Soldier

I’ve served with and under both sorts of man, and the difference is night and day. I’ll expand on this more in the leadership chapter, but in an environment as tight-knit and high-pressured as an army unit – especially a Special Forces unit – you simply can’t afford to have drains, and when they are around what tends to happen is that people shy away from them and exclude them as far as possible, which may solve the immediate problem but ends up causing many more.

On Selection there was this one guy who was a massive gobshite. He thought he knew it all, and every day he’d tell us what was coming and how to deal with it, because his dad had been in the SAS. (As it turned out, that was a crock of shit: his dad had done Selection but failed, just as this guy would, so it obviously ran in the family.) Perhaps he thought he was being a radiator and helping us, but actually whenever he opened his mouth people just switched off as none of us had the time, energy or inclination to listen to his bullshit. It’s rather like sheep and sheepdogs. Sheep will gravitate to a sheepdog, but sometimes the other sheepdogs realise quicker than the sheep that the dog in question is all bark and no bite. That’s what it was like with this guy, at least to start with: there were a few of the younger, greener guys who hung on his every word, but one by one they all saw the light and drifted away. You see it too on the former Special Forces circuit. Like I said in the Prologue, the secretive and elite nature of what we do makes this prime bullshit territory for the unscrupulous. It’s easy to hold yourself up as a hero to the man in the street, who has no reason to know any better, but those in the know really are aware who’s on the level and who isn’t.

All these – knowing yourself, making the most of yourself, gravitating towards radiators rather than drains – will help you become a better you. Finding what you love doing is the greatest form of wealth there is.

* Actually, there are ten separate levels of black belt rather than just the one – the black belt is supposed to signify the start of mastery of the art rather than the end – but let’s not go there right now!

† If you do want to try this, make sure your wheelie bin isn’t in a place where you might get mistakenly taken out and tipped in the back of the garbage truck on bin day.

‡ A burpee is a squat thrust with an additional stand between each rep. It’s one of the toughest and most effective bodyweight exercises there is. It’s named after its inventor, the American physiologist Royal H. Burpee. I promise you I’m not making this up.

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