First-10

The door of the Chinook began lowering before the helicopter was even on the ground. The stale, still air we’d been breathing for the last hour was instantly dissipated as the outside blasted in. Light flooded over the troop of men sitting in rows, in full kit, their helmets on, their SA80s on their laps. As the helicopter wobbled and bumped to land we moved in single file out into the gale of hot wind and grit that was being thrown up by its enormous blades. The smell was of jet fuel and dried bark. The day was quickly fading, the sun a hazy white button balancing on a distant ridge.

The landscape was barren and strange. It was desert, but not like those glossy images of perfect sand dunes you see in places like the Sahara. This was scrubby and dirty and dotted with tough, thorny-looking shrubs. And it just went on and on, with no particular landmarks other than a bored, ugly river that wound through the scrub. To the north I could see the sombre shadow shapes of a range of low mountains that I’d been informed was infested with Taliban. It was from there that our base would be regularly attacked with gunfire and RPGs. About a mile to the south was the troubled town of Sangin, in whose streets I’d be operating. Once the Chinook had left us and become just another dot of light in the deep, star-sprayed evening, I was surprised to note that it was also bitterly cold. But I was happy. Here I was. My first war zone.

I’d taken off from RAF Northolt on 21 September 2007 to take part in Operation Herrick 7, which was what they called the British operation in Afghanistan. I’d been made second in command, or 2IC, with direct responsibility for four people in my troop. We’d spent a couple of days acclimatising in the relative comforts of Camp Bastion, a vast base the size of Reading that contained the fifth-busiest UK-operated air strip, not to mention a gym, a Pizza Hut and a non-alcoholic bar called Heroes.

From there we’d been sent to our Forward Operating Base, Sangin District Command or ‘Sangin DC’, which lay just outside Sangin, a town of 30,000 in Helmand Province. Sangin had a reputation not only as a Taliban town but as a local centre of the heroin trade. With both the Islamists and the drug traffickers violently resisting our presence, it was without doubt the deadliest place in the country at that time. A third of all deaths of British troops during the conflict occurred in Sangin. There was a one in four chance that a man in my position would leave this place injured or killed.

Back at Camp Bastion, dusty and tired returning troops had warned us what to expect. The Taliban would lay IEDs, or ‘improvised explosive devices’, at night, especially around our base, which had only two entrances and exits. There were two types – contact IEDs, which would explode when stepped on, and command IEDs, which were detonated remotely, usually via Bluetooth. One common tactic the Taliban used involved detonating an IED, then waiting for more troops to arrive and assist the wounded before either detonating another device or attacking with sniper fire.

‘You’re definitely going to get in a firefight,’ one lad told us back at the NAAFI at Bastion. ‘People are going to get injured. You should expect a couple of deaths on this tour.’

Hearing this made my blood pump hot. Finally, I’d have the chance to put all my training into practice. As I looked around the table I was surprised to see that some of the other faces didn’t seem quite so excited. There was one young man in particular, a nineteen-year-old from Devon called Ian Cressey, who looked like he wanted to run off and ring his mum. I tried to encourage him.

‘Sounds fucking hardcore, doesn’t it, Cressey?’ I said, squeezing his shoulder. I gave him a wink. ‘I can’t wait. I just want to get in there and kill cunts, yeah?’ I joked.

‘Yes,’ he nodded, his eyes wandering to some distant point beyond my left shoulder. ‘Kill cunts.’

I made sure I was sitting next to Cressey in the Chinook out to Sangin DC. I was turning to get a look out of the window when I saw his head was down.

‘What’s up, dude?’ I said, shouting above the colossal racket of the helicopter.

‘I’m good,’ he said, with a thin smile. ‘Can’t wait. Kill cunts, mate.’

‘You can talk to me,’ I said. ‘You know that, don’t you? Whenever you need to, just grab me.’

But within thirty seconds, he was examining his thumbs again, his face the colour of yesterday’s porridge.

This was a worry. It wasn’t only that Cressey was one of the four men I’d have immediate responsibility for in Sangin. We were going into a war zone, and in that environment it would only take one man with his mind tuned out to fuck the whole thing up. I knew that I’d die for my men, every single one of them. I needed to be sure that every single one of them would die for me. That was the only way we’d all make it out of Sangin with our hearts still beating and the blood it was pumping finding four limbs. But the way it was looking right now, the only thing Cressey was dying for was a ticket back to London Heathrow. I’d made Emilie a solemn promise that I’d come home alive. When I’d made that promise I had no doubt I could keep to it. But what I didn’t need were weaknesses in my troop. And Cressey was beginning to look like one.

Forty minutes into the flight, as we neared Sangin DC, we began to draw machine-gun fire. The helicopter banked suddenly and swerved, the windows opposite us emptying of sky and showing only the sand and rocks of the plains of Helmand far below. I winked at Cressey excitedly. Before long we righted ourselves and were landing.

The base was an old bombed-out Afghan compound that had been commandeered by our military. There was nothing pretty or comfortable about it. Half the walls were pimpled with bullet holes and shrapnel spray from bomb blasts, the other half weren’t there anymore and were now just sandbags. Us troops would live and sleep in mud huts and socialise around a simple fire pit. Other more permanent but still heavily war-damaged buildings housed the offices of our people, along with some local-government personnel and members of the Afghan police.

I, and many of the other lads, were wary of these guys. The previous year the Taliban had retaken Sangin town, and Sangin DC had spent several months in a state of siege, suffering fierce attacks almost every day. Afterwards it was discovered that the Afghan police had been leaking information to the Taliban about its layout and operation. The siege had ended five months earlier, having lasted from June 2006 to April 2007. It had taken two hundred paratroopers, with the help of seven hundred men from various allied forces, to finally break it. These Talibs weren’t fucking about.

But even with the base free, the Taliban wasn’t prepared to let the town go without a serious battle. The fighting continued until April 2007, when a thousand coalition troops finally recaptured it as part of Operation Silver. And now that we had it back, we had to keep it. This was where me and my boys came in. 40 Commando had to maintain a show of strength, which meant fourteen-hour foot patrols up and down the war-damaged streets, fully armed and laden with kit. We’d go out in three teams of eight, one upfront, one in the middle and one behind. We wanted the locals to look at us and think, ‘Fucking hell, they’re a force to be reckoned with.’ But it wasn’t just a case of wartime policing and the display of power. We had to maintain a balance. On our patrols we’d try to help the locals out where we could, often with medical attention, while gathering as much intelligence from them as was possible.

Hearts and minds were crucial, but in reality the job mostly involved getting from A to B to C to D. The town itself was largely abandoned, the shutters closed on all the businesses apart from a couple of shops selling the usual essentials: SIM cards from the local networks – Roshan, MTN, Afghan Telecom – blue tins of chicken sausages, packets of Pine and Wave cigarettes, shit crisps, scratched glass bottles of Coca-Cola in knackered fridges, the logo in Arabic script, and slightly squashed cartons of mango and pineapple juice. We’d usually only spot the occasional person running here and there. When the locals saw our troop approaching they’d go into lockdown, hiding in their compounds.

Our patrols were tough, physically and mentally. We’d be in full body armour, with front and back plates and side protection, and I had an additional cop vest for good measure. As well as all this, we’d have twelve full magazines apiece, each containing thirty rounds, together with four grenades and six litres of water to last us the day. We’d stop for lunch and eat rations – bacon and beans, corned-beef hash or beef stew – but I’d make my lads have them cold. I didn’t want to waste time heating food up, and the last thing I needed was them staggering around feeling lethargic. We’d usually have a brew going, so at least there’d be something hot in their stomachs. The whole break would be over in ten minutes. We’d always make sure our movements were as unpredictable as possible. The Taliban could never hope to take us on toe-to-toe, so instead would play a sneaky-beaky game. If they were able to predict where we’d be at a certain time, they’d be able to strike, either with IEDs, suicide idiots or sniper fire from high buildings.

Just two days after our arrival we got the news that our troop sergeant had to return to the UK because his wife had fallen from a horse and broken her back. In the shuffle upwards, I went from section 2IC to section commander, an unusual promotion for someone with my experience. Now I had responsibility for eight men, and had to carry a pistol and extra ammunition in my day sack, which weighed between fifty and sixty pounds.

As the days ground on I was growing increasingly worried about some of the lads, not least Cressey. On some mornings I’d seen him actually vomit with fear as he was preparing to leave the base and, right now, he was staring at the dirt, sighing and grumbling about his cold beans.

‘Get your fucking head up,’ I said to him. ‘You’re a Royal Marine in a fucking war zone. Suck it up.’

I hoped I was getting the balance right, but it was tricky. I had to keep Cressey sharp, yet at the same time I was worried that if I just drilled him further into the ground he’d become even more of a liability. While it was my job to keep him motivated, I also believed that the Royal Marines should consist of positive, self-motivated people.

When I wasn’t sure how to act and was tempted to give Cressey or one of the others a heavy blast I’d sometimes ask myself, ‘What would Dad have done?’ I’d often give them the sharp end when they needed it and then later on, maybe at night around the fire, I’d have a more gentle talk in private. It was usually pretty effective with most of them, but nothing seemed to be working with Cressey. I could see it in his face – he was counting down the days and the hours. He wasn’t organised with his kit, either. I was always careful to take all the rounds out of the magazine of my weapon, because if you don’t it weakens the spring. Worse-case scenario: you could fire half your magazine, only for it to fail. To avoid this, I’d ease my spring every now and then and oil it up. I’d shown Cressey this more than once and impressed upon him what might happen if his weapon jammed during a firefight. But he’d made it very clear he couldn’t give a fuck.

It all came to a head one night when we received letters from home. Letters had always been a bit of a sore point for me. Before going to war it was mandated that every man had to write a letter for their family to receive in the event of their death. I’d refused point-blank but, after my arrival at Sangin DC, my sergeant major had pulled me up about it.

‘You’re not getting out of this, Middleton,’ he told me. ‘Write anything you want. Just get it done.’

I took the sheet of paper he’d handed me back to my quarters and wrote ‘The good die young, and I don’t want to disappoint anyone’ on it, before slotting it neatly back into its envelope. That evening, my sergeant major came to find me, my envelope in his hand.

Unlike the rest of the lads, I’d decided never to call home. I’d also given Emilie strict instructions not to write to me. I just didn’t want to know what was happening back there. Any domestic problems my wife or children might be going through would only distract me, just as reminding myself how much I missed Emilie would make me lose focus. I know this sounds harsh. But the fact is that when you’re in the field you can’t afford a second’s hesitation. You can’t allow a single drip of negativity or worry to get in. You need to be able to dodge bullets out there. Your awareness has to be keen enough that you can anticipate exactly what’s going to happen next. You just can’t do that if you’re thinking about the broken dishwasher or the rash on your kid’s arse. It was much more important that I came back alive.

This was why I was surprised and nervous when the mail was handed out as we were sitting around the campfire and I was handed an envelope with Emilie’s handwriting on it. Had something happened back home? Something serious enough to force Emilie to contact me? I was staring at the letter, the fire hot on my face, not knowing what to do with it, when I noticed Cressey beside me, frantically opening his latest note from home. Then he stood up and walked away.

I gave him a few seconds and then followed him discreetly. I found him on his knees behind one of the mud huts, sobbing, strings of phlegm in the corners of his lips.

‘It’s Hannah,’ he said. ‘I knew it. She’s been shagging my fucking c-cousin.’

‘Listen, fuck her,’ I said. ‘Fuck Hannah. She’s clearly not worth your time.’

‘You’ve got to straighten yourself up. I need to know you’re not going to let this take you down. I know I’ve been on your back a bit since we got here, but it’s for a reason. I’m trying to keep us all alive. I’m trying to keep you alive. That’s the most important thing to me. Making sure you get out of here in one piece.’

‘I would take a bullet for you. I would die for you, without hesitation. Do you understand?’

‘What I need is for you to be in the frame of mind where you’d take a bullet for me.’

‘Don’t thank me. Go to your bed, have a good cry, punch some walls, and I’ll see you tomorrow, a new man. Yes?’

I watched him pace towards his hut. Then I went back to the others, took Emilie’s letter out of my shirt pocket and threw it into the fire.

Another week, another challenge. A new troop sergeant had arrived in Sangin DC to replace the one who’d returned to the UK to tend to his injured wife. This meant I had to step back down to my 2IC role. In the days before he came, rumours began swirling around the Forward Operational Base (FOB). Our new boss was a guy called Lionel Boyle. He was known as a ‘Lympstonite’ because he’d spent years – pretty much his entire career – back at Lympstone Commando, training recruits. He’d never seen action, never been on ops. ‘And he talks to the lads like shit,’ said one man, who knew him from the training centre. ‘He’s dickmeat. Pure cock.’ But I decided not to listen to the gossip. I’d form my own opinion of the man.

On the morning of his arrival, I handed in the pistol that had been granted to me as troop sergeant and waited to meet him. A couple of hours later I was chatting with a buddy outside my mud hut when I saw a man who could only have been Boyle coming briskly towards me from the direction of the officers’ block. You could always tell the new arrivals: they were so scrubbed and fresh and clean-shaven, with the sun shining in the tips of their boots.

I held out my hand. ‘I’m Ant,’ I said. ‘I was section commander, but since you came back I’m now 2IC again.’

‘OK,’ he said, shaking it lightly. ‘And what’s been happening out there?’

‘We’re covering a lot of ground, things are going pretty steadily. It’s fine. No complaints. And, just to let you know, I’ve handed my pistol in, so we’re all good to go tomorrow.’

He looked at me with paternal exasperation, as if he’d found exactly the shambles he’d been fearing. He was livid about it.

‘Dear God,’ he said. ‘You have to go through the proper procedure. You can’t just fling your weapon over and say “Here’s your pistol.” It has to be done properly, in the presence of a recognised witness, and given to someone qualified to take it in. The serial number needs to be recorded, the paperwork signed. Did you follow this procedure, Middleton?’

‘For fuck’s sake, this is a war zone, Middleton,’ he snapped, working himself up into a headmasterly rage. He took a small step back. ‘And you’ve been acting section commander?’

A war zone? What did he know about a war zone? For a start, in a war zone you don’t line up on parade as you would back at base. It’s different out in the field. It’s not all boot-shined and spit-polished. You loosen things up a bit – you shave every other day, not every day, and you let your sideburns grow. It’s a morale thing, a bit of leeway to see you through the shit. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

Five minutes later there we were, all present and correct outside our huts, feeling like a bunch of knobs. Boyle was marching up and down in front of us with his hands behind his back like he was in his Lympstone parade square.

‘Look at the state of you,’ he said. ‘You’re a fucking disgrace. How have you let yourselves slide like this? You’re Royal Marines. There are standards, gentlemen, and being on the battlefield does not excuse you from them. I want you back here in ten minutes with your sideburns shaved to the middle of your ears.’

Some of the lads wanted to fight back, but I knew that would have been a bad idea. Although the Chelmsford street-fighter in me would have found great satisfaction in putting a crack right down the centre of Boyle’s jawbone, I’d come a long way from there. Those demons were now working for me. I knew the aggressive approach would very quickly have left us with no power at all. We’d only push him into coming back at us even harder. The more we went in on him, the more he’d have to elevate himself over us in order to keep hold of his self-respect. In a matter of days we’d have created a monster.

Those next few weeks were a master’s degree in wily leadership. The most crucial lesson I learned was that, to be a successful leader, you have to be emotionally connected. This is especially true when you’re not officially in a position of authority and have to manipulate someone above you in the pecking order. To do this, you’ve got to pick up on all their wants and needs and insecurities. You work out how they see the world and let that guide you.

To me it was obvious that Boyle was a stickler for detail and used arbitrary signs, like the length of our sideburns, as a yardstick to judge how well things were going. But I also knew it went much deeper than that. What Boyle really wanted, deep down in his delicate little pigeon heart, was the respect of the lads. He wanted us to look up to him. He wanted that with all his soul and body. He’d reacted so unreasonably and disproportionately about the length of our sideburns because he’d taken it as a sign of personal rejection. It was as if we’d collectively blown raspberries at him in the school playground. This, I realised, was my way in.

As soon as I worked out what was really going on, I started to feel quite sorry for him. But I also knew I couldn’t have him treating the lads like that. So, over the next few days I started making an effort to befriend him. I didn’t particularly want to spend my downtime hanging out with Lionel Boyle, drinking coffee with him and flattering his ego, but I had to remember my objective. It isn’t sitting in a certain office or having a certain job title or a badge on your chest that makes you a leader. Sometimes it’s simply putting the group first in order to get the job done. And that’s what I was doing.

Meanwhile, I told the lads to keep their facial hair in order, at least for now. There were a few grumbles about this – and I didn’t blame them. The last thing we wanted to be worried about when we got up in the morning was having a shave. We wanted to be preparing our kit, getting ready for a long day walking those sweating, deadly streets, feeling constantly surrounded by eyes and sudden noises and shadows behind doors. But I knew, if we were to ever get him off our backs, we’d have to give him this little sign.

On the evenings after long patrols I started spending more and more time chatting with him, sympathising with him, making him mugs of coffee. ‘Are you alright, Sergeant? What’s been happening?’ I’d overplay it. It was toy respect. But it was my opportunity to make him think I was letting him into the fold, which was where I was convinced he really wanted to be, even if he himself didn’t consciously know it.

Before long he’d learned to trust me. That’s when I felt able to subtly start changing the way he recognised respect and success, slowly turning his head in a new direction, shifting his focus. I’d emphasise how hard the guys had worked and how completely devoted they were to their mission.

‘Cor, that was a long patrol,’ I’d say. ‘The lads have come in and they’ve cleaned their weapons and they’re now getting their heads down because they’re up early in the morning on another one. I’ll make sure they’re up at first light and we’re ready to go.’ Rather than, ‘They’re thinking about shaving,’ I’d make it, ‘They’re thinking about the job at hand.’

Boyle had his Lympstonite book that he was devoted to. What I was doing was adding extra pages to it. And it worked. Within a fortnight our sideburns were creeping down our faces, and he was happy and leaving us be. Life was returning to normal.

We were out on patrol when we just happened to be in the vicinity of our base at somewhere around lunchtime.

‘All right, lads. Special treat,’ I said. ‘Let’s hop back into the fob and have a cooked meal.’

We settled down in the relative safety of Sangin DC and lit our burners, happily anticipating beans, stew and corned beef hash served hot, for once, just as God intended. The bubbles had just started popping on the surface of my bacon and beans when I became aware of a commotion over by one of the offices. It was Boyle. Now he was running towards us, his face long and pale, his eyes bright.

‘An IED,’ he said, between puffs of breath. ‘Two kilometres to the west. We’ve taken injuries, maybe worse. We need to get out there now as a QRF.’

Minutes later, Boyle and the rest of us were marching out of the front entrance of Sangin DC as a Quick Response Force, helmets and headsets on, SA80s ready, all thoughts of lunch a long-forgotten dream. The forty minutes it took us to reach the IED site passed as if in seconds. All twenty-four of us fell into that strange, zoomed-in state in which nothing else exists but the mission. The heat, the fear, the aches, the pains, the sweat, the sores, the thoughts of family and home, the human politics of Boyle, Cressey and all the rest of it had gone completely. The entire universe vanished around us and the only thing that was left was one foot in front of the other.

The incident had taken place outside a typical Afghan compound. It was a large, two-storey structure built from dried, compacted mud, which took up the area of roughly half a football pitch. Inside the compound would be a maze of darkened rooms that could either have been booby-trapped or have Taliban fighters lurking in its shadows, armed with grenades and AK-47s or strapped up in suicide vests. You couldn’t have imagined a more unpredictable environment if you were a designer of first-person shooter video games. The level of adrenalised fearfulness inside that dusty shithole would be high.

We gathered around Boyle, awaiting further information that he’d been receiving on his radio.

‘All right lads, huddle in,’ he said. ‘An officer has been blown up. We’re going to clear the area, then retrieve his remains so they can be sent home. The IED went off over by the south wall of the compound. That’s where his arms and legs are. His torso is on the roof.’ He turned to me. ‘Middleton.’

I glanced around at the other lads, looking for a suitable candidate. Immediately this tough-nut Welshman called Miles stepped forward. Ordinarily he’d have been my automatic choice, and he knew it. But to his surprise and mine I found myself nodding past him to a familiar face hiding at the back of the huddle.

Miles was respectful enough not to say anything, but I could tell by his face that he thought I’d fucking lost it.

I walked around the corner with Cressey to the door of the compound. ‘What I’m going to do is put a grenade in each room,’ I told him.

‘That’s how we’ll clear the building. You’ve got to cover me as I go in. OK?’

‘It’d better be, mate,’ I said. ‘We don’t know what kind of badness is in there. I’m relying on you, one hundred per cent.’

We stacked up against the door, which wasn’t bolted and hung slightly ajar. I kicked it open, unpinned a grenade and tossed it in. For the crucial moments between my appearance in the doorway and the blast, I had only Cressey to protect me. They were very long moments. And then, boom! Out of the building came a barrage of grit, sound and wind. The instant it settled we moved into the space, exactly as we’d been trained, each covering a different corner. Then we stacked up against the next door. And that’s how we did it, the entire building.

Before long we located the entrance to the roof. We crept up the short flight of steps and pushed at the door, which opened with a rusty groan. For a moment it was if all that existed on the other side was a realm of pure, blinding light. Our vision quickly adjusting, we stepped out into the heat that beat hard on the back of our necks.

It was about six feet in front of us, not far from the edge. It was fully clothed and, because its owner had perished in a blast, the heart had stopped pumping instantly, so there was no blood. It didn’t look human. It looked like a thing – a package ready for posting or a piece of a resuscitation doll. Under the torn shirt you could just make out a ragged disc of meat from where, just this morning, an arm had brushed teeth and made coffee.

He meant it too. I glanced over my shoulder to see his gaze fixed on the body part. There was a fire in his eyes I’d never seen before.

We grabbed a shoulder each and dragged it across the roof, then carefully lowered it down, into the waiting hands of the men on the ground, where the torso was placed on a stretcher next to its arms and legs. Cressey was all business.

We arrived back at base fired up and mostly silent, each man in their own space of shock and fury. Just then, as we were clearing our weapons, there was the unmistakable ricocheting crack of a round being fired. It came from inside the compound. Everyone flinched and went to ground, grabbing for their weapons. Everyone, that is, except for one man. Over in the corner, looking red-faced and sheepish, was Cressey. He’d made a basic error, a ‘negligent discharge’. He must have cocked his weapon before taking the magazine off, rather than taking the magazine off first to extract the round. But there was no harm done: he’d done everything else correctly, and the round had just fired harmlessly into the dirt.

As the lads slowly and wearily rose to their feet, Boyle stormed furiously towards us.

‘You! Cressey!’ he said. ‘You fucking idiot. I’m sending you back to Camp Bastion. You’re getting charged.’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I’d never wanted so badly to knock someone out.

But he ignored me. When he was done with Cressey I followed him back to his office and closed the door behind me.

‘This isn’t right,’ I said. ‘It’s going to be a serious mark on his record. He’s a young lad. He’s just turned a corner. If you charge him, everyone’s going to know about it. This is going to knock his fucking confidence badly.’

He sat himself down behind his desk, then said with a contemptuous sneer, ‘And they gave you the King’s Badge?’

Savage electricity charged through the fingers of my right hand, trying to curl them into a fist. But I wouldn’t let him have it. I was my father’s son, not my stepfather’s.

I went back to my mud hut fuming. Leadership isn’t about throwing the book at someone the moment they fuck up. It’s not about saying, ‘I’ve made my way through the ranks and this is what the book says, so follow it or suffer.’ That book is not followed by leaders, it’s written by them. We were a team operating in a risky situation. What message does that send? What’s going to happen when things go wrong, as they inevitably will, out there on the battlefield? The very reason you can operate outside of your comfort zone in a dangerous situation is that you know the people behind you and above you will be there when you fall. If Cressey made the same mistake again, fair enough. But I could guarantee he wouldn’t.

I soon decided that my game of manipulation with Boyle had reached its limit. I walked over to the office of my sergeant major.

It was dark outside and the only light came from a single low-wattage bulb hanging off a wire. There were maps on the wall, mosquitos in the air, and the smell and crackle of the fire getting going outside. The sergeant major sat behind his desk, the dim yellow light casting shadows off the lines in his face.

‘He wants to send Cressey back for a court martial. I don’t think it’s the right thing to do. He was up there with me on the roof today, recovering body parts, and he didn’t fucking flinch. And it’s not as if he’s shot anyone. He had his weapon pointed into the sand. No harm done, you know? He’s not the most confident of lads as it is. I’ve been working really hard with him, building him up, and I was getting somewhere. Today was a breakthrough. I saw it in him, that strength coming out. Sending him to Bastion will destroy him.’

I shrugged. ‘To be honest, all the lads are out of joint with him a bit. He’s been poking people, coming in with all his drill stuff. He doesn’t get it.’

I said, ‘I guarantee you, personally, that Cressey will not do that again. Ever.’

In the end I got my way. Cressey wasn’t sent back for a court martial. And from that point on, everything Boyle said to any of us was just white noise. It wasn’t long before he was spending the majority of his time hiding in the ops room away from the rest of us. Even though I wasn’t the official leader, in practice I was back in charge.

That night, after I left the sergeant major’s office, I did what I always did on returning from a long day in the field. I went to the bombed-out top floor of the building at the centre of the base, jumped on the rusty, squeaky bicycle that had been put on a stand, and began working out under a huge full moon that illuminated the outline of the dark, dangerous mountains as brightly as if it were God’s own torch. I couldn’t help but feel disillusioned with my first experience of war. I’d come to Afghanistan full of excitement for the challenge but felt limited by our timid rules of engagement, and that I was endangered by people who just didn’t give a shit and shouldn’t have been there. In a matter of days, though, none of this would matter any longer.

Ever since that fateful day during Commando training when I’d seen that man leaving the armoury wearing a green beret with the motto BY STRENGTH AND GUILE, I’d wanted one thing above all else. To join the Special Boat Service. I’d heard a rumour that there’d once been a Marine who was fresh from passing out who’d made it into the Special Forces. I had no idea if it was really true, but the truth of it no longer mattered. I would make it true. I would achieve what that possibly mythical lad had. Back in May my sergeant major had signed me off as a candidate. The forms had been sent. I’d been excited about it ever since. And now, finally, the time had come. I was leaving my tour three months early. I was going home. I’d spend three precious hours with my family, and then, at 6 a.m., I was off to Wales, where I’d start my Special Forces Selection.

LEADERSHIP LESSONS

You don’t need to be a leader to lead. Very often in life you’ll find yourself in a situation in which the person officially in charge is not doing the greatest job. If you decide to take matters into your own hands, you need to do it cleverly. A certain skill for manipulation is often what’s called for. You need to get under that leader’s skin, win their trust and discover what they want. As long as they think they’re getting it, you’re free to steer the ship.

Never be too quick to write anyone off. Even though I sensed Ian Cressey would be able to handle the recovery of that body, the level of professionalism he brought to the situation still surprised me. Since then, I’ve always been extremely careful about being too hasty with my judgements of those who appear weak. There’s often steel inside them – they just need the opportunity to show it.

Do what you have to, even if people judge you for it. I know some of the lads probably found my attitude to letters and calls to my family harsh or unfeeling. But I had my reasons, and I wasn’t going to let their preconceptions bully me into not doing what I knew was best for me.

YOU DON’T NEED TO BE THE LEADER TO LEAD