Jocko Podcast 270: “Relentless” w/ British Special Forces Soldier Frogman, Dean Stott

this is jaco podcast number 270 with echo charles and me jocko willink good evening echo good evening i'd made a mistake that was going to cost me my life i turned to the man beside me he was a yemeni we called him h and he was the only passenger in the beat up local car i was driving the air around us was was stiff with heat and tension the vehicle almost rocking as the press of humanity outside began to shove towards me pointing i kept my eyes down not out of fear but so that they didn't get a good look at them through the dirty glass i knew exactly what had happened how they'd spotted me i was dressed head to toe as a local from flip-flops to a turban i had a dyed beard and my skin colored but what i hadn't added to my disguise was my brown contact lenses and now my bright blue eyes were drawing the locals in to point and stare i knew it was only a matter of minutes before the neighborhood bad guys started slipping out of their hiding places and tonight i could look forward to an orange jumpsuit the last thing the world would see of me was the image of a former special forces soldier about to meet his end courtesy of an enemy unfamiliar with the geneva convention bollocks i wanted to talk to h i wanted to the local man's opinion but if the people outside saw my lips moving in a funny way then we were truly [ __ ] and so instead i raised an eyebrow and hoped that people would just think i was commenting on the traffic that had packed us into this bustling marketplace h gave a shrug in reply as if to say what can you do what could i do get my head chopped off or go out fighting those seemed to be the choices i knew which one i'd choose if it came down to it but i couldn't help but hear the voice in the back of my head the voice that had told me always you'll never last two minutes in the army well if this was the end i'd show them how wrong they were i've been showing them for years this wasn't my first covert mission as a civilian i'd cut my teeth as a special forces soldier and as such i'd had my medal tested again and again i tried to remember that as yet another local pointed at me and began waving towards my door i pretended to be busy looking ahead at traffic and checked the mirror behind me no sign of our second car i wanted to rub my eyes despite the danger i was knackered maybe that's why i had made the mistake maybe that was why i had to get on my radio hidden away out of sight from the yemenis who continued to walk by peering in and pointing at me i kept my message short trying to move my lips as little as possible i've been compromised my mate sam came on the net from the second vehicle he was out of sight but i was sure that he couldn't be more than 100 meters away are you compromised over he asked i confirmed that i was are you happy with the immediate action drill over i knew that drill off by heart the first part would involve me pulling a snub-nosed machine gun from beneath my seat and emptying a full magazine into the windscreen this would send a very loud signal that it was a good idea for people to get away from me it would buy me seconds to grab my wrapped up assault rifle wedge between the seat and the door and exit the vehicle then me and my flip-flops would be racing for the nearest safe house sam came back on the net your call out my call when it comes down to it the biggest moments in your life always are i thought about letting out a deep breath but looking ice cool in front of h was important to me fear is contagious and so i put mine on a shelf until i got clear of the situation instead i imagined everything that was about to happen in this [ __ ] storm bloody hell i almost laughed to myself all this over a pair of contact lenses i looked at h gave him the slightest of nods he was probably sending up a prayer at that point maybe more than one my own thoughts went to my wife and children if someone wanted to stop me seeing them again then i promised it would be a fight like no other and then with the thought of my family pumping like fire through my veins i reached below my seat and took hold of my weapon and that is the opening of a book the book is called relentless and is written by someone named dean stott who is a british soldier who served as an engineer in the commandos and eventually went on to the british special forces selection and became one of the first army soldiers to opt into joining the special boat service counterpart to the british sas and that is just the beginning of this story and luckily for us dean is here himself to help talk us through his experiences in the military and beyond dean thanks for coming thanks for coming aboard no pleasure having me it's been a long time that we have been getting requests to have a brit on here so you're the you're the first well we had we had one photographer who had been to iraq but i think you're our first british military person and there's been a lot of requests oh brilliant great so glad glad to have you here man no pressure yeah the whole the whole nation is riding on on your shoulders so um the that's the beginning of this book and the beginning of the book starts off it's sort of the middle of your your operational career when you talk about the military operations and then civilian operations but i guess we should start at the beginning i always like to start at the beginning of you know where you came from and and how you ended up in this particular situation in life and um yeah let's get to it yeah so i was um i was born into military family my father he was in the royal engineers and um so very much immersed in that in that environment and i grew up in a town called aldershot which was the home of the british army so it's just airborne heavy you had two parallel you had free paradise i'd never even heard of the royal marines or the special boat services i mean it was just sas and airborne um my father and my mother they ended up splitting up when i was quite a young age um by the age of eight my mother um left my father and took me and my sisters to manchester up north and we ended up in a homeless home in moss side and moss side back in the 80s was the roughest estate in the whole of the uk now now when brits say a state yeah when you see when americans say a state they're thinking of like a country estate with big houses when brits say a state you're talking about the ghetto yes it is a ghetto yeah and it's it's a government housing right is that what isn't a government housing estate that's where the word estate comes from yeah they call them council estates and yeah obviously to get your your name on on the housing market you have to then go into a homeless home so that's what we did we ended up in a homeless shelter in moscow and you know i was the only white me and my sisters the only caucasians in in the area so we were attracting attention from an early start the you know this soon ended up with me learning how to fight with my fist quite early you know protecting my sisters in in the school playground actually i ended up having to leave that school because there's too many fighting and we moved to another another place within manchester my mother we then got housed in my father however used to travel up and pick us up every other weekend it's about 240 mile drive one way and take us back down me and my father were very close my sister was very close to my mother and three years later my father got custody you know of me and my sisters um wow that's that is that heart i mean america it's pretty hard for uh especially a military dude to get custody yeah over the mom yeah no there was i think obviously you know he he put his career on pause he got promoted to regimental sound major and was posted to germany and he said no i want to stay in uk i want to look after my kids and so he put his whole career online and i think the judge at the time um didn't want the siblings splitting up you know he didn't want like two sisters being in manchester and the sun down south so the judge said no the children made the decision and being the eldest at the age about ten and a half i had to make that quite hard decision and said no i want to live live with my father and he he got custody and i and you know even to the day i remember the day that my mum dropped us off and the reaction she saw when my father took us away you know that sticks with you something something like that but for me we moved back down to older shots and you know i'm very close to my father i never actually wanted to pursue a career in the military myself i always wanted to be a fireman um but we we grew up around there but my dad is he was a scotsman he was old school sergeant major he was old school uh through and through and i remember finishing like junior school and we went on to what you call high school secondary school and so this is what age what age is this well i would have been about 13 at this age so at 13 you're you've been living with your dad for a few years now and you're seeing the military but you're still not quite you're not quite um like enthralled by it yeah yeah no as i say when i was immersed that our school playground uh was where the red devils used to take off which is the um the british parachute and free fall teams every day you'd see the parachutes the guys would be walking around in their their uniforms in their maroon berets and it was just it was almost like the the norm living in older shots so um but my father was now going to transition out the military my father his career wasn't very um he was more sports it was what we would call a track suit soldier he was very good at a sport and and soccer was his so he was the army manager coach and player so i very rarely saw my father in green kit you know it was more track suits trainers and on the football pitch so i didn't really know much about the military and and the layout of the military and um was it was he going on deployments uh he he went on deployments to like norman island um but that was but when he then got custody of the kids you know that obviously stopped him going on on any deployments and this was a period of time actually you know the last conflict was 1982 which was was the falcon so there was a dry period up until now we had the gulf war in 91 um but that was still to come actually i was two years two years later so other than northern ireland there wasn't really any sort of overseas deployment so it didn't didn't really affect him going away um but he was now coming to the end of his career and transitioning to sivi street so growing up in older shot in these military schools um he then decided to put me in secondary school in a local town it's called north camp um but being old school my my father dressed me up day one in a blazer carrying like a a briefcase a leather briefcase you know it wasn't even real leather that's what i was more upset about um but my hair was was a crew cut you know rather than going downtown and paying for a normal haircut my father would take me to camp and just put me in straight at the front of the queue with all the recruits and that's legit yeah so i really stood out when i turned up at school day one i i stood out wait so is this school what kind of is this school like a pr what we call in america a private school where you have to pay to go to or what was different no it was a public school but it wasn't in a military town it was next to the military town so the children that went there their parents weren't from the military because it was so close to aldershot there was a lot of rivalry between and so the haircut just just i just stood out and um yeah unfortunately a week later i got suspended from that school for fighting like were you just an angry youth or what no i just think i'll just put in some really awkward positions and that that being one but i always remember my father i know you guys do brazilian jiu jitsu you know my father again always taught me to fight with my fists and as soon as the guy we call that scottish jiu jitsu but as soon as the opponent's down that's it you you know you stop you've got the bear of them and um there's no like follow-up like there isn't nowadays so i i was so nervous when i got home and i sort of left the left the letter on the table and quickly ran upstairs to the toilet my father could you know screams out my name and um i come down and his his one question was did you did you hit him when he was down i said no he said that's fine and then i had to i then explained to him i said look you dressed me in this this and he he just thought he was doing good by me when in fact he was bringing too far too much attention um we then left actually not long a few months after that and moved out into the country um totally away from any sort of military town and and that was almost the start for me that was the start of a new life you know i'd left that military background behind me um so how old are you now i'm probably about 14 now right on and and then you get to where where where did you move to when you got this new start so it moved to uh into surrey so it's just south of london but it's more very very green um the country the country exactly and now did you uh how was that was that like uh you said it was a new start because you were able to fit in a little bit better your dad didn't shave your head to send you to school yeah exactly there was no military barbers but it was also that no one could judge you you sort of left your your past behind you you know manchester fighting and um you know it's almost like this is the baseline you start from now so um and again it was actually nice to um socialize with kids whose parents weren't in is learning stuff that was out that military lifestyle you know all my friends back in older shot their dads are all airborne because my dad wasn't they called him a hat you know i mean it was just like he didn't have any of that i didn't have to prove anything to them or feel like you know you know because your father's career you're you're part of that and that's what older shot was like it was like what ranks your father is he para is he not and it's like oh god i had a friend who was uh who is australian sas and he was saying you know him and his wife we were talking and he was like they're they have an expression it was like oh their wife wears the rank of the family so it's like oh you know he's lieutenant colonel who are you it sounds like but i can't imagine little kids telling me my dad's not airborne oh yeah that's great why they call him a hat uh it's just saying that the parachute regiment call him hat i don't know we say helly airborne troop but it's it's not they just call them a hat because they they don't have the maroon berry and then you know some of the army commandos also take on that terminology and call them call them hats or screamers we in the army the american army they call someone that's not airborne a leg and it's said with such disdain i remember when i went to airborne schools i committed you nasty leg and then in the the in the navy the the aviation guys people that are in helicopters or jets or whatever planes they wear brown shoes it's part of their uniforms so they call in a derogatory way they call anybody that's not a brown shoe which no one's used that term but they call everyone else a black shoe and so then in the teams we take that one step further and like the derogatory who's that guy some shoe came over and told us if we couldn't wear that whatever so that's uh it's funny how you get these little little little words that stick but hat yeah hat is the parachute regiment and then the marines obviously from the army it's pongo little kids telling you your dad's a hat yeah yeah and again no wonder you had to fight on a regular basis yeah if it was airborne i'd probably been all right and then so so so you end up in in surrey yeah you're in the country do you feel like your life's taken a better direction so your dad was a good great athlete apparently did you inherit that athleticism and love for the game i did yeah i think that's where you know i'm very competitive i like to compete and i i think that's you know from my father you know even on christmas day with the board game it got that competitive um you you had to win you know and um you know so i did inherit that that from him um sport wise i and i i followed in his footsteps you know played uh played football as well i wasn't great at sport but i just tried everything you know i was very fortunate at school i ended up getting sports personality at the award it sounds amazing yeah but i wasn't the best at football i wasn't the best at rugby you know i just helped out you know if they said right we need someone on the basketball team well i don't really know basketball but i would step in so so i saw ins had that from my father but um and i think that's what helped later on in the military career you know i always found myself competing with others or having to prove prove a point or be an ambassador well that's two different things actually prove a point or be an ambassador yeah i don't know how that's that's like that's two different things right if i'm trying to prove a point that's one thing if i'm trying to be it's like one's gonna come at you the ambassador is gonna be cool so you found that nice like middle ground between those two things yeah well i found myself that you know when you're in the army and you you are working alongside marines you're an ambassador for your cat badge if that makes sense you know what i mean and then when you go to the sbs from the army you're an ambassador for the for the british army when you're on jocko's podcast and you're the first british guy you're an ambassador so i was proving a point to myself into them but almost representing your unit or your cat batch so you talked about you wanted to be a fireman and in the book you in the book you it sounds like at some point you realize there's a lot of applicants to be a fireman and like thousands of applicants to be a fireman it's sort of like in america we get a similar thing here but yeah you realized it's probably not going to happen yeah well back to the schooling my father again being old school he wouldn't let me go out and play unless i did my homework so he would check everything so in school-wise i did quite well i didn't look beyond school i didn't look at college i thought i was just going to join the fire every day and you had to be 18 anyway so i was still underage and and at the time there was a big recession and it was 2 000 applicants for one job i i went to college um but every summer holidays as a young kid my father would take me and my sisters down to the southwest of england to to cornwall and we would go surfing so i've been surfing since you know a young boy so during college we had a two-week summer holiday so me my mates are out right let's go down to nuki none of them surfed but they just wanted to try and find gills so wait you know we all went down to nuki um for two weeks um i was in the water all day and they're just just sat on the beach doing their thing and um i met a norwegian guy called yarn and um you know we just got chatting and he was a silver surface waiter uh at the local hotel so fistral beach is actually on the the surf tour at the pro surf tour official beach hotel is on on the peninsula and he said well i'm getting 30 pounds a day i i serve breakfast i get free breakfast i serve i surf all day and then in the evening i serve the evening meal and you know i get a free meal i get 30 pound in my pocket is only 10 pound for the hostel i thought brilliant you know being an entrepreneur i thought i'll have a piece of that so two weeks later my father came to pick us up and this is now where you're talking 94 long before any mobile phones and things like that and i wasn't in the car park with my friends and my dad said where's dean and they said oh he's staying so so your friends met your dad yeah my dad dropped us off and he came back to pick us up two weeks later but i wasn't there yeah so again i just didn't want to confront my dad and i didn't want to go back to college so i just didn't want to get into an argument so when you got done with what we call high school how old are you so we're about 16.

Okay so then your college starts after that and this is taking place during this two-week break you go down there you're surfing yeah you're living the dream and you see this norwegian cat that's got it all figured out and you figured you're in yeah that's it that's my life full planned out loud the road map um my father then came back six months later you know looking for me uh and he found me working in a local surf shop and he's you know right you know you've messed up your education that's it your life is over you know giving it all all these all these little one-liners so for me to really just silence it i just said well i'll join the army and you normally expect some you know warm comforting words from your father but i've sort of met with a response you'd last two minutes um probably wasn't the response i wanted but i thought okay no there's no point in getting into an argument and the best thing to do is try and prove him wrong but i was about five foot seven and 65 kilos so i could probably see where he was coming from at the time but he drove me back down to surrey and then the following monday you know we went i went into the careers office did your dad go with you no he didn't but his office was only 400 meters from there so i i walked in and it was in older shot obviously para heavy airborne and i came out and i went to my dad's office said i'm joining the parachute regiment he says you're bloody not and march me straight back in um i didn't obviously he was royal engineers i didn't know much about the royal engines i didn't know that you actually can do pee company and be an airborne engineer or do the all-arms commander course and be a commando engineer all i'd known was him playing football so when he actually explained a bit more to me i thought okay that's a good idea and he wanted you to go engineer so you'd have some kind of a civilian skill set whether it was building or pouring concrete or whatever skill you're gonna get yeah he was thinking obviously short term i'll probably do minimum three years you know be a bricklayer a plumber so but also within the military there was a trades and b trades your b trades in the engineers were your artisan trades which is like carpenter plumber you know everything else and then your a trades was like you're electricians and uh plant operators so the big jcbs and diggers so my dad said what about a plant fair um so i was out gardener i didn't know what he was on about he said no he then explained but again before that once once he'd marched me back in the office a week later i had to go in and do this touchscreen test and basically i passed it they said you can choose any trade you want obviously back in 94 i was thinking more with my my penis and i was thinking bomb disposal that sounds sexy i said let's go bomb disposal so i went to my dad's office i said i'm going bomb disposal he said you're not and he just marched me straight back in and then he said right why don't you be a plant fair and again you know he was he was sort of carving my path or put me in the right direction you know if i stepped off and that's it so then so then you're enlisted and how long was the was the weight between when you enlisted and when you actually shipped off to basic training it wasn't long at all about two two to three months um i went to a place called purbrite you you have like a um it's almost like an acquaint you know three days there you do all your fitness tests and then you speak to other recruits you know get their perception on on basic training so i was actually i think my dad pulled a few few strains because i seem to get get quite quick to start point than others and then i in the book you say you basically say that basic training is what basic training is what is there anything that shocked you about it did you feel like you were pretty ready for it um again my my father you know he started steering things i i had to turn up uh it's a place called bassembourne and all i'd known about bassembourne is where they filmed full metal jacket and memphis belt and that's the only research i'd done on it on this place um but you had to be there um from zero 800 in the morning to 1700 at night you had to parade on on the sunday actually between those times my father had me dropped off at 007.55 with my hair already cut and my bag already packed because he knew it was all about first impressions you know if you start coming in you know just over five or about half four you know i mean the the the instructors were already march or cards but i i had arrived at five to eight and i i stood there from eight o'clock till five o'clock in the in the in the evening so you know in reflection going back i know why why he did it at the time it was raining i didn't appreciate it but you know it's a culture shock uh training everything you're you're sort of used to having your your home comforts is taken away from you guys who did have hair soon lost their hair and we all look the same um but it's good you know it still instills that discipline from from the off how long is british army boot camp so it depends what what cat badge so for the royal engineers we do um 10 weeks basic training and literally that just is as what it says it's basic training we then have phase 2 combat engineer training which is about 14 weeks and then you go on if you then want to go do the commando course the commando course is 10 weeks as well so if you start putting them all together it can be quite long if you join the royal marines that's nine months from from start to finish um so yeah it all depends on what cat badge you're going to but originally basic training is about 10 weeks and then you got picked up to become when did you get picked up to become a physical training instructor yeah so it seems like they had a lot of faith in you out of the gate or was that your dad working behind the scenes no well what it was when i when i finished uh my phase two training um i i got my post in order and i remember ringing my my my dad and my stepmom uh penny and i said yeah i've got posted to 2 8 and then she starts crying on the phone and my dad's that picks up the phone he said what have you said to penny i said i've been posted to 2-8 and i can hear him in the background he said 2-8 not q8 like that but what it was because my father was the army manager two-way engineer regiments were in germany were the army champions football champions in germany so it was like you're thought son so you're coming out to germany so i i got posted to hamel at the age of 18.

Um which at the time was good you know it was the deutsche mark before the euro it was like must cost about seven dollars for a crate of becks at 24. you know you know i was seeing germany which which is now collapsed now everyone's back in uk but as soon as i arrived my side major knew that they call us kiss ballers the footballers you're a kiss baller he goes i'm not going to see you because literally it was almost semi-professional you didn't work you trained every morning between 8 and 12 on the astro turf and you had a bit uh a big match every wednesday afternoon and then we used to all play play semi-pro uh for local teams so he knew that he was never gonna have me as a soldier so he said well i need to fill a slot a billet in the gym so you're going on your pti course and that's how i managed to get it fast tracked so so quickly and then what that course consists of so i flew back to hold a shot and it was right next to one of my old schools and and it's basically you they get in a position that you can you can teach physical training so when you go back to units there's different types of training you can do you can do gym uh pt you can do green pt um the hardest thing is gymnastics you actually have to do gymnastics and it's like you know it's like a flying track suit just throw a t-shirt in the air probably look more elegant than me um but it's just so you're in a position when you go back to the unit you can run pt sessions and then you end up from there you get done with that and then you now is when you check into 59 commando yeah there's a little period before between that so when i was in the gym i was like i could see i could see me almost mirroring my father's career and i was like i don't want to be a track suit soldier you know i want something different so you saw the possibility of mirroring your father's career and something about it you didn't really you wanted to be you wanted to you wanted to get after it in a different way yeah that's it yeah i wanted to do do something different and so i actually filled out the application form for nine squadron and five nine um but actually on reflection so nine squadron is the airborne engineers which is back in older shot where i grew up and five nine commando is down in north devon and it's you know surf heaven down there you know i've got saunton beach croyd beach um so for me we are in san diego and he's from hawaii so maybe it's not quite surf heaven probably yeah it's england we'll give it to you for but for me i you know you join the military because you want to you want to see the world you want to experience new things i didn't want to go back to older shots so five night commander was well suited for me so i applied for five nine commando and you have to go do a four-week beat up with the unit before you can go on the all-arms commando course so you go to the unit first and they kind of do an assessment that's it yeah and then and then from there you go to that's sort of like ranger school in america you can go to ranger battalion and you haven't been to ranger school yet and then you go to ranger school that's it yeah it's like that but back in germany during this process when the paperwork was in um one of the one of the squadrons had just returned from northern ireland and they had like a welcome back party in the camp camp bar there's a course called um assault engineers where infantry can come do engineering courses and there was an infantry unit called the fusiliers who were on camp doing that but they'd they're troublemakers basically they were banned from downtown because they're always causing trouble so they were on camp this evening that they had the big uh the family get together they were in the bar as well and me and my friend could see they're being quite rude to some of the we call them pad's wives you know the lad's wives you know so me my friend you know decided to open up on a couple of them so we ended up you know putting down three guys my my my sergeant major came in is that right you boys go to bed you know it's brushed under the carpet i was then rudely awoken by a military policeman two hours later said you're under arrest and um so before i went over to five nine commando i there was possibility that i could be getting caught marshalled for this fight so i went over anyway i did the first week of the beat up and then the course staff started pulls me and he said you you've got to fly to germany they're doing an id parade i was like okay so id parade is some kind of investigation investigation with the police yeah they want to line you up with other other other guys and are you are you like totally distraught at this point um i'm not totally distraught you do worry about your career how this can can affect your your career so i i flew over and me at the time i still hadn't grown into my ears so i just stood out like you know a sore thumb and and they all knew me as the pti so straight away they just beelined yeah that's the guy my friend who did it with me however his his brother was in the squadron as well so he never got picked out so i was like okay great um so i flew back to finish the beat up you know they said yeah you're fit enough you're ready so when on and did the did the commander course and um when we finished the command of course ten weeks later we go back to five nine commando and the oc is like that he said right guys you guys are going across the water and the squadron were in northern ireland so i thought perfect we're off to northern ireland he said not you stop he said you're going across the other water you're going back to germany he said we need to get this get this cleared so i went back to germany and um basically they said look you can go court martial and it probably would get thrown out but that's gonna be another 12 months to 18 months you know i've just passed the command of course i wanted to go be with the commandos so i just pleaded guilty um i got charged and so i spent 56 days in the military correction training center which is colchester prison known as the glass house and but the the commanding officer actually because everyone knew it was me and the other guy you know they and they knew these guys were troublemakers they're like yeah you just unfortunately got caught out so the commanding officer was an airborne guy airborne engineers this is the commanding officer at colchester no no this is this is the gym yeah no this is in germany okay you know so i have to leave that unit first and so the rsm matches me and the rsm was one of a football player with me and uh and he's like outright you know sapper stott um i was going to give you 60 days but because you've done the all-arms commander course i've taken four days off any questions i said yes if i'd gone airborne would i got more days off and he sort of giggled and he said like you know it's time for you to go so so yeah i spent 56 days in her majesty's corrective training center yeah i was looking i didn't know what colchester was but it's basically it's the same term echo charles when you hear somebody say leavenworth what do you think of prison yeah military prison that's kind of the way culture is i think it's the last military prison really in england there's so there's not it's everybody knows it the glass house it's the glass it's the equivalent of leavenworth yeah and and everyone has you know you hear horror stories coming out of the glass house and what and what it actually is is because when you you have an escort that drops you off and the instructors are there to meet you and it's like it is like a scenario full metal jacket they are screaming and shouting at you but as soon as they've gone they just treat you like adults you know i mean it's um they take away all those sort of those creature comforts you know you don't you're not allowed to phone anyone it's um two pt sessions a day it's room inspections all the time i actually really enjoyed colchester um i said if i got paid full full wages i would i would have really enjoyed it and it got to a stage actually where guys were going into colchester and coming out better soldiers a lot better soldiers and they were actually getting promoted when they got back to their units and they had to stop that they said no it's you know you're there for the wrong you know for bad bad reasons you can't be seen to be be promoted so i did i did my time there and um went back to five nine right rewind a little bit to the commando course yes how was that yeah so i remember my father dropping me off at driving me to north devon to do the beat up and then you know i obviously hadn't told him about the incident in germany at this point and he said you know these guys will you know these guys will will make you a man you know what i mean so you're obviously really nervous about things like that but um but it is that the beat up's great you know the five nine beat up they actually is harder than the all-arms command of course so if you can reach their levels and their expectations then as long as you stay away from injury when you go on the all-arms command of course you should be fine so the all-arms command of course is for any cat badges so engineers artillery anyone who's going to be serving alongside free commander brigade with the royal marines or any naval um you know doctors dentists as well so you've got a mixture on on that course and you've got guys who are young privates all the way through to quite senior officers who may have just been attached to the brigade and we also have foreign um foreign militaries there i remember we had a seal no a marine on our course as well us marine on our course we had some guys from lebanon we had some guys from russia you know he had all sorts on there and basically they get you to a standard so you're understanding the royal marines sort of ttps their sops so when you go to unit you understand how they operate as well you know you do amphibious warfare as well i mean you also do their commando tests so they're commando tests you know the 30 miler which is the last one to get you your green beret and all the all the other tests that build up to it and it's 10 weeks long and i could be a doctor that's going to get attached to i could be a 39 year old doctor that's going to be attached to commando and i got to go through that and get a 30 pound rock on i think for them they they have they they volunteer for it you know they can still serve with the brigade but it's almost like you know i mean you they see that you've made the effort and you've got to covet a green beret um you know probably they get less pressure if they've done the course but actually saying that the navy guys were really good because a few years later which would touch and i ended up being an instructor on the on this command of course the navy guys because they have no military background before this they've not picked up any bad habits so what the instructors were telling them they were picking up straight away whereas you may have a a sergeant or a staff sergeant who's you know been in 14 years and he's already picked up his little bad habits it's have happened to you know realigning or reset that whole whole uh [ __ ] um but for us our course i i didn't learn anything if i'm on i learned nothing on our course um every one of our instructors got sacked at the end of the course our course was very officer heavy and it was like we weren't allowed to wear gore-tex if it rained we didn't learn anything so who could survive in the cold and and who was the fierce actually learning anything soldier-wise i picked up when i got to the unit but that backfired on the instructors because at the end of the course they do like course critiques you know how was your course and could it was so officer heavy that they went to town on them oh they went yeah yeah they went to town because enlisted guys get handed a critique and they're like good good good good i'm going to get a beer officer's like well let me state my opinion on this matter oh yeah they backfired it every every uh instructor got sacked apart from the two army guys the engineer and the artillery officer but for me i'm still i'm only 18.

I'm you know you're still developing as a young man you know i wasn't i wasn't fully grown i remember the load carries being you know really difficult you're carrying some excess weight there um and it's very different from like pea company the parrots that's all more that they're leaner and then they go faster with with less weight with the commandos they sort of tend to be bigger guys uh carrying more weight but a slower speed so you know i i do think that's probably one of the hardest courses still to date but that's because i hadn't developed yet fully now i got to pull this one section out of the book because i thought it was worth reading this is when you're in colchester and you have this conversation you say drink was a big problem in the forces at the time i'd be surprised if it isn't still and so when i was interviewed by the officer of the prison i was grilled about my alcohol consumption you were drunk when you hit the other soldiers correct yes sir so do you have a drinking problem no sir i'd have hit them anyways hmm what happened to your wrist and this is another thing you explain i fell out of a window sir trying to urinate sir were you drunk well yes sir hmm so you don't have a drinking problem i didn't really know how to reply to that one as far as i saw it it was just part of army life part of being a squatty if i had a drinking problem maybe the whole army did personally i felt like it was just being one of the boys the officer dismissed me and then you go on to the fact that you enjoyed being at colchester which is which is cool you had a good time but that's uh that's one of those things as i was reading it i've i had quite a few conversations with young seals you know hey so you've gotten another fight at a bar right that's why you're in here talking to me yeah were you drinking yeah and you also were here three months ago and you were also in another fight in a bar and you were drinking you see any common things here no any commonalities between these incidents no i don't know mm-hmm i like to fight i guess i gotta watch out for that one you get to um you get to to fif do you call it five nine or fifty nine five nine yeah you get to five nine and uh i thought this was cool couldn't have asked for a better beginning to my time at five nine the admin officer took one look at my report from colchester seemed happy with what he saw and ripped it up fresh start but it was a lonely start the rest of the squadron was in northern ireland finishing the tour i'd missed out on doing to my due to my time in kali i was gutted not to be a part of that but it ended up working my favor we're sending you on a diving aptitude course usually guys have to wait years to get on this so consider yourself lucky so because the other guys were deployed in northern ireland you got an opportunity to go to this dive course yeah that's it so in the royal engineers we we have divers so everything um you can do on the surface be it um broco cut in um welding carpentry scaffolding everything we we can do subsurface do you guys call that hard hat diving um the osds which is the open supply dive assist and the kirby morgan helmets that that's part of it so scuba is part of it and and and so and so is that but we group everything if you're not doing combat swimmer operations like if you're just if you're doing any kind of work we just call it hard hat diving it's a hard hat diver it's like good it's good for you yeah but like yeah that's the way we classify anything that's not dragger combat swimmer ship attack you know it's like hard hat diving hey before before you dive into that so this this going to colchester that's is that on your record or when that guy shredded it was it gone i think it stays on my record i think he was just trying to prove a point is you know withdrawals fresh start but actually a lot of a lot of guys do well in the military a lot of these rsms you look back especially the guards they've been to colchester it was almost you touched on it then and that you'd brief up a guy for drink and then three months later you come in and you tell him this again well obviously he's he's making a mistake i learned from my mistake and i learned at an early stage thankfully it didn't happen later on in my career um and then obviously i have bigger consequences because i still didn't have rank at that point yeah you know yeah no it's i so in the in the navy you have service stripes on your uniform and if you've never been in trouble those service stripes are gold so in your dress uniform when you see a navy guy a navy master chief or a senior chief and they're in their uniform they'll have service stripes so it's like one stripe for every four years so you can have a lot of stripes after 28 years yeah and if you've never been in trouble they're gold but if you've been in trouble if you have like a captain's mask or something like that they're red and it was it was always interesting to see that there would be guys that would be master chiefs and they'd have they'd have red stripes i mean they got in trouble at some point in their career and the reason i asked that is because you know it's a as more and more focus sort of more and more attention to the seal teams you know it was like a lot less of a there's there was more of a zero defect mentality right and if you got in trouble one time it was going to stay with you and it's going to be a problem so those gold versus red stripes was it kind of like it's kind of cool to have the red one or is it kind of cool to have the gold like what is it it depends on your assessment of the situation that's what i mean like what was the common like the culture like if you seen a guy and one guy had a gold one guys not a huge deal not a huge deal but like btf tony yeah yeah red all day he's one of my buddies and he's like you know just a break glass in case of war type of dude and yeah he had bread so it kind of depends on the person's like personality like it's a case by case yes and this is this is you know back in the day when guy yeah you know when guys were getting in trouble more because there's also less going on and really a lot of it boils down to leadership too you know if you're if your leadership isn't giving you stuff to do and pointing you in the right direction where do you end up if you're 18 years old if you're 21 years old if you're 19 years old and you don't you're not giving good direction where do you end up as a as a young male where do you end up echo charles jail well possibly but definitely in a pub definitely you know being aggressive definitely doing that's what you're going to do and so if you haven't gotten some good guidance then it's going to be problematic and you know we're getting better at it but it definitely is it's good to hear that you could you could have a a mistake like that and look you could how many times did you not get caught right of course yeah plenty of times this time you got caught it's good that you could get caught learn a lesson and move on it's also very interesting that people would come out of that highly disciplined environment highly disciplined environment in colchester and do better as humans yeah do better as soldiers that's freaking legit that's proof proof of what proof that discipline equals freedom well that that's kind of a good deal where like yeah you can go to prison essentially and get what i mean would you call it rehabilitated like if you're improved absolutely out of it i mean isn't shouldn't that sort of be the goal i think so yeah i think so you know like i said it's you know we we have something similar we don't have the the bands on our arms but if you have 15 years of of of good discipline you get the long service good conduct medal yeah you have things you know to aspire to but you know i think everyone will get in trouble as as long as you learn from it it's character building as well you know thankfully for me it was at an early age my good friend now he's he's the rsm in the ses he was in colchester prison with me as well so but that's what it started to be almost like oh uh people are getting promoted and that's the wrong reasons for be going there um but as you if you come out a different man different soldier but like i said the instructions in there were amazing and that's probably you know that was reflective on the guys when they came out well it's interesting that you actually call them instructors and not guards right when you go into the navy brig if you're in the marine corps in the navy you get in trouble you go into the brig and those are guards they're not instructors so it's kind of cool that they were actually trying to well do you think that they were trying to teach you they were trying to move you forward yeah well you have military lessons it is just being on camp but you're just locked up at night that's the only difference um you know you are going to uh you're doing drill you know the guards like today we're going to take off on the runway and then just be marching as fast as you can i mean you have the gym instructors and then you do aircraft recognition you'd be you'd be on the ranges you'd go for runs pt you'd run out at the camp gates and i remember running like that thinking but i knew that if someone wanted to take a bolt for it and you stopped them it reduced your sentence i was i was keeping an eye out you know for any sort of yeah oh really sharp move you tackled somebody yeah yeah yeah but i think you you have an interview when you go in and they they sort of say you know you've got all sorts in there you've got guys who who don't want to be in the military you know you've got awhile you've got guys with drugs you've got you know you know there's all things and and when i you know you just honestly look i got into a fight and a lot you just got caught that's it at the end of the day they understood they've probably been in the position you've been in before but just didn't get caught so so it's like more i mean it's like a different approach essentially then like you know like when you think of prison outside of the military you're like no that's your punishment straight up like you you're it's essentially like the the difference between a beating and a counseling kind of thing so like you know what you're talking about it's kind of a counseling like hey you did this let's let's let's kind of reap benefits from this whole situation improve you well they have programs like this now that i think about it they have programs like this in america i don't know if they have an england but they take kids that are on the wrong track and they put them into like a highly disciplined military militaristic environment and it definitely can straighten them out i sponsored a kid going through one of those things and went up there and saw what they were doing and it's like a lot of those kids really turn around and start doing well yeah so yeah and then but then if you just get the beating it's like you just it's yeah it's just a different approach right it is more effective i think for the military you know if you come out a different person you know if you come out and then you reoffend then obviously there's a problem um but i think it's almost like yes it's one strike yeah because you you can go in and you have 28 days in under and 28 days and older there's like two different wings and you sort of look down you look down at the 28 days you said that in the book you're like i'm competitive about it you guys are over here for 28 days i'm big time i mean you got the ones actually were going to get discharged from the military as well but rather than just throwing them out the gates they would go do plumbing courses cut up into courses so there was stuff there there to help them here man that squared away okay so i cut you off when you were starting to talk about dive school i'm sorry but yeah no it's yeah so um but for so the royal engineers have divers i think we have about 450 um divers at the moment and and basically what um when i was in germany there was always things on orders asking for guys who want to go on a dive course because everyone's heard of p company the para course in the all arms command of course but the dive course i think is probably one of the most arduous and underrated and underrated courses but it's also an additional quote so you get you get more money back back in the day when i do it was only two pounds 65 about five dollars a day uh but now you're talking you know 20 pounds so 35 40 so there used to always be anyone want to go on a course right exactly yeah exactly but there was they'd struggle to get volunteers from other units because of the guys from the airborne engineers and commando engineers because that's already physically robust that there's a waiting list you know you are at the back of that list um but because they're all in germany so all in northern ireland still out well you're going on the app shoot so i literally must have just fast tracked two or three years to get on the on this course so i went and did my my aptitude and now i've seen diving change over the years this was back in 90 in 97.

Um and it was it was called a deska diving set self-contained compressed air it's like scuba but it was no comms we don't have any comms it was nil visibility uh the only way we communicate we had a lifeline uh that rope around our chest with a bow line and they just do pools and bells so it's an alien as you know underwater it's an alien environment and so a lot of guys don't like it but for me i've been surfing and i i love the water it was almost like for me i'm more comfortable underwater than i am on land so so i did that course came back and the squadron had just returned from northern ireland so here's me now in this new unit just stolen everyone's dive course which everyone's on the waiting list for uh and they've obviously heard i've just come out of colchester prison so there's a couple there was a couple of names within the unit like you know squadron bullies and they're like oh wait till such and such uh sees you and i thought here we go we had a christmas party and uh one of the lads just comes over he said oh you think your hand in just just full-on straight in the face god so i you know i just i just right hooked him back and you know he stepped back and said that's all i needed to know and uh i think that's sort of you know getting my foot in the door within the unit but what five nine commando used to be the army minor unit boxing champions and each year they were because they won the final they'd automatically go to the final the next year and each year our opponents were the airborne engineers so this was coming up in january three months training i didn't have a choice to like well you've been a corchester prison you're on the boxing team not really so um so we went i just spent three months did you ever box before i did in in guildford where near surrey uh one of my friends from school we went to a place called bell fields so i did a bit of boxing then again my father didn't want me boxing and i sort of had an agreement and said well look i'll box until i get beat and then you know then i'll stop so thankfully i never i never got beat i only had two about three fights i think when i was when i was there but in the military in five nine commando it's it's just pure fitness there's no boxing skill uh at all and we would have three or four pt sessions um a day and rather than like lose the weight over a period of time they lose the weight in a short period and you've got to maintain it but um three months later we had the army mine units finals and there's other guys from the squadron based at other training units and there's you could see him reading the book like who's this start who's this new lad and we thought we were going to walk away with it and at the interval it was too all there's seven fights of the night it's too all at the interval and remember the sergeant major coming in and he's just like in my chair she said you need to do you know poking me right in the middle of chest and i was like oh my god and um i came out and i had tears in my eyes the adrenaline was pumping i went out and i knocked the guy down uh three times in a minute and 20 seconds and and that literally you know i'd made my mark within five nine commando and i settled in quite well that's awesome good story um you go you go here in the book you say it wasn't it wasn't long into my time at five nine that i was selected for recce troop a kind of elite within the squadron it was a huge privilege as recce was known as being a great stepping stone towards the special forces an idea that i'd begun to toy with thinking about my future in the army so you end up in recce troupe that's it yeah so in free commander brigade you have five nine commando engineers that support the brigade you have two nine commando the artillery and within free commander brigade they have their own sort of um reconnaissance troop called um brigade recce force or brigade brigade patrol troop from the marines which consists of snipers and mountain leaders but also part of that group is naval gunfire from the artillery and also five nine record troops so we're almost like eyes on the ground advanced sides on the ground you know giving input on potential combat engineering tasks so you have to be selected from record troop within five nine commando and they they did that in norway so each year we used to go to norway for three months and the whole of the brigade and we do arctic warfare training it was all due to the cold war if the russians were starting to head west across norway that we'd be able to you know to stop them so you know and norway's an equalizer and that separates the boys from the men so i'd got my name have been picked up to go wrecking troop and um so yeah so very fortunate to get selected again at a young age to go recce troop and within five nine commando it's actually classed as a posting so my time had started again as i entered in into record as you touched on there a record troop had a 100 pass rate for uk special forces selection so guys i would see guys leaving and and never come back um so for me it was when i then started my head started turning towards the opportunity of special forces you know my dad told me i had last two minutes i managed to get through basic training i've done a pizza i managed to get through colchester i managed to get through the command of course i'm now just about to get my my para wings and you're also then amongst like-minded individuals those who want to go or aspire to be special forces so um so yeah that was wreckage route for me did you did you go through any official training for recki trip do you have to go to a school or is it just from the unit itself you get trained up they they had their own selection process with it within the unit and then you used to have to go do p company which is the the airborne engineers uh course but when i when i got there our troop staff sergeant you know said there's no need to do p company you know we would run our own selection process which disgruntled some of the older boys they felt no you have to do p company um but there's a big difference as well now in the guys that were going wrecking troop compared to the guys of old guys of old were like you jocker they were just huge you know they were just massive guys it was all about fitness whereas now you know the world was sort of evolving the balkans had kicked off and so five nine commando went to um bosnia and wreckage we went to to kosovo with brigade recoforce well this was the first operational tour for record troops since the falklands war um so the guys in between that period hadn't seen any action and then we then uh when i went over to kosovo which was great for us yeah you say here uh one day i called home to the uk with news from my dad he'd probably forgotten long ago about our two minutes conversation in the car i hadn't i had a big smile on my face as i gave him the news i'm going to kosovo i told the old soldier i'm going on tour and this is in this is in 2000 so if you were going to do something real going into going into the going to kosovo was as good as it was going to get at that time at that time yeah then um what what types of missions were you doing there so brigade wrecking four so we were we were doing as a you know forward observation um for example one the first i mean it's in the book actually the first stop we went on it was like right we're going on the ground we're on ops uh and so basically there was a 5k buffer zone between serbia and kosovo and they didn't want any sort of any serbians in there any cosmons in there because that you know that's where it was all kicking off so a lot of our work was on the border but there was also those that committed horrific crimes crimes of war as well so we were also identifying these hvts getting imagery from them and then obviously getting guys to come in and pick them up so we were having a grab no camera kit straight off civilian shelves walking in with a great big lens and things like that and uh i remember the first job we went on and we inserted we had our intelligence brief we inserted and as we were patrolling you know to the frv i was a real man and i kept hearing something sort of that stop the team get down on one knee you know all round defense i'm all looking through our size you know there's nothing there but you can hear almost like the creeping in the leaves you know someone's sneaking up on us anyway this carried on all the way through we got to the position even when we're in the op position we could hear it um we've got the imagery we needed and about you know two weeks later we extract it through the field for two weeks in the field the whole time you're hearing this noise at night you hear these probable enemy approaching your position yeah ready for the fight the whole time you're thinking of the worst you know you shouldn't be there and things like that and uh so when we extracted um we went back to camp and we we have the a debrief and like you know any point something like yeah you know i don't know whether we were compromised it felt like i will compromise but there was a lot of movement you know especially at night and then some some you know corbin call them green slime the intelligence core this guy that i i did forget to mention it's breeding season for the tour toys so actually what we were hearing was the tortoises coming out to mate but it kept the whole patrol on stand two for two weeks uh so you guys are doing recon patrols how big of teams are you guys rolling out with so we're in six-man teams yeah 690.

And and you're staying for up to two weeks out there yeah we we did four weeks once um yeah we we got to um basically we got an int report in that there was a a training camp in the 5k buffers and the serbians basically said you deal with them or we'll deal with them and so we inserted remember you know snow on the ground as well and because we were arctic trained we were the best guys for the job so we inserted did our tents and we're in observation ops for for four weeks and um just feeding back all the intelligence and they were it was a military training school they were doing heavy weapons training small arms training it was quite well disciplined and we were actually then relieved by the americans americans you know came in and took over from us four weeks later and i think subsequently from that sf did go in and actually take down take down the uh the training camp but um for me yeah four weeks in in the snow um you know separates the boys from the men what's the op tempo like when you'd get back how how often would how much down time would you get and then you'd roll back out uh we'd be rolling you know we'd obviously de-service and resurface it was everything from urban to rural you know we were doing stuff as well in in in vehicles we had snipers in in the tall buildings in the middle of pristina um so the jobs would range from that to you know we did get into about one one of the local government guys is gonna be an assassination attempt on him so we're obviously having to keep an eye on him all the time as well and i remember actually seeing two guys and we got out we were in civilian attire and we walked up to walking up towards him because we see you could see the guys that we knew were going to take him down and they caught our eye and they caught theirs and they just went the other way and actually it was a dry rehearsal we just compromised dry rehearsal they weren't doing it then which obviously kept him alive probably for another month i think he did get assassinate after we left so you had to be how old are you right at this point yeah nine nights i'm 22.

Yeah so you're just all kinds of fired up for this is living the dream oh yeah there's everything everything you dream about and read about yeah doing it for real you you go through this uh this here in the book as you close out this chapter we were just about to head home from kosovo when we were fastballed onto a task going to apprehend a bomb maker we were told and the adrenaline began to buzz in my veins sitting through the intel brief we learned that someone had been cooking up bombs that were being used to take out politicians the bomb maker wasn't the one using them he was more like a chef for hire understandably nato were keen to get him off the streets i wasn't the one to grab him but a couple of the other guys bundled him into the back of our vehicles of our vehicle his hands were tied behind his back and despite our orders to keep his eyes on the floor he kept looking up and around him i put a hand on the back of his head to help his concentration that's bang out of order the man shouted in a sharp manchunian accent as i've ever heard so it's a manchester accident my jaw dropped and i looked around at the other guys in the team not for one moment had we suspected that the bomb maker could be a fellow countryman when we dropped him off for questioning i bet he wished he'd stayed at home there was a solitary chair in the center of a courtyard with two bright spotlights shining onto it very james bond we left the bomb maker to answer for his crimes it was time for us to go home so you guys were running those those are great ops you know yeah great ops getting bad guys um who'd you turn them over to who's gonna interrogate him um it was our intelligence services yeah relatively gentle then uh so then this is the point where you get uh the offer to or the selected once again to go be an instructor yeah that's it yeah linstone am i saying it right listen yeah limpstone so you go to limston to to be an instructor of that commando course which you which you had gone through and the one that you said everyone got fired yeah yeah that's it yes and so how was that yeah great it's great privilege to go back so so what we used to do uh with five nine wrecking troop we each each troop within five nine had to have a guy who did guard duties and things like that so we were exempt from guard duties and from that we would send an instructor on the commander course for a year so you're actually again it was classed as a post in outer unit but you're still attached so again when i talk about being an ambassador you're an ambassador now for the cat badge and this is only about four years after me doing my own course so i always remember my course thinking well you know when we were on our course we had to build build up the uh the instructors tents you know we were doing a lot for them when i got there it was night and day you know we did our own tents um but instruction had changed completely they we were doing everything that the students were doing we were wearing the same equipment we didn't have any you know gucci kit as well we were wearing exactly what they they had and because you were you were as an ambassador you obviously had to be seen to be doing what what they were doing which i thought was a great way of teaching don't ask for them if you can't do it yourself and and so yeah it was night night and day the we had a couple of instructors on the course and you know i soon learned how you can get the most out of of your students i know when i was on my course you know i didn't learn anything and i always remember that i thought well i don't want this to happen to these young boys you know i want them to be in a good position when they go to their unit because you're going to go back to five nine and you're gonna be serving along alongside these guys as well but we had a couple instructors and they would just come out every morning just scream and shout you know i mean i think the the marine instructors they felt they they had a bad bad deal going on the all-arms command of course um but in fact actually they enjoyed it they really opened their eyes to how good these guys were at soldiering you know the marines because it's nine months long they're so proud of their tradition and they see these you know army guys coming in and doing ten weeks but they don't realize what they've done before that before they've got it but these guys would come out and scream and shout and then and you can see this student's eyes it's almost like straight in the press-up position and you know they've got nothing back um whereas for me it was all about the banter it's about a humor you need to have a sense of humor and be approachable so if i had to tell them to do press-ups i would do the press-ups with them i remember also there was a law that we could only do 30 press-ups really a law yeah within limstone yeah they started introducing the maximum you can do with 30 press steps but there's ways you can get around that you know because you can do a press up you can do a half press up you can hold it for a few seconds and then fully down you know so we we did that i mean there's way ways around it but for them as as students you know i was seeing a better product at the end than probably what they did of me uh four years before so i did like i did like that change do you feel like you were able like i was very lucky because i was gotten new instructor roles and was able to teach i taught everything it was awesome i felt like i learned a lot while i was teaching because now you're observing i mean from a leadership perspective you know i was when i was at e5 so i was like a young junior guy i was teaching the young officers that were going through our basic it was called seal tactical training at the time so i'm out there telling them how to run immediate action drills and telling them like hey no one's listening to you you need to step back you need to take a look around i learned so much from doing that did you feel like you in this instructor mode got to learn yeah i got to learn learn a lot myself yeah and and like i said we call it the sugar pedestal we used to have to always do the demonstrations before the students so it's like do not mess this up so our drills had to be had to be slick and and quick but on my first course we had the first female candidate to do the all-arms commander course yeah she's in the book you call her what lieutenant why lieutenant yeah yeah we had to protect her name for legal reasons but um she'd done two she had two previous attempts and this was her third attempt and so the instructors who took her on her initial two uh courses were dismissed from the training team and we had another training team sort of come in so you can already see it's going to be it's getting steered that way so basically um what it was is they wanted a female to pass the commander course and people don't realize this actually basically if a female hadn't passed the command of course they were going to lower the standards until a female pass but that would be standard throughout male and female so the fact that she went on and passed we didn't lower the standard so people don't see see the bigger the bigger picture behind the scenes so so when you talk about her in the book she didn't pass it's not that she didn't pass there was two ladies on the course there's lieutenant y and i'll say lieutenant x uh lieutenant x was a a doctor who's actually from five nine and she did everything that was asked of her you know she she struggled and things like that whereas lieutenant y was almost playing the system she knew that if she could go to the doctor she would get two days light duties but the way the timings of that used to always before the commando test so she dressed up for a couple of days for the commando test and it was that it wasn't the fact she didn't it was the fact that she played the system well um lieutenant x you know she i remember one of the guys uh daz who went on to be chief instructor to the sniper school we were doing some close quarter cqb and he you know you'd follow the student through and then at the end you'd give him a debrief and he's like he comes through with a student who said that guy was brilliant and and then me and him started chatting and as we looked over it was like a scene from a shampoo advert she took her helmet off and just brushed her hair down and with the both our jaws hit the floor and there's that i said well if she was good you tell her you know you tell her that she was good and he did yeah you're excellent but unfortunately week five you do your your bottom field test which is like a an assault course and you have to climb a 30-foot rope and she was about a foot and a half just below that rope so she didn't progress on that course but i do think you know if she had none it instructed without any qualms so was that lieutenant x or lieutenant wife left left in an x okay yeah and but you're saying eventually she did make it through lieutenant uh no lieutenant why she she made it through on that course she made it through on that on that course and it was almost to just dampen the white noise you know whitehall we need a female to pass we need a female to pass um but you can imagine what the airborne lads were like you know i mean it was like oh my god you know you used to get phone calls my wife's on paternity leave for 10 weeks can we come down and do your course it was a good banner and you also talked about a guy that was what 50 something years old yeah just a beast yeah so you know even when you know lieutenant y passed i was getting blueis from the lads there in afghanistan yeah well done you know i mean it was like you know lads some special forces don't even bother coming on selection it's like a big thing a female passing but to be honest you know she deserved to pass and i generally believe that if you deserve to pass you know you've earned the right and so yeah the next course this gentleman turns up captain fox and he's basically going to be the family officer 2-9 commando this guy's 55 years old and he did pee company four years before i was born the airborne you know i mean so uh we're there we were there on parade and the first thing we do is we do a um i think we're doing a six mile boot in march and it was spring and we came back and it like you just thrown two buckets of water over this guy and i was like i said are you all right you know captain photos it goes oh yeah i had pneumonia you know 15 years ago so i can't control my my my sweats i was like oh my god this guy's going to die on me but this guy basically he had like four-wheel records he was an ultra marathon running i don't know what it was called but basically has to keep moving has to be physically active but this guy was was old school i remember when you know teaching the student the students messed up and you know so i had him on beastie knoll up and down this this hill i remember him coming down every time he come to me you get in the press-up position i used to feel really embarrassed like talking in my granddad please please stand up captain fox i said what is it he said can i take my warm kit off now god yeah yeah please do but you know really humbling being with him but i remember he was in my group and he's we were doing the 30 miler next week you know it's the commando test and the final test there's a 30 mile endurance march in eight hours and at the end you get you covered green beret he's like he said corporal started he said is there a grid reference to the finish point and the finish point actually is a public car park on on dartmouth i said yeah you shouldn't know it but i said this is it fine so when it came to the 30 miler i bring him up and so he wanted to know that did he clarify why he wanted to know that because he wanted his wife or whatever yeah he wanted his girlfriend to come along he said my girlfriend wants to meet me at the end do you mind i said yeah fine so we came over and cut the old man some slack yeah yeah much appreciated us older dudes say yeah right on thank you yeah i just had so much respect for him in fact the p company four years was born so um so i said yeah of course and then we did the 30 miler and um on the last phase you bring them up a hill called poopers hill you come bring him in mean you stop them short of the end and you get them to sort themselves out they put their their cap comfort on and you know and we marched them in and um so it was doing that and as we came around the corner oh my god it was like the super bowl there was there no balloons how was that acting i said i thought it was just your girlfriend oh yeah my grandkids as well and my kids [ __ ] brilliant i did google uh i think this is a good section you had in here just on on you you touched on it but just the the attitude of being an instructor you say i think a lot of ncos came into their positions on courses and and at units thinking that being shouty shouty and swearing was the way to behave because that's how it had been for them and perhaps they thought it made them feared personally i didn't want to scare people into learning if they didn't want to be there they'd end up failing themselves without me shouting and screaming i found it far more effective to use humor and to be quiet at times when others would shout using that old old parents line of i'm not angry i'm just disappointed just a look would be enough they wanted the approval of those already wearing the green lid and so if they saw that they had failed you they double their efforts on the next task no need for shouting or swearing when you fill a void with swearing it looks rightly or wrongly like it's down to lack of intelligence or to anger issues instructors were being assessed by their students just as much as the other way around i always decided early on that i would have that i would share in any punishment that i handed out if i gave them press ups then i'd get down in the mud and do them too not only did that earn their respect but it gave them no excuse in their minds to feel hard done by at the end of the course those that earned the coveted berets would be serving alongside me and so i wanted to treat them as my equals even if i was in a position of authority especially if i was in a position of authority we needed each other and that's the same whether you're on a training exercise in combat or attempting a world record no person is an island yeah good a great uh attitude that i think a lot of people could use you know from a leader not just instructor but from just a leadership perspective you know that you you think maybe you need to yell to get someone's respect no it doesn't you actually lose respect when you act like that you get done with that and now you go to see the careers management officer and he's asking you about what you want to do next now did he did he chime in about selection about did you see the one that brought up you possibly going to selection or did you already have it in your mind i had it in my mind so he he pulled me in so the whole period of time now from joining five nine to where i was now i was now a sergeant i'd spent eight years in five nine and that's purely because of the record troop the all-arms commander course so normally in in the military you spend three years and then you move on to another unit you know you progress in your career so to have eight years there and seven and then with brigade record it's unheard of so i basically had to move on so i put my paperwork in for for pathfinders which was the brigade recce for the airborne unit and we each year we have a confidential report and my report was excellent and he pulled me in he said can you not see the wood through the trees he goes you need to go to then come back as the the wreckage staff sergeant going you know pathfinders isn't the way so you're probably like yeah give me a bit of a rollicking um but that afternoon actually um i got a phone call from glasgow glasgow runs all our manning and records they tell you where you're getting posted and things like and so the engineer royal engineer divers we also have royal navy search divers there have been a few deaths recently in the royal navy divers um just purely because they're not full-time divers and there's you know lack of um you know i would say lack of uh protocol yeah exactly yeah protocol training so unfortunately in a couple of deaths but then hse had now started creeping into diving you know when i said earlier that there's no no voice comms and things like that now you can't dive unless you've got two-way visual camera and voice comps hsc was really creeping into middle school wait what's hsc health and safety executive okay yeah yeah yeah the the big banners so they'd introduced a new dive equipment called the sabre mod one um and so it didn't disrupt the other diving courses they introduced another dive team to come in and train all the current divers within the engineers so i just passed my army diving supervisors and got top students so you know that that same day to start majors i haven't been moroccan i didn't get posted to the dive school so it was out of both our hands um so i went down as the the senior dive instructor um and then you're down there as a senior drive instructor and it sounds like you guys are basically just uh partying a lot because in the book i mean you guys are divers but you kind of it's plenty you're training people that are already divers right yeah yeah and you're just training them on a new piece of gear that's it yeah they're already qualified divers but for them they're going to portsmouth it's like probably coming to san diego you know you've got two weeks in the gaslamp you know for these guys they're saving up their money so ready to rock and roll yeah but every two weeks you get another another of qualified divers so for them it was a holiday they knew that they knew they were passing they were just going through the procedures so they're on holiday and they're dragging you on holiday yeah yeah you're coming out and i you know i was single guys yeah of course and at one point at what point did you realize did you decide you're gonna go selection so uh a couple of mates have gone uh sas and we we met up about three months later and um you know it really opened my eyes and i you know i i like to party hard and they're all like you're not even drunk and you know i said i'm going to go on selection and it was one of the backflip no you weren't i said yeah well so that monday i just stopped drinking and then and then i trained um i went on i had an attempt at selection before that a couple years before not long after the alarms command of course and my knee blew out on the hill how deep into selection were you on that first time when you got blown out me within the aptitude phase the first four weeks uh on on the hill train so i tore my i tore my lateral meniscus but my training for that selection i was up and down the north devon coastal path you know carrying weight i was just pounding and pounding the knee so for me i didn't want to have that same approach with this attempt also i was running uh dive courses at the time so any time i had you know off was the evening so i'd spend two hours on on these spin bikes you know these spin might be on a spinner for two hours each night uh for six weeks how was uh when you when you got dropped from selection the first time around like you're kind of making it like it's no big deal i only know from my experience it's a when you if if people don't make it through like basic seal training yeah it's a it's a it's horrible because you're going to be in the regular navy and that's not what you do in the navy to do and all of a sudden you're doing this other thing or you're doing like a regular navy job and that's not good and i can't even fathom like my mindset if i wouldn't have made it but it seems like it's a little easier on someone that's you know you're so you were were you at five nine so i was in record at the yeah so you're in recce troops you're like okay i didn't get through it this time and i still have an awesome job so maybe it wasn't quite as psychologically devastating yeah well we we you you get two attempts at selection you see i knew i had another tape it wasn't the be all be all or end all but i learned a lot from that and it was it was the approach to training you know a lot you know we have the first four weeks which we'll talk about soon on selection which is the aptitude phase which is the hills phase which is the physical once you're at once you pass that it's when the uh then comes in and i sort of knew i just needed to get past that first four weeks because soldiering-wise you know i spent years in wrecking troop you know i was on the all-arms team you know i was quite current so when i approac did it the second time like i said i was on the spinner bike for two weeks so it was low impact and um actually i'd we do a a run in the uk minutes called bft the basic fitness debt it's it's a run for a mile and a half and i got my fastest run at the age of 28 i didn't like seven minutes 10 seconds so i thought right you know the fitness finish fitness is up up here so i then went on selection i decided to um to go sbs i went and did the they do a thing called a briefing course because there's two attempts at selection days of old guys you know if you weren't from the marines in paris guys would go on selection and get caught out there they'd get big culture shock they didn't realize actually what was involved and what training and preparation you needed to do so rather than wasting one life then coming back and potentially getting injured both units then introduced a thing called a briefing course which you can have as many attempts at as you want and it's a one-week course and basically it's like an aptitude it gives you an insight of what where you are fitness-wise navigation-wise did you get to do that the first attempt that you did they didn't have it yet they didn't have that yet so you had wasted one life so i'd wasted one life yeah so i went and did the sas breathing course for a week and then the following week i went and did the sbs one because i still wanted to i wanted to make my decision but obviously a lot more my friends were in the sas and i sort of knew all them and you know saw the way that they operated and then i went down to paul endorse it on our south coast and then and the guys are there you know they've got frog shorts t-shirts they've got you know reef sandals and oakland yeah this is me this is this is where this is where i belong um so i did both and then you have to make the decision before you go on selection so i said right i'm going and that was a new thing before if you were in the army you're going the sas if you were in the marines or i guess would they take regular navy dudes into the sbs there's only ever been one navy guy pass although it's the naval special forces only only one navy guys pass it up until then there's 100 um royal marines so normally you or in the past you would have been sas 100 percent not even a choice that's you're in the army you're going to the sas and at some point during the joint environment of hey we all need to work together yeah they said pick which one you want to go to you saw the you saw the you saw a pool you saw flip-flops yeah surf shorts and oakleys and said i'm i'm heading there yeah that was it the so what it was was the marines could go to the sas so the marine the sbs we're losing candidates to the sas because not everyone likes diving you see oh yes yeah and then some guys have head injuries as well it means they can't go underwater so they're losing uh students to that and so they decided to then open up try service that the navy the army in the raf can come and they'd just literally just done that so for me having spent eight years in free commander brigade having the green beret anyway and being to see india it just seemed the natural transition the perfect transition for me but in my head i thought well if i go sas you know because i'm a senior dive instructor i'm going to end up in boat troop if i go sbs these guys are all divers so you know i'm a level playing field and that was where my mindset was and so yeah i did it much to the disgust of my friends in the sas they're like what you're doing because especially like wrecking tree we had 100 pass rate and it was like you know if this guy goes then you know people are gonna look at those options um you know uk special forces 40 the uk special forces made up of the royal marines that's because they were all in the sbs you you uh had to explain this a lot here's the here's the book talking to your instructors why the [ __ ] do you want to go to pool one of the dss asked me the special forces selection encompassed all those who want to go to sas and sbs so it's the exact same training you're going to go through the exact same training the exact same selection course i should say i knew i shouldn't give him a real answer i didn't want to go to boat troop in hereford and i liked the way the sbs guys cut about in t-shirts shorts and oakley's as a surfer that appealed to me and poole would certainly put me closer to the surf spots of devon and cornwall i love diving staff [ __ ] answer who likes diving the ds snorted picking up a rock put that in your kit and you better [ __ ] have it when we're when we get to the end of the day i had it with me every day each morning the ds would ask me the same question and each day i'd be told to put a rock into my already heavy bergen then one day i had an idea my chances of being the gray man were long gone and so i decided to deploy a bit of humor back in the camp that evening i got busy and in the morning i was prepared one of two of the ds walked over to me they were both from hereford and both had been at five nine they had a keen eye for horrible rocks oh you why the [ __ ] you want to go to pool i placed my weapon down across my boots that it was out of the dirt and opened up the one of the map pockets in my trousers pulling out a laminated photo what the [ __ ] is this one of them sneered it was a fold it was a photo of born mouth am i saying that right bournemouth born mouth got him in america it was a photo of bournemouth beach during a heat wave i'd pulled it off of google and laminated it in the office you don't get topless girl girls on the beach in hereford staff i told them with a straight face and both men burst out laughing i kept the photo in my pocket for the rest of the course and didn't carry another rock uh actually one of the main reasons why i do well i grew up surfing too yeah in in the cold water of new england and i was looking at you know when i was trying to figure out what i wanted to go into and one of the things that was seemed like a really good deal was either being stationed in virginia beach which is good waves on the east coast and or san diego which is san diego and either that you know are you going to fort bedding or fort lewis or just there's some other places to get stationed so that definitely helped guide me in the right direction and i didn't know any seals at the time otherwise i would have seen sandals shorts and oakleys and that probably would have steered me even more in that direction um continue on here despite the rocks i did really well on the hills the training on the spin bike worked out my joints felt fresh on my last basic fitness test at dive school i even ran my fastest time ever 28 years old avoiding injury on the hills is key there's no time for recovery if you get hurt you're done that's that and so i was pleased that i'd learned the lessons of my first attempt at selection and adapted my plan accordingly yeah my buddy john dudley is a bow hunter and like he's he spends a bunch of time on the stationary bike getting ready for hunting season and i i was like i just put on a rock and walk because i'm maybe not as smart but yeah it seems like that's a seems like that works yeah i think obviously you're gonna have the impact anyway you know for for me when i did the first selection you know i've got quite big hill legs so actually ascending hills was not a problem where you need to be making up your time is on the on the downhills and on the straights and you know and that's where i need needed to improve so that's that's why i introduced the spin bike because i didn't want to inflame that injury again i didn't want to you know put starting it in a bad position so i just looked at what worked and what didn't you know i knew i was struck i had the strength you know in my legs i just didn't have the speed and how was i going to be able to improve on that and that's where the spinning bike was was perfect for it but the our our aptitude our first four weeks is you know it's 20 20 to 30 kilometers you know up to 70 pounds uh you you have then then have like the test week um and they say you know you need to be moving at 4k an hour which thinks that's fine but that's as the crow flies looking at a map so if you've got a mountain in the way you need to get over that mountain so you need to really be moving about five to six k an hour because if you then have any issues navigational wise you know you've got some fudge and you you're not scraping in but groundhog day for four weeks doing that on the brecon beacons in wales is uh and you don't know there's no like cut off time they just tell you to go and get it done as quick as you can that's it yeah you basically get to your your start point you know the ds will give you your grid reference you you then step aside work out you know which direction you're going tell him in time speed distance and you start working on your 4k an hour how long it's going to take you and then you go and then you get to the next checkpoint which is the top of the hill where he's always meet the ds telling me to pick up a rock and then they will just give you the next one and you just keep going until you get to to the finish point and they also have a couple of little games in there as well where you you think you've finished for the day and they'll write your next checkpoint and then you know you go you start going and it caught a couple of guys out there they're done and didn't realize that actually it was just the test um you just have to be self-disciplined you know self-motivated yeah no you wrote you wrote about that in the book how they'd come up you think you're done yeah you've been walking for what 12 hours 14 hours or whatever it is 19th day in a row yeah you come up to the to the drill sergeant and you say um you know him checking in and he's like yep here's your next point yeah and guys would say i'm done and they'd quit yeah and then someone else would come up and say they'd say here's your next point they'd start walking say hey just kidding come back and then that guy would realize that they just quit for no reason yeah yeah i think it was on ours it was a lot of the parallax a lot of the parachute regiment lads would go as drivers to drive the vehicles on the selections before so they knew the start and finishes points and it was actually to catch them out because in their head they're like right i've just got 30 kilometers i've just got 30 kilometers and so they built themselves up and when they get to that point they think it's finished and then when you throw a little curveball in there to like they weren't expecting it um but then yeah even test week you know it's called the aptitude phase but test week itself you then have five marches and if you don't come in on the times you know you get a red card you get two red cards uh you're done i think the first three march is about 30 kilometers the fourth march is it's 35 kilometers but then you have four hours rest and then that evening you do 40 miles uh with 70 pounds it's called endurance and you have to do that within 20 hours it's called other things besides endurance yeah yeah so um but you finish that and you think brilliant you know i've i've just passed the hills phase it's quite a big thing but for the instructors they're called aptitude they don't even call you by your name they don't even know who you are at this point it's like and you probably lost 50 percent of the course at this point either voluntary withdrawal injury or actually just not meeting the injury level's got to be high yeah because that's a beat down on your joints oh i mean well it happened to you the first time yeah exactly i mean even obviously like i i broke my ankle as a young boy so my so my nemesis in the military was my my left ankle and so it would go over we can edit that out we don't want everyone to know his weaknesses so for me though i knew that and i would take you know i'd take my ankles up and things like that and i remember on test week um i had these these military boots lowers had great ankle support because you know because lads were were failing they were leaving so in the evening you put your boots in the drying room and i remember going in the next day and i'm like they look a bit small and one of the guys who left had taken my boots and i was like oh no i still had three more test marches with these with these almost like jungle boot style boobs you know running across all these babies heads so uh yeah but you know it's also administering yourself and looking after yourself and prevention um you continue on you get past that that phase and like you say in here like that was just the beginning um and you also say this you had to be totally self-motivated you had the mental strength or you didn't unlike p company or command of course there were no shouts of encouragement from the staff anything the ds did say would be an attempt to undermine your confidence make you second-guess yourself my preparation for the course helped a lot i never doubted my decisions i knew i'd done the work over the years to be spot on with my map and compass i knew i'd left enough sweat in the gym to have my fitness up to standard i'm only human and i'd listen to the ds as cutting criticism but then i could calmly say to myself it's just part of the mind games mate you're doing fine times like those i think back to when my dad had told me i wouldn't last two minutes in the army he'd been wrong and so would the ds yeah they play they they learn what to say to people to get them to quit you know they they say all kinds of things and what you would you say right there uh it's just part of the mind games yeah but man they go hard yeah yeah they do yeah we we we go to the jungle so one once we finish the hills phase we we start doing some uh some inventory skills as well because basically you're learning all over again so whether you're a marine or para the way that they operate in uk sf is totally different and you're introducing new weapon systems so the c8 demarco is only used by uk special forces you're having to learn a whole new weapon system uh again and um yeah but you know from your friends who've done it before you that they're gonna start playing mind games with you and i remember we go to brunei spend six weeks in the jungle and that's that's a great great part selection you lose a lot of guys there you know some guys really thrive in the jungle and some guys it's almost like um it's claustrophobic you know you spend a lot of time in their day in day out and hear the helicopter coming in to pick up the lads and you see guys it's just see guys randomly packing their bags like jesus and they're like what you're doing they said oh well you know i'm gonna fail this instructor said it was like ignore what the instructor said but i remember when it happened to me i remember we were marching up to a um a range and everything we do on selection is live firing we don't do blank everything is for real um you know because on a data race you don't fire blank and it's all about weapon handling that you're safe but you know effective and i remember one instructor is coming straight up to me [ __ ] in my face screaming and shouting if i see any weapon handling like that again because you'll be off you'll be on the next helicopter and i just said yes stuff um i didn't get into an argument i hadn't even been on the range yet he didn't realize that you know i hadn't been on the range i knew it was my day uh that he was testing me and you you could see it as well you know throughout the course you can see oh he's getting it today the instructor would be on you i mean you get guys you know who don't pass and they said oh yes because i had a personality clash with the instructors and a lot of them tend to use that but what they do on selection which is great is actually especially the final exercise the last 10 days they swap your instructors around so if there is you know human beings there's always going to be personality crashes if there is anything like that it's sort of you get you get a fair chance at it so um but i enjoyed i enjoyed the jungle for me um you know i was going through a court case at the time my ex-wife and trying to get custody of my my first daughter and um i remember passing and we have a barbecue and they always say don't go on selection with any welfare issues you need to go there fully focused you know so guys guys would get letters from their wives you know blueys and she's having a bad day you know if she's at home with a friend would you call it a bluey bluey it used to be like blue uh blue envelopes which are free free posts um and you know you write in there and it's purely just military so it's known as a bluey and you know if your wife's having a bad day and she's got kids and she thinks you're on holiday in brunei you know i mean um and she's like i mean you know plays your mind and guys pull themselves off and then phone their wives and i'm actually all right now you know what i mean so they do say just cut off all the white noise so when i finish my uh my chief instructor is like because hi here guys come on here we're well i said i'm going through a divorce and custody of my kid is it really i said the only place the solicitors can't get letters to me and that's i mean so for me at the time it was it was a big escape escape i got back in this big pile of letters that are great but um but yeah you come back from that and i i got the uh troop sergeant role for the final five days of the of the final attack and you saw that's almost an indicate that you you're doing well um so i sort of i knew i'd done well on the course but when you come out the jungle you have the barbecue the instructors get together they have their little you know final decisions but you don't know for another five days when you get back to uk they don't they don't tell you there and then it's like so you know one of the instructors came up to me at the barbecue a friend of a friend uh south african land and drunk totally drunk he's out yeah you've done well i said but you should come and say yes so it's almost like you've been given the nod unofficially and so you're telling lads you've been given a nod yeah i haven't so lads are self-critiquing over the next five days and and a member the same ds came up to me the next day so he said story he said did i give you the nod last night i said no he said did you pass i said i didn't know you said i did i said oh i was drunk i was gonna say that's like psychological yeah all kinds of psychological gains hey it's been nice knowing you've really made good effort out here yeah but actually the the jungle drums it's quite a big thing selection you know those instructors will go back they'll sort of tell things it doesn't take long before it starts so i got a text of my friend's wife saying well done you've passed how does this wife know in devon i'm back but even though you you're feeling confident that you've done it you still you still when you walk in five days later it's like you know because occasionally guys are getting the down check because whatever yeah that's it you know they may have got through the jungle phase but it may be like not not this time but with the jungle you only get one attempt so that that's your only attempt so yeah that's a that's quite a big big color as well but once you've finished the jungle phase you know that they want you you know so the next three months you know unless you're a real you know do a neil diamond negligent negligent discharge or something like that you're you you should be safe and what's the last three months what are you doing for that section so you do continuation chains to do sear it's a vital evasion resistance extraction uh running through gray coats around scottish highlands um you do your your parachute and your squares you do communications kit and then the final phase counter terrorism um so basically they they get you into a position that when you join your saber squadrons that you can fit into the team but you you that's just your start point within the squadrons but so it's a six month process it's actually quite long drawn out and we we basically the sbs and sas as you touched on is joint selection and the accommodations at hereford with the ses and you're seeing the guys on the course already been given you know what squadron they're going to told what deployments are going having to go see the quartermaster to get kit and you guys in the sps are like oh my god you know not getting anything um so it is quite frustrating that they get their berry and belt and then we used to just get given a blue track so you've got then another three months continuation oh it's it's it continues on it it does it is still selection or is it just continuation it's days of old it used to be selection because if you failed the dive course they'd accept you in the sas so you know the whole thing you know what's the difference in the ses in the sbs are you always a surprisingly avid soldier slightly better soldier you know sort of joking but um you know but but actually they then introduced that we then got we then got our own sort of unit recognition we got our own cat badge recently and you know we got our own belt because days of old you wouldn't know who was sbs because it was a raw marine cap badge that was it yeah the only indicator was this is long curly hair um you go here an elite club it may have been and the journey to get there was incredibly difficult but all of the other men at the squadron i now joined had done exactly the same so no one remarked on it for me selection been the most monumental thing in my life but for these guys it was a tick in the box to get me to work you the new guy are you all right simple as that i'd be the the exactly the same way once i'd spent some time at pool and the next cadre of new guys came in but for now i was the new bloke and i was about to begin one of the most intense periods of my life what year is this so this is 2006.

Oh okay so it's on so when where were you when september 11th happened so september 11th i we were about to go on a uh an exercise called safe zaria in oman it was a big big exercise i remember obviously seeing the twins i was you know getting pulled into the cinema watching it and then that um that afternoon i got a phone call from the dive school saying that you know there's an army advanced diving course started yesterday yesterday one of the guys has failed his his entrance test so our diving courses are in phases you have the basic course which is um which is six weeks you had advanced courses 10 and you your supervisor so you have to pass each before you progress and so i got a phone call to come down to dive school so i was heading down the road and then obviously see the twin towers everyone's going to oh man i think oh my god i'm going to miss out on this and you know so i missed the initial the initial phases and then i was at limston on the training team when the lads lads deployed so yeah i i missed out with free commander rigging my afghan tour so i was fuming fuming so my my first deployment afghan was yes with the sbs uh you say here um i totally understand that some people will be disappointed that i can't divulge details of special forces operations but our country has enemies and we can't hand them information that could endanger the lives of my former colleagues who continue to operate around the world selflessly providing the blanket of freedom beneath which we sleep i know you'll appreciate that and in light of what they sacrifice we can sacrifice some stories let me just say that those years gave me some of my best friends and that i love the job so this is now you're you're going on deployments um with the sbs and obviously we're not going to go into any any details of them were you guys primarily doing like direct action yeah so when we i was very fortunate my first you know i'd missed that opportunity free commander brigade so when i went out with the sbs um my first our first deployment was the first ever operational jump for the sbs into into hellmann so i was at wow it's my first time in afghan and it's an operational jump at night um so yeah we we were doing it's called task force 42 tf-42 which is the door kicking but also alongside that um the intelligence services were also picking up agents and things that so i was having to work between between both normally the instructor the guys who would go on that were from our reservists and it all failed the course so when i first got there it was literally door kicking at night and then in the day dressing up as a local um but for me we then did numerous operational jumps we were very fortunate on that tour we had the most hvts and any squadron and we had more hvts in first three months than the last three squadrons back to back um because we were just changing the way that that we operated as you know out there you had to change you know they all knew your ttps and you had to change and adapt to that so for me it was i was at the pinnacle you know i'd missed out that time of free commander ago but i i made up for it in abundance and what's your position are you are you like a breacher are you a sniper what's your what's your role yeah so actually one thing i forgot to mention so unlike um so when i went on selection i was a sergeant when you finish selection your rank goes you start again as a trooper as a trooper yeah well actually they said i was gonna be a marine i was like oh i said i said that's fine but know that no other army lad especially airborne is going to come in to sbs if you call us marines you have to call us troopers so when i went there i was almost like the guinea pig you know what works what doesn't work and and things like that so yeah but then you do were you literally the first army there was two two other guys with uh two other guys with me there was an officer and another engineer lad in your selection class yeah and so you three were the first army soldiers to go into the i think there was one before there was one one before us but uh first time in in this squadron but from the engineers especially wreckage we've been being the first and i think now 15 of the sbs is now made up of the army so it was almost like the floodgates had opened um which i think is good because the marines as i said they're so proud of you know their background i think that but you need diversity you need diversity in there and that's what the army the army brought in also the fact that at the time the sas were run in iraq and the sbs would run in afghanistan so again you know for guys who want to go on selection you know iraq was starting to wind down you know guys were looking uh towards afghans so the sbs was a good option there yeah that's my interaction with well i had two interactions with the with the british special forces in my career one of them was before 9 11 and it was very cool and i'll tell you about it later and then the other one was um it was it was just in in iraq you know we were hitting target sets and there was like multiple targets that were all somehow connected and so i just sat down next to the troop commander and we talked through the plan and really good guy and obviously just you know when people ask me about the the brits and i've i've worked with other british units but all of them what i say about the brits the british are just professionals like just professionals the way they behave the way they operate it's just always awesome you know they're going to be squared away it's um that was always my impression of of the british special forces and of the british military in general yeah except for one person that i'll tell you also tell you about later which was really strange and he was british navy so which is strange right because that's the royal navy that's the rule navy yeah right yeah we should be just totally squared away yeah well that's probably where the drinking drinking the problems are yeah this guy was uh i don't know maybe he could have used a beer at this particular ritual uh so you so i cut you off when you were talking about i'd asked you were you a sniper yeah yeah so when you when you joined um it depends so we have four troops um so you have air mountain boat and mobility i mean you go in there and as i said when you when you pass selection you think i've just done six months you know you're at the the you're baseline and now another bass line and you have to then get all these other skill sets so within the teams it's where there's any gaps or whether it's language demolitions you know i was the forward air controller so mine was anything to do with air uh was me so i was i was the fac within art and then that means you get to go on every mission yeah exactly yeah yeah perfect but then you obviously stacking up on the doors you know you would be point man you know there's guys out there who've got books like first man in i'm the leader well you're not you know the first man in is is the new boy you know the the section commander or the commander is like number three or four so but then obviously when you bounce on to the next door it just depends who was there you know that's what we used to do you know we didn't really have say right we have to go in this order you know when we did our training it was unrelenting you know we knew it inside out the drills it was just second nature very slick so uh but you were so you're just you guys are doing a rolling point doesn't matter who goes in but did you did you guys have breacher did you have a special assignment for that because you're an engineer i figured you were going to say breacher because we always kind of associate breacher with engineer was that enough yeah no it wasn't actually when i when i yeah so out there no no it wasn't because it because their demolitions is slightly different from the royal engineer demolitions i know we'll take down the bridge not put a nice little hole in it we know we'd probably drop the whole compound things they didn't trust you you'd be using too much explosives but what they tend to do which i thought was great in the special forces if you already have skill sets you've already you've already got that skill set let's give you another skill set you know so you sort of build on it so like the pathfinder lads who like the airborne recce when they go sas they're already halo trained so there's no point in them going air troop they've got that skill set put them in boat route you know so they try and give you as many skill sets as possible yeah and then how long would you guys go on deployments for so ours is six months six month deployment we used to do a two year sort of rule month so six months pre-deployment training six months training you then come back and then you're on the green roll so you're on the pager for any sort of any other um situations around the world and then six months counter terrorism then so hostage rescue in you know domestic and international and then um when you i like like i said i think that's enough broad people can kind of figure out what you were doing um but how long how many years of this cycle were you on so this side got discipled every every two years so every two years you've been out for for another six months unless you then you spend four years in your saber squadron and then you you have to move on you then get like an instructional post okay so guys tend to do that and then they then come back in and slot in as then team leaders i'm gonna go through the whole room on again so now we're gonna jump into one particular pre-deployment training cycle i'm going to the book we were in the desert as part of our pre-deployment training i couldn't wait to get back out on operations nor could any of the other guys being on ops was the reason we joined the special forces and nowhere were our skills put to the test more than the daily life or death battles with our enemies we're going on high altitude high opening training i loved jumping jumping some guys didn't and just sucked it up but i always wanted to be the first in the stick so i could stand on the open tail ramp and look down at the earth beneath me i wanted to soak it all in before i jumped but on the second jump that day i was put in the back of the line i waddled with my kit toward the door as the others left the aircraft one guy tumbled out after the next eventually it was my turn i jumped and immediately i knew that i was in trouble i felt something on my leg i looked up and saw that it was wrapped in rigging i knew that as soon as the static line pulled up the canopy that rigging would shoot up above my head and the force of it would take my leg with it i had a second to get my leg clear whack i failed the static line pulled the chute the chute pulled the rigging the rigging pulled my leg it came up and over my shoulder like i was a yoga guru instantly i felt every muscle ligament and tendon rip and snap i screamed in absolute agony and almost blacked out from the pain the rigging worked its way clear and now the leg fell back alongside the other but i knew that i had no control over its movement i was lucky to still have the leg the force could have easily ripped it off and if that happened i'd have bled to death within minutes and some poor local would have had a one-legged corpse landing in his garden pain was racing through my body but i knew that if i didn't get my act together i could still die i was so far up that oxygen was thin and i could not afford to pass out i drifted away from my guys if i drifted away from my guys i could end up in the middle of the desert or the sea it would be browners i had to stay awake you'd think that the pain would have made that easy but it was so intense that my brain was trying to send me into unconsciousness i wouldn't let it i just wouldn't instead i fixed my focus on the descending parachutes of the stick and followed them in it was the longest 30 minutes of my life despite the physical agony i had time had enough time hanging in the sky to feel emotional pain too i knew that there would be no deployment for me now i think i knew deep down that there would be no more time on operations at all 30 minutes is a long time to think about that when you're alone floating through the air finally the ground was getting closer i saw my mates landing in formation i wanted to make a good landing out of pride but more than that i knew that if i landed badly i could quite well ruin my good leg too the ground came up to meet me i pushed down on my toggles and flared the chute just at the right moment dragging in enough air under the canvas to take the speed out of my descent if you do it too early you just stop in the sky then drop like a sack of [ __ ] but i came in like a feather and landed on one leg there was only one thing left to do medic what year was that so that was 2010.

So ma'am um that's it i mean your leg you did you know instantly you were you were done yeah um you know it was actually the new guys who come to the squadron were getting hey-ho trained so our sergeant major we'd already brought a heiho train from previous tours he's like we'll go do fun jumps you know i'd like jumping but there's no such thing as a fun jump in the military and um and the reason i got moved like normally i'm at the front i like to frog you know you turn around and you exit the pgis which used to always upset the uh the the raf so i then got moved to the back of the stick and like i said we've done numerous of these jumps just routine but as i exit it got caught in the line so i'm trying to kick it in time and i couldn't and then when it got pulled up and over you know you'd probably hear me from the ground screaming so but no one else in the team is aware there's anything anything going on um but because of those thin altitude i was drifting in and out i was vomiting because of the pain and i just needed to get i just wanted to get to the ground and see and re establish what's what's going on um assessed the other parachutists their approach you know took another a look over dee's head and landed it one-legged but you know straight away i couldn't put any pressure on it you know because got uh we got um medic medic uh back to the camp uh had a mri scan the next day and i was like yeah you've torn your acl your mcl your lateral meniscus your hamstring your calf your quad it's all the supporting muscles as well so normally with an acl or mcl you you can carry on you see rugby players just carrying on but it's all the supporting muscles but to add to the issue as well the it was the icelandic volcano which is grounded aircraft all over the world so they couldn't get an error med to me so based i was just thrown into a hotel in muscat the lads went on to tour from there i was put in a hotel for four weeks with painkillers you know sort of deteriorating got back to uk after an era med sent home for six weeks back to the hospital then they'd lost all my paperwork and it was just a spiral of of errors within the military medical system how long did it take for you to get through i mean how long did it take to get surgery and you talk about in the book but how long was that it was 44 weeks in the end you know my when i injured my leg on the first selection process it was five days i mean i was running again in six weeks it took me 44 weeks to get this so you know my whole my leg had deteriorated completely and for me i was then transitioning to civilian street so i wasn't really focused on my my rehab was like what am i gonna do next did your uh at what point did did you know did somebody say hey that's it you you can't be here anymore do they offer you medical retirement like what did that process look like you'd like to think they'd offer you medical retirement um but it didn't you know i had to almost threaten them that i i needed um with legal that i needed the operation and when i left they the pay scale they put me out and was one below a medical pension and it said you were fixed within 26 weeks i was like well it was 44 weeks so five years later i i had a tribunal here and against the military and what the military tend to do is it's basically guys that appeal it they'll say no and you can appeal it again and they'll say no they'll lose 80 percent of people doing that so i knew a general who said to me he said just keep appealing said they won't even open your case until it's the third appeal which is five years later so that's what i did and then i had a tribunal hearing in in edinburgh and i went down and actually had a qc in front of you and two doctors from the military i then brought a military charity called the royal british legion and they just sort of ask certain questions which gets your story out and then you have a representative from the military veterans appealing you and normally they can be quite aggressive but this guy was actually quite quite relaxed um but someone did say to me the week before he said look when you go in this that he goes he he had one and he didn't get his medical pension he said when you go in there you can't be dean stop special forces you know these guys say can you walk down the street you say no you know it was one of them so i had that in the back of my mind and i went in and actually they had the timeline that i'd printed out and um you know i then ended up getting a full full medical pension and then back dated but the fact that i had to go through it with my own yeah it's crazy so you'd like to think you know especially when you feel like you're the top again you feel like you're a pop star we're in you know tier one special forces and then just this all almost put a a cloud over my my career you know not my career but the my last last year in the military yeah it's a bad it leaves you the bad taste leave me a bad taste i didn't actually realize until i was successful how you know what a weight was on my shoulders you know one i felt when i got it i felt i'd been reciprocated for my time you know things and i could almost close that chapter and move on but that was five years after leaving how many years then did you how many years were you in total 16.

So 16 years in and so you get what from the day you got injured how long did it take before you said all right i need i'm going to get out because i can't do my job anymore so it was over nearly a year and i had to extend because i hadn't even been operated on the military have to return you to civilian street in similar condition or best condition than what you entered and i was nowhere near that so so for me my mindset you know my head's now thinking well i'm not i'm not in the military anymore i need to look look beyond that but you still can't progress because you're waiting on on this operation so i i got it in the end and then when i finally left in may 2011 is when i actually got out and then as you're working through this transition um at some point you get a call it's uh can you be in libya tomorrow yeah yeah that's it yeah so to add to the pressure you know you know when you know we talk about identity crisis you spent all this time in the military working in a tiny knit unit you know knowing what you're doing day out working alongside professionals to like where do i now fit in society what is my role what is my purpose so i had that going on in my head i hadn't really had that full transition so guys when they're getting out they have like two year build up you know to do all these workshops and they set up their companies mine was almost you know crash bang you're out the door my wife at this point was eight months pregnant you know so i'm like i gotta say any work out there you know what i'm gonna do and without sounding like liam neeson people with our skill sets tends to be the private security industry so this was the middle of the arab spring and qadhafi was still in tripoli at this point and in benghazi a lot of the oil companies the security companies the media were forming up and my friend who was a director one of the large security companies said dean can you be in libya and i said yeah of course i can't so i went i went straight in and basically it was a it was a diffid project department for institute development which was the you know at the time was the prime minister's little baby so they would go into the these sort of countries and you'd have representatives from the the financial sector from the the medical and you know the military and it's to basically advise and help these these countries get back on their feet uh so they're all preparing for qaddafi so i he said can you go in can you help set up the diffid project we're going to fly 30 private security operators in from iraq and afghanistan so i went in and straight away i could see there was no threat you know the libyans were very hospitable but they also were quite adamant that they didn't want this being another afghanistan in iraq you know once qadhafi had fallen and they wanted to take control of their country they didn't want you know private security so we had these mp7s these weapons and these guys came in two days later from this herc you know these herc from afghan in iraq and like where's our weapons and that's sort of sort of changing their mindset that actually there is no threat and you know it needs to be all low-key um i was also trying to find a niche within the industry and i was looking at all these other security companies a lot of my friends had their their security companies were doing uh anti-piracy off the east coast of uh africa so i didn't want to tread on their feet so some of these big security companies i identify with charging you know six figure sums for crisis managements and evacuation plans but when you scrape the surface there was nothing in place so having spent two weeks set that up i um i flew back home and alana gave birth to our daughter molly and um i said i think i've got a plan so i i went back in to libya and and there was a huge proliferation of weapons at the time it was actually ammunition it was difficult to get hold of so i bought 30 weapons on the black market and i buried them between tunas and egypt i just spent a month in the desert just caching these pellet cases with comms kits and money and just wrote my own evacuation plans hoping never to really really need them and that's what i did we lived in aberdeen which is the oil and gas capital of europe so i had a good links to the oil and gas sector and that's what i did i didn't that was my niche i'd found a niche within within the industry um so yeah now did you set that up where you were talking to the oil companies and i've been to aberdeen thankfully uh very cool so have you ever surfed there i i haven't no but i know up thirsty further north is one of the great spots i was there in like the winter and you could have surfed it like it wouldn't have been fun but you could have surfed i was looking at the waves i went for a little run down there and i was looking at the waves and i was like well you could do it yeah you could do it but we're making not fun close freezing choppy he's like barely you could probably surf for about you know two seconds or three seconds per wave you'd have the waves to yourself though there was no water there was no one even on the beach um so did you did you set that the those all that gear up and then go and pitch to clients like hey i've got these plans set up here's what i can do for you and then are they giving you some kind of a revenue up front yeah so so basically i identified that i wrote him up first you know because it's almost like right i have this plan in place you know i had the cases so my sort of mindset with it was i i knew that the libyans didn't want security companies with weapons so before long we couldn't do that so my sort of mindset was if there was a situation we could drive across the border unarmed you know go to the cage points pick them up if we need the if we needed weapons you know and then and then get you know decline out and then bury them that was it so it was almost like a retainer and knowing that that service was there um and then we used to have like like triggers you know you know if there's a certain situation we go up to yellow we go up to amber so really you should never if if you're a deer into that trigger system that you have in place you shouldn't really need to go full on evacuation the only thing that sort of is is natural disasters that's where you can go from green to red overnight this is a natural disaster so really if you have that in place but that's something i just picked up from the military um was these cage systems and these cases that actually um the ira and the taliban use these cage systems that's where it originates um but for me it just wasn't i was walking around with weapons but i knew that i had safe houses and i knew there were weapons available if needed and you built relationships and you talk about that a lot in here yeah yeah you know i sort of you know i when i got out as well i didn't want to be going out to afghanistan and iraq you know i'd done my time in the dead no i sort of the security security industry isn't risk reward ratio balanced at all you know you could be in yemen libya or somalia on 50 of what you're on taking the uae royal family super yacht from barcelona to maldives so i was at well where's the money and it's in the corporate close protection so i didn't have cargo pants and tight tops you know it was like it was a nice dinner jacket shirt and brogues and and that was that was my approach but everyone has this perception of special forces you know it's about offensive action it's you know breaching walls it's kicking indoors and things like that that's 25 of what we do 50 of what we do is is support and influence it's hearts and minds being embedded with the locals understanding actually what is the situation on the ground not what i'm seeing on tv but what is actually physically going on in the ground so for me i really built up good relationships with local fixers there's 167 tribes in libya so my fixer in tripoli isn't my same fixer in benghazi so i quickly understood that especially during that that arab spring and i just returned from the london olympics i was providing security for visa and i was in benghazi the evening that your american ambassador got killed um september 11 2012.

And i i got a phone call could i escort help a german oil company eight german engineers get them out of benghazi so while it was all i think they made a film 13 hours but it was all kicking off in the city i got these guys safely from benghazi to tripoli through safe houses that i had in the desert and again i remember we had drivers from benghazi and we got to the safe house and we could you know we could drive to tripoli in a day but i said no we'll wait here for 48 hours which was worrying the engineers a bit and the benghazi guys had like big big beds and they're like oh no mr dean we can go i said no no we wait 48 hours but they were nervous i knew they were nervous going into tripoli because they're from the wrong region um but what they weren't aware of as i was getting drivers coming in from tripoli to meet us and they would carry on um it's that sort of knowledge knowing who to use and when to use and i remember the morning we were leaving and these poor guys and benghazi because i couldn't tell them they'd shaved all their bits and then i just went outside and the tripoli drivers had turned up it was like a almost like a scene from the okay corral they all started going for their weapons i said look i said i cannot take you to tripoli you will compromise us these guys can do it and i said look you will still get paid and it's just all about respect you know i i always say about communication but for that operation i couldn't i couldn't uh divulge too much to them so i got them safely out and then two years later i was in um brazil for visa again covering the world cup and i then get a phone call from the canadian embassy so what happened now is the tripoli war it's a civil war between the militias and the government and embassy is the the only reason embassies are in countries is all about trade and investment you know what can we get for for our country you know when it when things start opening up so october 13 the um they've done an assessment the canadians and basically it was costing them 20 million dollars a year to have the embassy open and their sort of assessment was there's gonna be no trade investment for about at least 15 years so when we see a window of opportunity let's collapse the embassy and leave but they couldn't just collapse them because the locals would be questioning them so fast forward now of summer 14 the tripoli war the americans the brits italians they just shut shot and when the canadians aren't going back so they had to shred everything and stay there their protection team was canadian military and they would fly in every four months rotate you know fly into tripoli international airport but during their period of four months they never left the walls of tripoli they just went from their accommodation to the office it didn't get out the city so they didn't know what was beyond the city walls and it's actually only 100 kilometers coastal road from tripoli to tunis so i flew in and we'd already evacuated a couple of people from usaid and i i did i don't go with the big over vehicles like local taxis just keep it all low profile and the week before the british got engaged at every checkpoint on the way to um to tunis which was obviously worrying the the canadians so me and my fixer um we went out and we just rather than speaking to the guys who got the weapons you know identified who the tribal elders was sat down with him no shared bread showed coffee and it was actually all about communication showing them respect and um yeah the following following day they then escorted us safely so i've got 18 military and four diplomats single-handedly from tripoli to to tunis yeah just to put that in perspective a little bit when i was a young seal before before you know um september 11th one of the main missions i did two deployments with the marine corps on ships and one of the main missions that we would train for is called uh a neo non-combatant evacuation operation which is literally to go into whatever am you know an american embassy presumably and go in in some hostile or semi-hostile country and evacuate those people but they would have an entire amphibious ready group with you know several battalions of marines the air support the seals all to go and get whatever that group is out of the country so when i was reading that portion of the book where you made this happen that's a that's a huge deal to do this essentially a mission that normally uh that could utilize an entire amphibious ready group with airframes and ships and the whole nine yards to make this happen and you're able to do it um in a different from a different angle by utilizing the locals by having building relationships with the locals going and doing it low profile that's just a it's a real credit to the way you were thinking about that operation yeah you have to think out of the box you know the fish wagons there's fish wagons that take fish from tripoli to tunis every day so we used the fish wagons to put the equipment in because they would just go straight through border control they were a bit slower getting to tunis and i could see the canadians getting getting a bit a bit worried but yeah it was just thinking thinking out the box we did have uav coverage there was uav coverage to to the border and then when we were at the border the canadians are met but i did that job um for free and the reason i did that was the year before i just finished the uh well i mean go ahead it's it's it's an interesting perspective um good you you you got yourself into a situation yeah that maybe didn't give the best image of what you were trying to do yeah so my role within the security industry i was very ad hoc you know when i got out a lot of my friends went over to work in the uae and trained their military um which is great good money and things out but i wanted to learn more you know outside that military environment as well i actually did more sensitive jobs as a private secure operator than i did when i was in the special forces and you know i worked all over africa yemen you know every time i got a phone call it was a different country it was a different job and i just come out of yemen and i was in dubai and i got a phone call from my friend we just set up a new company in london and he said can you be can you be in libya tomorrow i said well i can't my visas expired so don't worry about that this is a different call by the way i did that quote earlier did you can you be can you be in libya libya tomorrow this is another time that that happened this is another time this was what this is what you were doing once you got out of the military you're running these security events you're providing security you're doing assessments you're doing evacuations and so this is another time when you got the call hey can you be in libya tomorrow yeah can you be in libya tomorrow and i was out well no because my visas expired and he said you don't need a visa i was at fine so uh we flew via manchester flew straight in and i i got to the um i got to the airport terminal this young guy comes up to me said you mr dean i said yeah mr dean said follow me so everyone's in the queue for passports and we went in another queue and um we went to took me into the city and went to the te bestie hotel uh which is uh part of the cramfey hotel group but i knew that was owned by the maltese and also by the government and one of the guys that he said right met my one of my partners there my business partners and he said right you're just about to go meet the prime minister of libya he speaks no english speaks german so the health minister is going to translate i was okay fine so a bit a bit boring on the backstory about 48 hours before the militias had seized all the oil terminals to stop exporting of oil in libya and so we went upstairs and he sits down he explains his situation to me and um he says what do we do and i said well i said what do you want he said i want i want terminals back the terminals back i said look well we can we can pull a team together you know do four four simultaneous assaults you don't want to do back to back because you're warning four simultaneous assaults either from sea or from land but leave the flank open from to escape said no i don't want to escape and i sort of looked over to my friend um and he said this has been sanctioned oh not really so okay so let me just translate this for people that might not be tracking so there's oil um rigs that have been seized the prime minister of libya is sitting there telling you i want these things back from these insurgents or whatever you want to call them i want these oil rigs back from these insurgents i want you to do a simultaneous where you said hey i can do a simultaneous assault yeah so you're going to need a lot of people to do this and then you say listen you know smart thing you're thinking hey i'll give them a way to get out so that way they're not going to stand and fight hopefully and you know we'll we'll mitigate damage and he says no we don't want anyone to escape we want you to go and kill all these people that are on these oil rigs and that's so that's the the mission tasking that you're getting okay so that's the mission task and and for the listeners so basically in libya benghazi over in the east is where all the oil is and the the politicians are all in the west and again different tribes they do not get on well so and then in the middle you've got misrata as well and they're just so there's a big mess so i walked out this meeting and on that right i'm gonna need at least 150 guys you know 50 tier 1 and 70 tier 2.

And this was being funded he said yeah make it happen so straight away so i'm like i'm having to make phone calls and i would love to see the invoice on this that you're going to send but and it was no the money we were getting for this job was four times your normal daily wage you know and so i i had guys on standby in uk on like twice as much they're doing in in iraq and an afghan just staying at home it was huge it started to grow in into a beast and every evening i would go up and speak to the prime minister update where we are in this situation and um you know this went on for like two or three weeks the problem i had was some guys were starting to come in and it was trying to hide them you know to keep them out of view because there was other private security companies there who i knew i had a great reputation in in libya and they're like oh what what are you doing dean i'm not i'm reviewing my evacuation plans it's like you know the guys do look very special forces so this went on for about three weeks and um putting all the planning into place doing all our recce using his private jet you know to fly over the areas identifying you know if there's any aircraft we can utilize you know we're at the top of the the equipment list we had kit coming in from like plat attack you know all over the world um so yeah it was a big invoice and um this evening i went up to the prime minister and he said look he said i need to go to um to new york tomorrow it's the u.n conference but each evening he said please come up brief up the health minister that's fine so the following evening i went upstairs and the health minister said and so now the prime minister went to new york he's in new york now you're just alone with the the health minister health industry who actually turns out to be not the health minister but a hospital manager from london it's the only guy he could trust so it's very closed doors but in the in the corner over my left was a a larger gentleman with a big bushy tash and he's just saying nothing so mean health minister chatting away next thing he just starts screaming libyan they start arguing in libya so i just pulled my pull my chair back and let it let it quiet and down i mean he just then started talking in the perfect english he said who are you and i told him who i was and he said what are you doing here and i explained and he was the head of their sis intelligence service and he said no one knows this is happening in government you know he's going the prime minister's gone on his own back i was like okay and he said where are we with it i said well this is a stage right you know one or two more weeks and we're ready to go and he's like he said i'm not saying stop it but can we slow it down i'm thinking yeah the daily wage we're on i'm gonna slow it down as much as you want i said yeah of course so we uh i said well look i'll tell you what we'll do is why not we design a special forces training program for the libyans in the west and then and the libyans and east because they will never train together that way it would be cover the reason why there's equipment coming in it would justify where this guy is coming in so we went to an agreement on that keep us all on payroll drag this right out so um so that's that's what we did anyway the you know the government paying it was a third party i can't mention who was paying for this and about a week later they said look you know we are siphoning money yeah um let's call it a day because we can pick this up anytime we can come back and pick up i said yeah perfect let's do that so i sent i started sending the guys back and one of my best friends he stayed out with me i said look we'll go back tomorrow that evening we're in the um there's a restaurant at the top of the hotel a nice moroccan open-air restaurant and we could hear a distinct sound of an ac-130 you know what a hercules aircraft sound is like distinct and well that that's a herc but there was four ac-130s at military military airport around the corner but they were grounded they didn't work because already done the recce on them see if we could utilize them thought nothing of it anyway the next morning all over the world news delta force had come in and picked up an aq guy responsible for the kenyan tanzania bombings so obviously the prime minister when he'd gone into un had done an agreement with the americans giving it the green light which is fine but of course everyone thought that was me you know me and my mate trying to get out the airport that day was difficult because and obviously explaining to the other security companies i said that that wasn't me we got out um the prime minister got back about three days later he got arrested by the militias he got released in the end again people thought i was responsible for that i wasn't so i kept a low profile for about a couple of weeks and i flew black back in and i was winning contracts i was getting some good contracts but i wasn't getting your oil and gas your ngos i wasn't getting the big ones and i met a friend who's an xsas guy who's a security advisor for pmc um oh sorry pwc and he says um he says scotty everyone thinks you're you're a mercenary we're not murdering unless it was sanctioned by the various governments it was actually a show of force how quickly we could pull a private team together he said yeah we know that he said but for the general you know organic corporations who do their diligence they don't see it like that so then when it came to the canadian embassy one everyone had gone no security companies were going to come back in and help the canadians so when i came in they said what what's the cost and i said i think it was about seven thousand dollars and that was to cover the fish wagons my fixer and i i charged nothing and i thought what you know everyone's that you could have made but for me it was actually then brushed off that reputation of being immersed and then put my name on the top of the pile as being the number one did that up for seven thousand dollars seven thousand dollars we've got 24 uh sorry 22 people a whole embassy safely as soon as that's ridiculous yeah yeah my wife said you should have charged yeah you could have kept your reputation or earned back your reputation and at least made a little money on the side but for me it's all about you know it wasn't the money i liked like to help people and that's what i wanted to get across and is that fact and yeah it did yeah so then became number one in the industry yeah it's a lot it's a strategic move obviously to to do that and take care of those people and and give them a good deal and and clean your reputation up after been a little bit you know tarnished by this involvement and and you know you go into some details on the book on that about just just the fact that you know you can be sitting there talking to the actual prime minister of the country at the time and it's not what it looks like no not um i'm exactly back up a little bit this uh one part in the book you're talking about your new normal and this is what you're doing um your dad had been diagnosed with cancer you drove to the hospital when you got to the hospital your sisters are there your stepmom's there they'd been there kind of kind of just toiling with the whole situation you show up and put them on rotation like hey i'm going home i'll be back in the morning um you know you need to get some sleep because they were out there at the edge and then you come back um and you go into this the next eight hours was probably the longest continuous amount of time that we'd ever spent together this is with your dad in the hospital he's in rough shape we had a bit of a chat but it was superficial he was on painkillers but that had never been our style anyways i knew i loved him he knew i loved him and i knew he loved me anything else i can do for you i asked him he told me out of pain in his leg i saw he had a problem with one of his pain relief devices i took a couple of seconds to fix it and instantly he looked serene and nodded off to sleep when the girls returned that evening he was still peaceful i've never seen him look so calm my stepmom said well that's because he hasn't got three women fussing over him isn't it i joked every squatty knows that dark humor is how you cope with death i stood up and gave my dad a pat on the shoulder when we would be back when will you be back one of my sisters asked me i shook my head i won't i'm going back to aberdeen they couldn't believe it i've said my goodbyes i told them and my family are up in aberdeen that's where i need to be i knew it would be the last time that i saw him and i was at peace with that back in aberdeen that night i got news that i had been expecting how's your dad doing alana asked me the next day at breakfast he died last night i replied and went back to eating my cereal i was that blase about the whole thing i didn't realize it then but death had been normalized for me so too at my ways of coping with it a complete numbing of my emotions my father had passed away and i'd given my wife the news in the same way that i'd tell her that the kettle had just boiled over the next week or so i took control of the practical side of my dad's death i helped arrange the funeral and made contact with the royal engineers association so they could be present i wore my levats one of the ceremonial uniforms of the royal marines and the sbs i wore my green beret my medals and my father's it was the last time that i wore the uniform and i suppose that it was a true fitting tribute in itself my dad been a huge part of me beginning in the my military journey and now he was part of its end how are you feeling alana asked me after the funeral i need to leave the house at 0-600 hours tomorrow to get to the airport i told her in reply in a moment when most people are wracked by emotion i was pr planning my travel for the job in south africa i was relentless but in pursuit of what and why now obviously you know it's uh something that you know we we have to deal with death on on a big way in in especially when with with people that you know i don't know how old your dad was when he died but yeah 67 i think yeah had her had a grown son and and and kids and had lived his life and you know i i know for me you know for us it's hard because we see we we see our friends that die that are 27 32 you know they they haven't had that opportunity and i think that's something that makes a little sense in my head of when someone older dies of course it's sad but you know that they had a good life and they had that opportunity and then like you said you know um we unfortunately have to see a lot of people dying you have to figure out how to get through that and sometimes maybe it's not the well sometimes i guess we take the emotional side of it and and have to stifle it down maybe not the best thing to do but it's kind of what we do yeah so it's how we deal with things like with my my father you know when i joined the army that was it that was my new family my one of my sisters stayed with mum and my dad and my other sister went up to her mom so they they had their own lives so when i joined the army that was that was my family you know i would only get in touch my dad was old school you know i mean he i remember getting a phone call he said you've got to ring your dad a lot really you know and it was because my cousin had come over from australia he would only ring if it was really really important so i would do my normal birthdays and christmas and that was enough no news was good news in my family my dad sort of knew the score he would know about me coming back from a tour i wouldn't tell him when i was going so we we had that that relationship so you know we weren't close close um but i think it was just after christmas we knew he'd been diagnosed and and it was terminal and things like that and my sister said you need to come down you need to come down and i know that she was being a bit overreactive then her husband rang me and said you now need to come down so i was like yeah i'll come down and i went in there and literally they're all watching is every breath you know their eyes were like piss holes in the snow they had no sleep for like 24 hours so i just flown in i hadn't seen him for months i said right i'm just off to my friend's house and uh what i said because you know you you guys tomorrow will be useless you know i mean i just the military just kicked in right we need to do centuries we when you do routines and i remember my mum calling me from manchester dean you need to calm down it's like you know they're they're upset you deal with death differently than they do but like i said the eight hours i had with my dad you know that was the longest i had and you know for me i'd i'd said my goodbyes and you know i i just i just went but that was 2014 it was the same year that i evacuated the canadian embassy when i came back from that trip i did the same thing again i sat down and my normal sop would be to you know de-service and resurface my kit ready for the next phone call and one of my shirts which was covered in blood uh i'd administer first aid at a traffic accident at the border so i said to my wife i said can we get the blood out and she could yeah i want to know why there's blood in there and i sort of said well i've just evacuated canadian enemies and she's like it's another throwaway comment like you told me your dad's just died so actually we sat down that evening down two bottles of pork and yeah tears started flowing and really and what it was is actually i hadn't come to terms with the fact that i'd left the special forces i was still trying to match that adrenaline rush that i had when i was still in so everything even approaching the fact that my father had died that hadn't hadn't sunk in so as you mentioned earlier it takes a whole brigade to evacuate something you know i didn't have that top cover i didn't have the helo support that the guy is coming in so that's when the the pin dropped for me that something needs to change it was actually all about communication and i i built it up inside me it was that evening that it really kicked in that your dad's not here you you don't have to prove a point um anymore so um yeah it was a big i think it's called chapters called dead or divorced as well so you know i'd reach that t junction i was either going to die or not have a family right if i didn't change the way my lifestyle you um one of the things that you breezed over is when you when you did the world cup in brazil and um i'll just jump into it it was at the brazil versus cameroon game that i got a chance to catch up with a friend of mine he was there representing the football association because his brother couldn't make it happy that my clients were secure with the other lads i left my place and went to the presidential box to meet my mate from the army all right snotty he said how are you mate i asked him we'd met back in 2007 at a joint tactical air controller sorry joint terminal attack controller jtac horse held at raf leeming there were 18 students and when we've been told to behave towards a certain individual as we would to anybody else in the forces no special treatment it was on the second day that we hit it off when we were being given our call signs from the back of the room i'd made a joke at his expense and there was a sharp inhalation of breath as everybody waited to see how it would look or see how he would see how he took it he laughed and that was how i came to be paired up for the rest of the course with prince harry who was one of the most decent blokes you could meet he's a military man through and through and i think part of the reason he loved the army so much was that he could just be himself he was comfortable in this environment and he could handle his rank and job as well as any other soldier i'd met it was great to see him in brazil not because he was a prince but because he was a comrade from my days in kit just like one of the boys how long was that course so that's a six week course at least we're going back now to 2007.

And um you know raf lehman you know he's got all your fighter pilots you know your tornadoes and your euro fighters you know with their with their brown shoes probably and the um and literally the raf the the jtac course is a wooden hut at the end of the runway you know no one even knows we're there so i remember walking in the room and and clocking him he's probably about 23. so basically this is when he he wanted to go on his first tour to afghanistan but he couldn't just go on tour you know he had to have a role within the unit and his commanding officer was an sas guy and said well look go on your jtac course you could be the regimental forward air controller so that's what he did he came on the course and like i said cody was there you know every man and his dog turned up for some face time with him and you know it was cringing but the back four the the lads at the back four in the back were two ses and two sbs guys and he was literally sat in front of me and you know everyone did their opening address harry then left the room and the commandant was like right gets no preferential treatment you know treat them like one in their own you know blah blah blah that's that fine harry then comes back in and the first lecture is call signs so on the course you call jackpot one to jackpot one eight so at least the pilot knows who the student is and then you know for example the prefix for special boat service is mayhem some mayhem for free and you know widowmaker for the ses so harry puts his hand up and he says um you know if successful on this course do i get a call sign and i just blurted out yeah your fox pissed one like that and of course everyone was just like ah you know you can't say that i'm just like well you've just told me to treat him like the one so he turns over you know looks at the berry smiles at me like oh god i'm gonna get beheaded and um that afternoon the sergeant major comes back in and he's like right i've randomly picked these jackpot numbers you'll be working with me and he pulled an sas guy an sbs guy prince harry and an raf officer and then the other 14 which didn't make sense is that what you've randomly picked but you could see on the course that was when i got my sort of first exposure so me and him got partnered off because they knew he wasn't going to get any preferential treatment and i think you made that quite clear that quite clear but also the fact that he he's probably is most comfortable there because he wasn't being critiqued by the media and everyone else he could be harry he could be you know lieutenant whales and things like that and he was actually a good operator you know he's clear and precise over the net he didn't get flustered um so no he's well worthy of that role and and then we maintain that relationship after that we you know we we did a lot together we do a lot in in charity and i remember going to we had a big rugby game called the army navy each year twickenham it's like it's the biggest rugby event hundred and fifty thousand people turn up yeah yeah they drink more alcohol on that one weekend than every international rugby game so he was my wife um alana she didn't really know i knew him and i'd not long been injured so my legs in a brace and we're out twickenham and uh i he texted me he said let's catch up in a car park so we're caught up in a car park and this was this was now where he was training to be a pilot and um you know we started chatting and he said look i've passed my course i need to make a decision you know whether i fly apache or lynx and lynx is like a glorified taxi driver for getting generals around and when we're chatting to the uh the apache call signs in afghan their prefix is ugly you know ugly one ugly too so i said look i always tell the lads to go ugly early um so he he that he then messaged me a few days later and said yeah i'm going ugly so he then goes apache fast forward and um we're at a big special forces charity event and he's he's a guest on my table and they auctioned off their special boat service like um statue silver plated they went for like forty thousand pounds and harry's eye was beautiful not for 40 grand i knew i knew the bronze one was only 75 pounds so i did i i bought one and i i got it um i got i got it laminated and i and i said you know harry i said congratulations on being ugly you know mayhem for free and quite delivered to the palace but um but yeah he you know he did 10 years and he then did another tour you know that was where he was he was most comfortable and that's when we started you know building our relationship you know the re you know his gotta be so tight who people he can trust and and to be part of that 13 years later is a big thing i think he knows obviously the integrity of the special forces you know you know people i get message all the time can you speak to harry yeah okay yeah that's i just i wonder he's gonna end up playing a role a little later he is yeah um but going back to the dead or divorced section of this book um so you pretty much you get the message like i'm either gonna get divorced or i'm gonna be dead i don't like either one of those outcomes so you you you kind of stand down from the security stuff and you've got to get a job like a regular job so we'll go to the book here i needed a job and alana suggested that i come work with her in the property development sector it would be a chance for me to learn about something outside kicking indoors and sneaking people out of countries and because i wanted what was best for my family i gave it a go i was about an hour into it before i started to fantasize about launching myself out of the nearest window everything that i'd done in my life i had done with the ethos of unrelenting pursuit pursuit of excellence the unrelenting pursuit of excellence and i tried to bring that attitude into the office but something was missing and you uh you spent some time doing that and and then she can tell that you're miserable yeah and you're trying to suck it up like a good uh like a good man and finally she says you know you look miserable and you're like yeah i am and she says why don't you when you start biking to the office start cycling to the office and it's 10 miles each way you start doing that you're starting to that's cool hey you're starting to get you're starting to get after it you know on the bike and trying to beat your times and all that and she says you know basically you're still not happy are you and you admit to her like no i don't like sitting in a cubicle or whatever it is you're doing and finally one day she she rolls in on you and you know she's holding something what's that i asked her she had a book in her hands a big one alana threw it at me read it and pick something she said i looked down at what had landed in my lap she knew me i smiled open to the cover and began reading guinness book of world's record records so that's what she did she threw this book at you and said figure out what figure out something to do yeah yeah so so a bit about elana actually you know when when i transition you hear horror stories when people transition from the military some can be quite turbulent and some quite smooth so when i met alana actually she was the bank manager for all the three of the biggest banks in aberdeen so when i'm worried about you know certain paperwork she set up my first security company on her phone watching tv you know like for me he's like wherever i've ticked the right box so she she knew about the corporate side which helped my transition and and is a massive part in in moving forward so when i came back from the canadian embassy the dead of divorcing it was actually she thought i wanted to go away and i thought that she needed me go away to make money so it was actually a lack of communication you know we sat down we sort of communicated and she said well look we don't need money i've got my own property business you know come come work with me i said fine so this is about five years now from leaving the military to this stage of my life my la my injured leg was now two kilos lighter than my good leg because of the muscle wasted so when i was away on these security jobs if there was a gym there i i took my trx everywhere you know it was a very upper body focus and neglected my cv so i just bought a push bike sorry i gotta look at echo about that he's skipping leg days bro he's going out he's just worried about those guns i don't know anything about picking stuff so i am so sorry about push bike of amazon you know and bought some batman lycra thinking it was cool it wasn't um but i didn't know anything about cycling but straight away just it's only about eight miles they aim about but being physically active and you felt that was a big weight off your shoulders you know i can't run anymore and i just thought perfect but you know with my back stories sat in these architects and planners meetings i've got no interest in these drawings and you know what i mean my wife could see the glaze over my eyes you know i was more interested in the coffee and the biscuits actually when my son was born i was the one holding the baby feeding the baby while she was doing all the work and you just felt like you know is this it is this all i've got too often i i didn't want to be taking those risks i did before so i was about a month before my 40th birthday and i was getting ground up middle-aged christian ground rush and i was like i always remember doing i always remember reading guinness book records so you know i was thinking cycling because it's not impacting my knee you know maybe i should have had 12 ferrero rochers in a minute or something something a bit easier but living in scotland i was thinking maybe you know maybe aberdeen to dundee's about 60 miles my wife hadn't found the world's longest road it was like from southern argentina to northern alaska so she was a that she clearly wanted me out the house i was like [ __ ] so it's like it's yeah it's 14 000 miles it's called the pan american highway called the pan american highway yeah so you know to give you an idea because at the curvature of the earth it's just equivalent to cycling from london to sydney and then another four thousand miles it's that big you know it's 22.

So i thought perfect you know so having only cycle less than 20 miles i applied for the world record which you know some people think is quite arrogant but i thought in my head i said well no i have that endurance mindset if the knee is not going to be an issue then then why not why why can't i do this so i applied for the world record the world record was 125 days at this point and then six weeks later guinness came back and said yes you've been successful on your application during this period someone else has already beaten the world record it's now 117 days great so already i've got to take eight days off my original plan um so we mentioned harry already which is perfect rolls into this so harry and i you know we just do a lot in charity stuff you know he used to come on on my table i had a an intelligence fusion cell based in mozambique in tanzania so you know these guys would give me in reports of where the ivory was going from africa you know to the far east you know so i would be obviously pushing this information up the line to harry would then be getting out so we're doing a lot in charity anyway so i when guinness came back you know i rang him up and i said look i'm gonna cycle the world's longest road and uh you know doing a world record what should we do it and the this was 2016.

So his brother and kate and him were about to launch a campaign in 2017 called heads together which was a mental health campaign um in the military i'd seen it firsthand you know some of my friends you know and but i wasn't aware how big an issue is the whole of society you know it's very much everyone talks about it nowadays be from postnatal depression young children teenagers all the way through so he said look could i do it for that campaign i said yeah harry asked would you do it you're not gonna say no i said yeah of course so um so he did that and then he then introduced me to the royal foundation who'd sort of deal with all their charity work and um the first you know you walk in the room and they're like they're probably like i want to harry's mates again i sat down and they said right first question is how much are you looking to raise and i thought i want to keep them at the table i said a million pounds i just showered out and uh but for me i wanted the enormity of the challenge to reflect how much you know you can't go do like the la marathon say you're going to raise a million pounds has to be in comparison i said fine i said what's what is your messaging i was like [ __ ] i didn't even thought about it harry just told me to come in here i was like um so i just thought about it and i said well well physical activity helps your mental state so i don't know you can't use that i said well why not i said well it's not being scientifically proven so i said it's fine i said but i don't need a scientist to tell me that i feel good when i'm being physically active so i ignored them anyway and carried on promoting that and then obviously now is very much recognized yeah it's one of the coping mechanisms so so that was the birth of the the pan-american highway challenge um sort of fell into it by accident and the the a lot of people doubted you because you had no experience on a bike you know these other people that are setting these records you know they they that's what their life is they're experienced racers and whatever else and you just decide yeah watch this hold my beer we the sponsored marketing team we did a swot analysis that right at the beginning it's just strengths and weaknesses the opportunities and threats and the only weakness it came about was my arrogance towards the cycling community which i took as a strength and actually yeah cycling had evolved so much from when i was a young boy on a bmx and um but for me it wasn't so much about the physical bit i thought i'll deal with that on the time it was the planning you know one of the things we're good at in the military is that meticulous planning and the detail you know even in the canadian embassy for if you have the right plan then you just bring that in you know so i just took a military set of orders and put it on here and i just crossed out ammunition and that's when i started started putting the plan together but i was taking experiences i had in the military from before and sort of putting it into this challenge i love the phrase that you can't be experienced without experiences so i've had experiences before and then what how can i sort of transfer that onto this so one thing we used to do in the special forces which i thought was was great uh it's not because like we're one of the best in the world it's because we're always evolving we're always learning and always changing and when we used to come off the ground we used to do a thing called before we even go clean your weapons and admin yourself it's called a hot debrief you know while it's still fresh in your mind and the three questions that were posed were what worked what didn't work and if we were going to do that again what would we do differently so at the time i was reading magazines i was buying books about cycling you know but i wasn't getting those answers i needed and i thought well the best people to speak to those that have done it before you you know they've been there they've been on that road they'll they'll be able to give me the answers so i did i reached out to the previous record holders and i just posed those three questions and i well getting all the information in and all their issues they would all start in alaska and finnish in argentina but all their issues are in south and central america so for me was that why take a gamble with the second half you know why not get you know bureaucracy at the borders languages spares for your bikes why not address those issues early and then when you get into america we can then reassess where we are so one of the things i was proud of is that i'd ignored everyone else and i turned it on its head my start point was from uh from southern argentina so that's that's how i came up with that plan but there you know there's a lot more to it than just grabbing a water bottle and a helmet and cycling north you know i mean when you're putting the planning together you know i had a support team and a documentary team who are very much more risk averse than myself you have to be considered in their welfare so there's things you you don't really think about elections you know what's the best time are you going to go through a country in the middle of elections there needs civil unrest you know what's going to give you the most advantage season wise you know there's there's so much which is what we do in the military you know and that's that's what it was and um so that's where the planning came from it's from what i i picked up before and then training wise yeah i then you know harry and i did a um did a little promo video together to promote the challenge and once cameras finished he said what training are you going to do and i said well i'm going to do lansia and john of groves land's engineer growth is the southern point of england to northern scotland um because the pan american highway was 15 of them back to back so i said if i can't do one how was i going to do 15.

So i said i'm going to do that and he said well i do it with some of the members of the invictus games i said yeah of course i can but i didn't want to do it with them and embarrass myself so i haven't only cycled three weeks i rang my mate and i said i'm going to go do lands in john of gross and everyone's that whoa you're not ready yet you don't know you haven't even been cycling you're not a bike fit and i thought bike fit was fitness it's actually your measurements to your bike yeah so i i just fooled me too oh yeah yeah yeah so i sit off from cornwall where the first two days was a huge storm storm angus the third day i fell off my bike fractured muscay void i got up to scotland it was uh the coldest it's been in 10 years it was -16 i wrote off the first bike and my friend just went and bought one off the shelf i did everything completely wrong in in in the cycling world but for me if i couldn't do one how was i gonna do 15.

And and then we then did it six months later with these guys and i was bike fit i knew about cadence and things like that and i understand more the listeners in uk is that landing genre growth is a is on a bucket list for cyclists but for me it was a training ride and i almost had to approach it in that manner yeah well what i like about all this i mean it's it's something i i've been saying to veterans for a long time which is you know when you get out you got to find a new mission if you don't have a new mission that's when things start going sideways and you know for you your first new mission was doing the security stuff and you did that you attacked that and then all of a sudden you had to pull back from that to take care of your family you you tried the new mission of the cubicle and the the drawings as you as you'd call them that that wasn't a mission for you then you got this in your head and now you had a new mission something to focus on something to do a positive thing and uh you know obviously takes moves you in the right direction it's just it's a it's a really great example of something that i say all the time that you actually executed uh this is an interesting section here um it's called who dares win who dares wins and you gotta you got a unexpected call and the call the guy says my name's andrew slater i'm a television producer and they had he had this idea they're gonna take special forces soldiers and gonna put civilians through some kind of uh s form of some kind of selection and as he's doing this uh you know you're he's interested in having you be one of the guys and the question was has this been cleared through the mod through the ministry of defense and you start running this up the chain of command and you're you know asking if this can happen or not and then you get this going to the book here a couple weeks later i received the letter it wasn't exactly a pleasant memo from the mod it cut straight to the point telling me to step away from the project immediately i read over the letter a couple of times to make sure i had everything straight but it was literally in black and white step away from the project or become persona non-grata yeah which is png means you're not you're not welcome anymore when it comes to decision making i always listened to my gut instinct and it was telling me loud and clear that i should comply with the mod's wishes i was the sbs ambassador to scotland and i enjoyed that role i enjoyed the sbs association charity events i enjoyed being able to visit poole and hereford i had good mates still in both did i want to cut that away in the vain hope of becoming the next jason statham the answer was clear i can't do the show i'm afraid mate i told andrew no worries he said we thought this could be a problem have you approached the mod about the show i asked him you're going to have the same problem with everyone unless the show gets cleared and you you go on you you end up saying the show went ahead and as soon as it became public knowledge there was a shitstorm at the mod and in hereford and poole the production company and the guys had pushed on without the mod signing off and the sas and sbs immediately cleared declared them persona non grata they were not allowed to attend any association events or to be on camp to give you any idea of how seriously this was taken i'd heard of a former general who was persona non grata being escorted off camp in hereford from his own from his own friend's wake i didn't want to see that happen to the guys but it was their decision and not for me to question personally i felt that this sense of community was important for my own happiness and that wasn't worth giving worth giving up i like the lads they're very close friends and so i felt for one of them later that year when i saw him at a black tie event held by the regiment he'd come as the guest of someone who was still serving but when the rsm saw him he was asked to leave he was he looked absolutely gutted and who am i to blame him it was in many ways like being cast out of a family so it's interesting too because the reason that was interesting to me as well because then you you wrote this book yeah but obviously you clear this book through the ministry of defense um i've written i've written 49 books or whatever the numbers at this point and you know again it's always very you know i remember the conversations around when when i hadn't written a book and just saying like we're not going to do anything that yeah sheds any light that puts anything we don't have anything bad to say about the military about the seal teams like that's that's not what we're doing we're obviously not giving away any information that could be useful at all to the enemy um and you know that's obviously of uh you know when when we ran these books when i ran these books through the chain of command you know we it was like direct columns with people that i knew and that were in the military and senior ranking positions and they read them and said yeah these are good to go and you know i had a great senior officer who said you know we're quiet professionals quiet professionals but that doesn't mean we're silent professionals there's stories that need to be told there's lessons that need to be passed on so you know look you you never feel good about it because we're we're we're not we're we don't want the spotlight you're never gonna feel good about it and there's always gonna be guys that are gonna look at you and say oh you know there you are in the spotlight and that they're they're totally i understand them because i was that guy too and so i get it and there's that's just the reality of the situation um but it was interesting to see how you had to go through that and and make those decisions yourself yeah i think i think for me at the time when when andrew came up you know i said your name keeps coming up fine um and there was an old documentary years called sasu tough enough it was a massive failure and i was like oh god that's all i had in my head was visions of that so it went on and ended up being one of the most most successful film um episode on on channel four and the two guys i got on it you know one of them he just come out you know he got kicked out of the military and then he went to prison you know for him you know there was no of other option for him so him it was a lifeline and then the other guy um foxy i'd say it was foxy he he had post-traumatic stress so but he had post-traumatic stress because his time served in the special forces he couldn't work in the private security sector for so for them guys it fitted perfect for them you know they they had a means of income for me at the time it didn't work because i was smuggling people across borders and you know i was a relate you know close relationship with harry you know so at the time it then didn't look right that you were on tv say it wasn't you you can't do it it's not because as you touched on it people can learn from the military um and these sort of things are great for that what upset the military with this was that they filmed it and then flanked them you know so i've maybe now get my book out and things like you know i've i'm still part of the group and i do charity work but i've been transparent in everything i do and they understand i think it was just the way that they'd gone about it in the fact that they caught them out by by surprise but for the for the two guys i got on the show you know they've now got successful careers in that and they probably if they didn't have this show they'd probably really be struggling you know coming out of prison having posts from iss but obviously the military also need to understand that it's a different world you know social media you know for me when i was in it was a taboo we were talking about before you know it is a way of communicating and obviously as long as you don't give away certain things then you can there's nothing that you can't get from the internet and that's it and a lot of it is actually jealousy you know a lot of it is actually jealousy from those that are still in is that because they're not in that position that they can they can do that but for me at the time i i just it just didn't didn't fit right i'm gonna fast forward a little bit you you know you you're just training and you're fundraising and you're getting ready and you're doing all these taking all these skills that you learn from the military for planning and endurance and mindset and you and you get to a point where you're you're gonna launch this thing and uh you know you're you're supported on the ground this is just so you you mentioned it but you're supported on the ground by a sports massage therapist a bike mechanic a medic a two-man camera crew that would be gathering footage to make a documentary about the event it was a big team but with the exception of the documentary crew everyone was doing it pro bono so it wasn't a huge strain on our sponsors um and then finally we get to shortly after dawn on 1 february 2018 i went with my team to the starting point of the pan-american highway i had 22 000 kilometers ahead of me and 110 days to do it no crowds no big send off start freaking peddling yeah and you you you you cover a lot of this um in the book you know talking about what what that's actually like what is what you're going through the wind the the crashes the traffic the heat the cold the illness the just the mayhem you know you you talked about you go through four seasons while you do this you go through all four seasons and um so then you you you're making progress um and then one time i'm going to the book here i got instantly worried when i stopped for lunch and saw i'd missed four calls from alana usually she would just leave me a message ask me to call her back i worried that something had gone wrong with the funding for the challenge or worse still that something was up with molly or tommy your kids i facetimed her what's wrong i asked what do you wear to a royal wedding alana said i had no idea what she was talking about what do you mean what do you wear to a royal wedding she said again then lifted up a card so i could see it alana and i had been invited to harry and megan's wedding i didn't see that one coming i told her honestly harry was a mate but a royal wedding isn't for a few beers in the local when is it alana smiled she knew that i'd know the date was the date i was due to finish in alaska off by heart 19th of may she said and i heard myself groan that was four days earlier than i was expected expecting to break the world record the last flight you can catch is on day 102 you better put your foot down so you get the invite to go to the big wedding yeah so so the world record was 117 days and when i was doing my planning i thought you know there's certain contingencies but those things that are out of your control bit natural disasters coups and things out so i thought if i encounter any of them on the challenge you know i don't want to eat into the challenge so my target was 110 days um and it's because we had that that fudge so you give yourself seven days of fudge is that right i gave myself seven days of seven days of fudges should it be something out of our control it wasn't eaten into the record time it was eaten into that and then i'd done all my planning on that you know i had a thing called the bible you know i knew every inch of the road we'd planned it out had it on paper had it on digital we um no south america i did it in 48 days the world record was 58 days so i took 10 days off the first world record and as you touched on there you know you had food poisoning you had you had everything else but it was things that i didn't see as well you know when i was putting the plan together not the medic i had to send home you know it's not in the book you know but i had to send the medic home on day 13 because bullying the documentary team it's like my god the bike ride was actually easier than managing eagles egos you know because they're pro bono they all started wanting wanting more from the challenge as they saw it evolving and thankfully my wife was a campaign director she was sort of managing keeping control of that we got to i talked about you know going from south to north that was a great decision from a psychic perspective i've got a tailwind all the way through peru that's 2500 kilometers tailwind but every checkpoint every border we're having to swap vehicles so that was slowing us down so the plan was to have an rv and a 4×4 ship from fort lauderdale to to panama so then when we did the second part of the challenge that would take us all the way to alaska i was in ecuador and my wife who rang me and she said that the vehicles haven't gone on to the shipping container so thankfully my wife and my pa and two of my mates had four sides they flew over to fort lauderdale and they drove the vehicles four thousand miles in eight days my wife left the kids on mother's day back in the uk and they drove it all the way to panama i broke the world record in the morning flew across the daring gap and they just handed the keys over you know so they're an integral part of this challenge you know people see you on social media but it's the team around you that they don't see we then get to mexico and the mechanic and a soft tissue therapist these are our new terms and conditions i'm now the project manager we're going to change the name to this here we go you know this has been going on for like nearly two months now they said you can't do this without us i left them in pueblo see hold my my beer my mate then drove the rv and then we just pushed on we didn't have a mechanic but we weren't far from the american border so when i got to the american board i got the american board on day 70 and i was 14 days ahead of the world record i didn't realize how important it was getting to america i don't know whether it was because everyone spoke our language i wasn't on google translate for the last two and a half months you know the culinary options were better or probably because the previous record holders all their issues were in south and central have i left all that behind me when now it should be a smooth road and also the fact that if there is any mechanical issues we can just get another mechanic you know we can find a massage partner that was the hardest thing for my wife trying to find a massage pilot which was the right massage parlor um so getting into america i was at 14 days ahead perfect and then i had that phone call yeah which was great but i was now going into that phone course 14 days ahead 10 minutes late i'm now a day behind so all that efforts i've done up until then all that drama has not that it meant nothing it's like you've now got a new objective so cycling in south america because obviously the support team and documentary and being risk-averse you know i had to consider them so i had to cycle from first light to last light and that was it and i was off the road but getting into america it's a lot more safer so i could cycle at night and i got to lubbock in texas the next day 60 mile an hour winds and tornadoes so i was grounded for another another uh 24 hours so i was now two days behind my new target so again i just looked at the plan looked at the paperwork and there's an app on your phone called windy tv it's quite popular with sailors and it gives you the strength and directions of the winds forecasted every hour for the next two weeks it's about 95 percent accurate it's 95 percent about 95 percent it's a great it's a great app yeah and it was known as my second wife on this because i was just always looking at windy tv so for me to get out of lubbock had to cycle 340 miles in 36 hours to miss the next weather window and that's what i did with north america i just played chess with mother nature through north america and majority of cycling was done at night because you know the wind yeah less wind got to cheyenne picked up the 50 mile an hour tailwind and so it covered 260 miles in 11 hours cycling so i was also using it to my advantage so i i gained up that time i had about 17 days originally on november i did it in 11 and a half and i thought perfect and then we got to a town called white horse about a week outside from the end and i thought you know we'll record secure i'm going to this wedding unless you get eaten by grizzly and then this gentleman's these guys come on on social media that day professional cyclist he's already got three other endurance world records mid-20s sponsored by all the big brands red bull and he's he's announced that he's going to do the pan american highway in august i'd be the first man to do 100 days so i was like great so every time i thought i had met my objective you know it then moved but thankfully for me if i'd known about that at the start of the challenge if i'd known about the wedding knowing about this guy you know i may not have pushed i may have pushed myself too hard um but thankfully when i received that information i was in a position that i could act on it so yeah i cycle for you know the last two days um i had 250 miles to do and it's dalton's highways where they film ice truckers it's that road there and uh i thought well i'll do 250 i do 150 miles today and 100 miles on the last day and then i'm in and my family of my wife my kids are on on the on this oil field in brudo bay at the end so i know they're only a couple of days away did the first 50 miles and i got to this roadblock at noon and the gill's like no you can't pass till 8 o'clock tonight so i was like oh my god so that evening i had to rest for eight hours and you're not resting um and i just cycled from eight o'clock that night to seven o'clock the next night 200 miles and minus 18 to make sure that i came in in 99 days and 12 hours so i talk about the importance of planning but actually the success of this was being reactive to the situation on the ground you have a plan that's great you have a start point you have an objective but you know things change as you know it's best planning will survive first contact um and that's what it was being you know reactive to that situation and that even to the very last day i was having to change change the plan yeah even the even when you talked about the fudge factor which some people would have planned that and just had oh okay i got to be do it in 225 days or 123 days cool that's what they're going to book they don't understand all the things that the amount of room that they gives you to make those adaptations when you need to is again that's something we learn about that things are not going to go smooth that's one thing i can promise you um i'm gonna read one more thing out of the book here athletes talk a lot about visualization and how they had imagined their final moment of victory again and again and again i'd done the same but now that i drew close to the finish line my moment was nothing like i had ever imagined it this was no ride along the champs-elysees with me leaning back in the seat with my hands in the air i clung onto my handlebars for dear life hitting one patch of black ice after another my face was covered in frozen snot my muscles were shaking from fatigue and cold and every blast of arctic wind cut through me to the bone but i made it and there you go you skidded to the finish line i pulled my wife and kids into a hug i was so exhausted that i probably can't remember what i said i was probably talking gibberish but i'd miss them all so much and they got big kisses from their dad's cracked lips molly was aware of what was going on and full of beans but tommy was in a world of his own i thought it was i thought it must be hallucinating when i saw the lady from guinness was braving the cold in tights in a skirt but there wasn't one ounce of discomfort on her face as she presented me with my record i was now the record holder for the fastest cycle of the pan american highway competing at 99 days which also made me the first person to ever do it in under a hundred i hugged my wife but unlike in cartagena this wasn't the place to stand around for a post certificate photo shoot let's get to the hotel i told my family and team as we piled into vehicles leaving the frostbitten finish line behind us so you made it and um but that's not the end that's not the end uh it's not the end of the book and it's definitely definitely not the end of the path that you're on right now yeah because you needed a new mission right yeah tell us tell us what's up what's your next challenge where are you where are you heading next yeah so so my usp is you know i take a sport or discipline i've never done before and find the bill like his biggest challenge so i've been arrogant towards the cycling community it's now going to be the kayaking community so the next challenge is to kayak the river nile the world's longest river from source to sea so it's never been done before um so unlike there where i can speak to previous record holders it's not been done before so the plan was obviously to do it last year and obviously kobits you know put scupper to that and that's why i'm here in america you know whilst the world is paused let's get over here get set up and get ready for that so yeah 4280 miles but you know unlike truckers and and support team you've got to worry i've got crocodiles hippos civil war in south sudan but one thing i i'm excited about this challenge you know i talk about we've talked about the successful private security missions it you know everyone's quite quick to tarnish certain communities you know with one brush from what they see with with tv you know if it wasn't for those local communities being so hospitable i would never been successful on them and that's where the african nile is going to be great it's because it's i'm gonna have to rely on the locals to help me and so you know it's not a world record whatever i do is the world record um but one of the so that's the next challenge um but one of the big feedbacks on the book is yes great endurance fee but you are the security guru why are you still not in this industry so for me i've got a niche security company you know very low key we help either corporates ultra high net worth and things like because paddling and cycling doesn't put food on the table my wife keeps reminding me uh so uh but yeah so i've set a date first of february next year and we set off for now it's gonna be huge so you've got a team you know obviously that's doing the security work under your guidance so what's the how do people get in get in contact with you for that type of business so we know originally i wasn't going to have a website and things like that but you know we will have a website that's password protected because for me the my approach to security is no there's certain ways of security ours is more intelligence based you know you have the private element you know we then have the intelligence side of it and then and then cyber you know we don't you know i don't normally walk around with tight black t-shirts with tattoos out you know we blend in and things out and it's just having that approach that i've used before um so yeah if you go to my website you can get in touch with them but the new website's getting built and that's what i've been doing this last four months is setting up the business preparing for denial and next and your website is um dean stott i was calling you dean scott i'm sure you've been called that a million times i was called i was calling you dean stott or dean scott my wife was calling you dean scott so it's dean stott s s-t-o-t-t dot com that's it is is where we can find you um also you're on facebook dean stot sbs you're on instagram which echo only calls the gram at dean stott um it's real quick on the nile what's the what's like the major challenges there what's the worst what's the what's the hardest level rapids they have there so merchant falls uh is the most powerful waterfall in the world is grade six grade six waterfalls but the problem you have with the waterfalls there is the they take the the crocodiles and the hippos from lake victoria and put them in murchison so when you come down there they're all in the pools at the bottom so originally when we were going to do if it were a record they said oh you can only use one boat that's just not going to be feasible in the 93 percent of knives quite flat so we'll use like almost like a ski um to go on that but then use a creek boat for grades three to four and then a raft we'll have to use a raft on on some of those big ones are you gonna have like a sniper overwatch for crocodiles yeah there's gonna be a guy coming a guy called peter meredith actually he's he watched his friend get by a croc kayaking in the drc you know so he knows the nile inside out you know he's talking about throwing stones i'm thinking to use them something a bit more powerful um but local wise you know i want to bring as many locals in as i can because especially the fishermen they know them waterways better than anyone so if there's crops and hippos in that pool i'll just portage it you know i'm gonna paddle through i'll walk walk around it message-wise you know we one thing we're passionate about is modern slavery and human trafficking and we're thinking of using this challenge to promote that but then that sort of channels you into just just one campaign the great thing about the nile is you know it's the lifeline of africa we can talk about poverty pollution uh covet you know so we're to talk about there's so many so many things along the the the challenge do you have a date plan to launch that first of february i set off oh dang next year yeah one year yeah yeah wait a second you have to have a start point i generally you have to have a start but if you don't have a start point then the start just keeps the start point becomes never yeah it comes never keeps moving to the right you have a start point and then you can start approaching sponsors and start working back from that so it gives me a year now to train at newport aquatic center and uh you know then look out you know get sponsorship um the book is called relentless uh that the subtitle is from sbs to world record breaker um echo you got anything else how's your leg from that parachute situation yeah so when i actually started the the training i went to see a doctor and i was testing the strength for my quads and my hamstring i mean it was it was him that identified you you know your leg is two kilos like that really um when i set off in the challenge i got the muscle mass back my hamstring was 18 percent less power but you know it's still good no we're good to go so does it bother you like daily like day-to-day kind of stuff no no i i you know i joke that my wife didn't marry me could i look like lance armstrong or chris froome i try not going leica as often as i can but um you know for me any and i still try and push it push on the bike now and then yeah it was crazy yeah the um i mean it's awesome it's awesome what you've done to support these charities as well the the heads together and and i'm sure you're gonna support some some awesome charities for this next event paddling the nile hopefully you won't support the charity of uh free food for hippos and crocs but uh yeah people can get this book on the uh we'll put a link for it on the website and yeah awesome you got any final any final thoughts dean no i think you know when you see the website you'll see the frog man and everyone's like why the frogmen i always got the question of what's the difference between you and the other guys and going back to my original one my reason for going sbs because i thought you know they're all divers and they weren't i ended up being the number one frogman so for me i'm not i'm not a cyclist i love i love the water so we we have the nile and then another one which jocko you're more welcome and come along it's called surfing with pirates gonna surf the somali coastline oh yeah that's that'll be fun that's not surfing with pirates that's surfing with sharks exactly but again it's promoting these these countries and you know they're amazing countries as well but obviously being as close to the water as i can yeah i'm game i never got a chance to go into small i sat off the coast of somalia for months and months in the in the 90s waiting to go in i never got the chance so i didn't get to operate i'll go get some barrels let's let's rock and roll well there's there's breaks and beaches with no names actually so the plan is to you know from the north to the south but you know again people see what they see on tv and make their assumptions straight away when i was in mogadishu again i work on my own and work with the locals and i was like spear fishing for lobsters and and everything and you wouldn't think you're in mogadishu because it hasn't been commercially fished for years there's a huge abundance of wildlife there as well yeah i think my wife anyone you you'll pick it up when you read the book you know it's a team effort you know my transition from the military wouldn't have been this move it wasn't for my wife we're very much we know our strengths and weaknesses no my wife can't ride a bike no i can but my wife is very good at all the planning i i and she was key to the success of the challenge and the success of my time in the security i generally believe that anyone can break a world record if you take away all those distractions you know the business the mortgage you know who's looking after the kids and and that's what alana does does really well and and and then again my my young children have you know nine and four i i sort of joke that when my my son when it was two and a half the the challenge when we finished the challenge you know the challenge was older than my son so i think he just thought i was a cyclist and my daughter she was born after i left the military so when i tell her that you know dad was a soldier she said dad you weren't a soldier so my son thinks i'm a cyclist and my daughter thinks i'm a walt with me so i sort of joke about that but again you know they're very they very much look up to mum and dad you know and they travel everywhere with us they've been all over the world they know alaska south america in australia and things like that so very lucky to have that i think people think once you have children that's it that's your traveling days over you know don't let them dictate you know your life well awesome uh thanks again for coming on and and thank you for your service and and great britain has always been our strongest ally and and we as nations have been through hell and back together in multiple wars and we know we can count on you in our darkest hour so thanks for coming on sharing some of that with us and uh good luck thank you please watch out for those hippos and with that dean stott has left the building talking about his incredibly incredible journey pretty crazy stories um the the relentless pursuit of perfection yeah it's he writes about that in the book a lot i only read it once today but it's in there quite a few times that mindset the special the british special forces mindset of the relentless pursuit of perfection awesome to have him on here and thanks to dean for coming on and echo charles yes sir speaking of a relentless pursuit of perfection do you have any suggestions that could maybe enable our relentless pursuit of perfection we're not going to get there by the way yeah but we're going to pursue it yeah i will say facilitate okay i said enable enable and facilitate for sure okay look with you are are all of us trying to break guinness world records for the book we are not maybe fast no factually not everyone's not everyone's correct but we're on a path though we're on our own path right and that path is not easy that's why we're on it in fact if it's easy is it even a path really not really no i guess technically it's the path of least resistance yes watch out for that one that's a different kind of we know that it leads downhill that path in particular we're not looking for that path we're not looking for it we're not on it we're not even that's not our jam in any way but the path that we are on is hard obstacles pitfalls and traps wise men once said but on that path you're gonna endure or you have to endure some sort of pain in your joints depends on what you're doing obviously but most people are going to enjoy that yes endure yeah and look i'm not saying you should worry about that and in fact if you really don't want to worry about that guess what jaco has some supplements how about that for your joints okay we've got josh i think there's anyone that's curious about how you're going to bring it all together in one moment you know like oh here it comes oh there he did he did it again hey look we're over here trying to sensationalize these things to make them sensational okay hopefully i don't think there's anything sensational about it here's the deal you don't want to have joint issues no so you want to do things that take care of your joints yes by joints i mean shoulder elbow elbow knee neck whatever yeah you want to call it if it's a joint in your body you don't want it to give you issues no you don't want that nope so that's why we made joint warfare go to war against that that decade and curl oil by the way super krill oil yes yeah so now we don't even have to worry about that kind of stuff so there's a lot of things you that you should be concerned about on this path distraction temptation if you will your friends sometimes and let's face it your joints you know i don't want to have to worry about that kind of stuff take the joint warfare every day with the super krill oil every day and you will not have to worry about that kind of stuff yeah that's how it works get the subscription yeah so check it out we are trying to make things easier so you can stay on the path more so right now everything at jaco fuel if you subscribe to it then the shipping is free and look we obviously we are we understand that there's people that don't want to give their money to some giant companies right this is part of it also so they don't want to give money to giant companies but big sometimes big giant companies ship stuff for free because they got this mass you know economies of scales and stuff we understand that we understand that so if you go to jockofield.com and you subscribe to anything we're going to ship it to you for free you don't have to give your money to some big giant company you don't have to uh do that it's fine we're here jacofuel.com subscribe get joint warfare get super krill get disciplined get vitamin d three for your immune system get cold war free any of these things mulk multi flavors i just had i just rotated mulk what'd you go into milkshake where'd you go from uh the peanut butter one okay but no i don't i rotate it no not the flavors i rotate it into a daily or more specifically a nightly got it i put a banana in there i think that's how for me from indefinitely that's just how right now get the kids on board well my kids are all about these different additives you know yeah i'm good oh yeah malcold can you get a um subscription for the discipline cans yes you can yeah so yeah yep that's what we're doing yeah so the discipline cans that's for like us who who kind of like are kind of down for the energy drink scenario but are not down for the toxicity sugar and all these bad elements that most of the time come with energy drinks that's what this is they do come with energy drinks unless you get these energy drinks exactly right that's exactly my point so yes so discipline go in a can there's also powder there's also pills you can also get this stuff you can get the cans at wawa and you can get all the stuff at the vitamin shop as well and also if you are doing jiu jitsu which is recommended yes look this is you want to talk about something you're never going to be you're never going to achieve perfection in jiu jitsu is definitely one of them but it's going to help you in a lot of different aspects if you're going to do jiu jitsu go to origin main.com get yourself a geek get yourself a rash guard and since you can't wear a ghee or a rash guard while you can john donner representing a rash guard in the supermarket he doesn't care all day all day all day so what are you going to wear on your legs right you are going to wear g-pants to the supermarket low probability low probability how about you wear a pair of jeans cool origin jeans made in america origin sweatshirts made in america this is all origin beanies whatever all made in america boots i hear some new stuff coming out with the boot scenario i'm no i'm in no position to talk about it but i hear good things from uh you know pete should follow we're trying to make stuff happen that's for sure origin main.com all kinds of american-made products where we are bringing manufacturing back to america get some it's true also jocko has a store so jacostore.com is where you can get disciplined equals freedom stuff shirts hoodies hats like that kind of stuff so we got disabled equals freedom we got good we got standby to get some we gotta get after it anyway like i said drugstore.com that's where um if you see something cool on there that you want to represent while you're on this path that's where you get it 100 we also have something formerly known as the t-shirt club whack it's not really a club i guess it's just it's a it's a solid kinda is a club to be honest with you but it's called the shirt locker new shirt every month boom by noo you don't mean like oh it's just a new shirt it's a new design redesign it's kind of an okay i'm going to use the word i'm going to use it exclusive because you can't get it on the store otherwise you assume i'm saying so you sign up for this people that are like really into the game in the game on the path representing hardware yes that's it so yes jackosore.com also subscribe to this podcast and um you can do that wherever you get a podcast we also have jackal unraveling which which i can tell you daryl's in the house we're we're on it i apologize it's been a while daryl's wrapping up a bunch of stuff in his world and so now we're gonna get back in the game there grounded podcast where am i even making claims on that right now i know we're we're not making claims okay yeah warrior kid podcast i will make claims on i owe that one we'll get on it um you can also join us at the underground underground is where we're putting some alternative podcasts maybe some amplifying information some little behind the scenes we're gonna do a q a you were just telling me about some q a where people can send video questions yeah audio or audio or video questions and you might be like actually featured like on it like your voice so you know clear your throat submit them boom yeah it'll be good i'll make an announcement on where to send them yeah on what like a twitter instagram scenario something like that you'll know yeah you'll know um and and this is all from jockowunderground.com and look it's cost eight dollars and eighteen cents a month this is the platform that we control so there's nobody that's going to tell us what to do no sponsor's going to tell us what to do no platform's going to tell us what to do we're going to do what we want to do regardless and it's 8 18 cents a month and if you can't afford that that's okay we're not here to gouge no if you can't afford it email assistance jocko underground.com and that's a little idea that i heard from sam harris sam harris same thing can't afford it cool he we're not i'm not trying to hold back information actually trying to keep information free flowing because if something ever happens to these platforms we're gonna need something somewhere to go we'll have it a little contingency plan is in action so appreciate the support over there that's true also we do have a youtube channel it's for the video version of this podcast want to see what everybody looks like and see what dean looks like dean stott by the way if you want to see what dean stott looks like if you want to see any of these you can check it out some excerpts on there yeah and also i i do a lot i do a lot of work as the assistant director with a lot of these videos so if you see something you like just let me know that you enjoyed my assistant directing i feel like we all kind of enjoyed your 10 list of 10 things that you utilize on a daily basis i think i think that was kind of a cool little hit that you guys kind of brought i mentioned that my daughter kind of drove the the spirit behind that and people think i think people think think that that meant that she made it mm-hmm she kind of did well she did but editing oh she get did you get director credit on that yeah she does okay straight up good job um yeah i do a lot of assistant directing yes sir i understand hey also origin usa has a little youtube channel you can check that out if you want to keep updated as to what it's like to grow a business yeah that's a good one yeah they put all kinds of cool stuff on their main tie yeah hell yeah pete yeah be little they're up there getting after it you know what it's kind of like like you know when you go to work like let's say you go to work every day and you kind of let's say i don't know you're a manager i don't know whatever you go to work every day and you kind of get updated when you go in about okay what's currently going on what's the status of this what's it's kind of like that when you when you watch like the youtube things or or sorry the the the origin youtube channel origin hd yeah that's the one right origin hd that's what i watch all the time yeah the the interesting thing is like if you watch a reality television show what they do is they take a bunch of people with like weird personalities yeah i'm not saying in all cases but this is kind of a stereotypical thing take a bunch of people and then they can fight with each other about whatever right yeah and so it creates drama for your tv show and then people watch it because they like to watch a train wreck the thing that's cool about about what we're doing at origin when you see behind the scenes it's not it's not the team fighting with the team right it's like hey how are we going to make this work yeah you know how are we going to get the right materials how are we going to get this in production how are we going to satisfy this this uh clients that we've got or the customers how are we going to take care of them so it's that it's that struggle it's not a struggle against there's no there's no like uh reality television drama yeah the producer like and this is what they do by the way from what i hear it's not like i watch this kind of stuff but i hear that they'll be like hey like there's little writers there that'll be like hey look we're gonna send these people on a trip um to the bahamas and hey you like you gotta you gotta say that you don't wanna go because of what this lady said like last month on instagram or something like this and you better tell her and we'll just see how it plays out kind of a thing see and just like your point though how whack that is well you know at the end of the day i agree but it makes for good cheap entertainment you know but yeah so you watch the origin one and it's like yeah it's not scripted drama it's like the actual drama that comes with running and maintaining growing like a business or whatever so yeah if you're interested in like how to run a business and what just the whole that whole environment and the process and all that oh man it's really it gets real interesting very interesting check so we got that also we got an album called psychological warfare it's me talking to you through your moments of weakness we got flipsidecanvas.com which is dakota myers company hang stuff on your wall that'll keep you on the path got some books obviously relentless from sbs to world record breaker by dean stott we have that up we have it linked linked books from the books final spin a story is it a poem don't know is it a novel don't know i wrote it but i don't know what to call it if you want to try and categorize it you're gonna have a hard time the the the literary critics yeah yeah they're gonna have a field day with that one we'll see we'll see how it shakes out form leadership strategy and tactics field manual the code the evaluation the protocol displays freedom field manual way of the warrior kid four field manual way the warrior kid one two and three mike and the dragons about face my hackworth i wrote the forward extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership i also have a leadership consultant consultancy it's called echelonfront echelonfront.com we solve problems through leadership ef online if you want training for you for your company on leadership if you want to get a line go to efonline.com we got the muster 2021 go to extremeownership.com if you want to come in if you want to come and get after it with us you want to meet a bunch of people that are all moving forward on the leadership path everything we've done is sold out these are going to sell out too so come early if you want ef overwatch if you need leadership inside your team in the civilian sector and you want someone from the military that understands the principles we talk about all the time go to efoverwatch.com and if you want to help service members active duty service members retired service members their families gold star families check out mark lee's mom mama lee she's got a charity organization and if you want to donate or you want to get involved go to america's mightywarriors.org and if you want more of my if you just you're sitting there thinking i could really use some more of jocko's interminable reading or we need more of echo's unrelated revelations related you can find us on the interwebs on twitter on instagram or for echo the gram and on facebook echo is adequate charles and i am at jonker willing and dean stott is at dean stott sbs on facebook and dean stott s-t-o-t-t on the gram and thanks to all military members around the world and tonight especially to the united kingdom and i know that we rebelled against you to form our own nation but we became allies and we thank you for standing by our side on the battlefield the little island with the heart of a lion and to our police and law enforcement firefighters and paramedics and emts dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service and all first responders thank you for your continued service and for being there for us when we call and to everyone else let me ask you this what are you doing what are you doing are you doing everything you can are you who you want to be are you who you are you who you are capable of being are you engaged in a relentless pursuit of excellence and if you are good then if you aren't well then you just might want to pick a goal and go get after it and until next time this is echo and jocko out

As found on YouTube