First Man In

COPYRIGHT

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

FIRST EDITION

© Anthony Middleton 2018

Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Cover photograph © Andrew Brown

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Anthony Middleton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008245719

Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008245740

Version: 2019-04-30

DEDICATION

For Emilie

To the only person who can make me or break me with one sentence. This woman pushes me on a daily basis and will not accept anything less than one hundred per cent from me at all times. When I lose my way, she redirects me. When I put a foot out of place, she stamps on it. And when I fail, she is the only person who can lift me back up and make me feel invincible. My wife is the reason I am here today and she is the lady that has made me the man I am.

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

INTRODUCTION

PREFACE

LESSON 1

DON’T LET ANYONE DEFINE WHO YOU ARE

LESSON 2

MAKE YOUR ENEMY YOUR ENERGY

LESSON 3

LEADERS STAND APART FROM CROWDS

LESSON 4

MAKE FRIENDS WITH YOUR DEMONS

LESSON 5

YOU DON’T NEED TO BE THE LEADER TO LEAD

LESSON 6

FAILURE ISN’T MAKING THE MISTAKE, IT’S ALLOWING THE MISTAKE TO WIN

LESSON 7

THE WAR IS ALWAYS IN YOUR HEAD

LESSON 8

THE POWER OF INTELLIGENT WAITING

LESSON 9

HOW TO AVOID A MUTINY

LESSON 10

THE ULTIMATE LEADERSHIP LESSON

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

INTRODUCTION

Of all the people that I meet in my day-to-day life, most don’t have the courage to ask The Question. The majority only know me from the television and so are aware that I served two tours of Afghanistan with the Special Forces. Because my first TV appearance was on Channel 4’s SAS: Who Dares Wins, it’s often assumed that I was a member of the Special Air Service. In fact, I was a Special Boat Service operator. In military parlance I was a point man. My job was to lead a small group of men into Taliban compounds, searching out high-status targets on dangerous ‘hard arrest’ missions. Because of the great secrecy that surrounds Special Forces operations, I can’t talk about them. But I am able to give you a very general answer to The Question.

Killing someone feels like gently pulling your trigger finger back a few millimetres. It feels like hearing a dull pop. It feels like seeing a man-shaped object fall away from your sights. It feels like getting the job done. It feels satisfying. But, beyond that, killing someone feels like nothing at all. You might find that shocking. You might even find it offensive. I’m aware, of course, that mine is not an ordinary response. It’s not even a response that I share with everyone who’s fought in war. Many brave men I served alongside will remain forever traumatised by the horrors they’ve witnessed and taken part in. I truly feel for them. Being part of a ‘hard arrest’ team meant working regularly in conditions of life-threatening stress and being surrounded, almost every day, by blood and killing. But my struggle wasn’t with the trauma all that created. Mine was with its satisfaction. I’d enjoyed it – perhaps, at times, too much. I thrived on combat. I still miss it every day.

In Afghanistan, getting shot at was a regular occurrence. You came to expect it. I viewed survival as a numbers game. As point man, every time I entered a Taliban compound or a room within a compound and knew that there was badness on the other side, I played the odds in my head. It was a bit like roulette – a calculated risk. I’d think, ‘What are the chances of me going through that door and there’s a combatant there who knows I’m coming? If they do know I’m coming, what are the chances of them being able to fire more than one bullet before I shoot at them? What are the chances that one bullet’s going to hit me in the head and kill me?’ When I thought of it like that, I’d usually come to realise the chances were pretty slim. So I’d think, ‘Fuck it, the odds are with me,’ and that would get me through the door.

Sometimes, at this point of entry, there’d be bullets flying in my direction. But experience told me these bursts were usually over in seconds and that the moment there was a pause in firing I could make my move – entering crouched low, because idiots with AKs usually can’t control the natural lift of their weapons and they spray rounds at the ceiling when they fire. I’d think, ‘If he pulls the trigger again, he’ll only have the chance to squeeze it once or twice, max, before I get the drop on him.’ If one or two rounds did come out of his weapon and strike me in the chest plate, it would only be my chest plate. If they hit me in the leg, they’d only immobilise me for a split second. If I fell down, I knew my pal would be right behind me, on my shoulder, and would finish the job in a blink. That was how I saw it – a numbers game. Always the odds. Always a little calculation in my head.

Which is not to say I found it easy. Far from it. Going into an operation, the fear would be horrendous. But as soon as it all began – the moment I breached the compound or made contact with the enemy – I’d enter a completely different psychological space. The only thing I can compare it to is the final seconds before a car smash, when you see how it’s all going to play out in slow motion. Your brain goes into a hyper-efficient state, absorbing so much information from your surroundings that it really does feel as if the clock has suddenly slowed down – as if you’ve got the ability to control time itself.

This enabled me to act with a level of precision in which it seemed I could count in milliseconds. It was a state of pure focus, pure action, pure instinct, every cell in my body working in perfect harmony with each other towards the same end, at a level of peak performance. I didn’t feel any emotion. There was only awareness, control and action. It was the closest thing I could imagine to feeling all-powerful, like God. And that’s what I was, in a way. When I was point man in the middle of a dangerous operation, godlike was how my mind and body felt – and godlike was how I had to act in judging, in a fraction of an instant, who lived and who died.

The first man I ever killed came out at me from the hot, dusty shadows of an Afghan compound. It was night. He was wearing a traditional white ankle-length robe, called a dish-dash. There was a thick strap over his right shoulder. In his hands, an AK-47. He stopped, then squinted into the darkness. He couldn’t see me. He stared some more. His neck craned forwards. He saw the two green eyes of my night-vision goggles staring back at him from the blackness. And then it came, an event I’d soon know well. While a lot goes on within it, the moment of death always has an order, a sure sequence of events. It happens like this: Shock. Doubt. Disbelief. Confusion. Your target feels an urge to double-check a situation that they can’t quite believe is happening. Their thoughts race. Their lips open just a few millimetres. Their eyes squint into the night. Their chin moves forward. Their body begins to change its stance. And then …

That moment – the one I’d watch happening time after time after time in Afghanistan in intimate, ultra-slow motion – is our secret weapon. Staying alive, and achieving our objective, relied on tiny fractions of time such as this. Special Forces soldiers are trained to operate between the tremors of the clock’s ticking hand, slipping in and out and doing their work in the time it takes for the enemy to turn one thought into another. And that’s how it went the night of my first kill. From my position in the corner of the compound I took half a step forwards, raised my weapon and squeezed the trigger once, then twice. The suppressor I’d screwed to the barrel made the firing of the bullets sound like little more than the clicks of a computer mouse. Perfect shots. Two in the mouth. He went down.

The Special Forces are looking for individuals who have the ability to do this as a job, day in, day out, and not let it destroy them. That was me. People like this aren’t born this way. They’re made. This book is not just lessons in leadership that I’ve learned over the years. It’s the story of how I became the man I am. It’s a tale of a naive and gentle young lad whose first memory is of his beloved father being found dead. It’s the tale of struggle and pain and fury in the army, of darkness and violence on the streets of Essex, of days in war zones, days in prison, days hunting down kidnapped girls in foreign lands, days leading men out of impossible hells. It’s the story of how I became the kind of individual who leads from the front and who, no matter what danger he’s charging into, always wants to be first man in.

PREFACE

Strange noises. People moving about. People talking. Footsteps. Heavy, grown-up footsteps that I didn’t recognise. I sat up in bed and tried to wake myself by squeezing and rubbing my eyes with the backs of my hands. It was the week after Christmas – perhaps Mum and Dad were having a party. I climbed down from my top bunk past my brother’s bed, which was empty. On the chest of drawers there was my favourite toy, a plastic army helicopter that Dad had bought for my fifth birthday. I reached up on tiptoes and gave its black propellers a push. I was about to take it down when I heard someone crying. I turned towards the sound. Through the crack in the door I saw a policeman.

I slipped out and followed him, barefoot in my grey pyjamas, in the direction of my parents’ bedroom. I passed two more policemen in the corridor who were talking and didn’t seem to notice me. Lights were blazing in my mum and dad’s room. There were even more policemen in there, four, maybe five of them, crowded around the bed. Intrigued and excited, I pushed between the legs of two of them and peered up to see what they were all looking at. There was someone under the sheets. Whoever it was, they weren’t moving. I shuffled forward for a better view.

‘No! No! No!’ a policeman shouted. He bent down and manoeuvred me back down the corridor into the other bedroom, his bony fingertips pressing into my shoulders. My brothers were all in there, Peter, Michael and Daniel. Someone had taken the television up there from downstairs. They were all watching it. I sat down in the corner. I didn’t say a word.

My next memory is about four weeks later. I was being woken up again: ‘Anthony! Anthony! Come on, Anthony. Wake up.’ The main light was on. There were two people standing over me, my mum and this man I’d never seen before. He was enormously tall, with a big nose and long, dark hair that went down past his shoulders. I didn’t know how old he was, but I could see he was much younger than Mum.

‘Anthony,’ she said. ‘Meet your new dad.’

LESSON 1

DON’T LET ANYONE DEFINE WHO YOU ARE

It felt as if we’d been driving for days. I gazed out of the car window, watching motorways turn to A-roads turn to winding, hedge-crowded country lanes, with every mile we travelled bringing me closer and closer to the new life I’d chosen for myself and further away from the familiarity of the family home and everything I loved, hated and feared. The clouds hung above us like oily rags and the November wind battered on the roof of our Ford Sierra as it sputtered through the Surrey countryside. Neither me, my mum nor my stepfather spoke much. We let the English weather do the talking for us. As the wheels of the car pounded the tarmac, anxious thoughts span around my head. Had I made the right decision? Would I find myself and thrive in my new home? Or was I just swapping one unpredictable hellhole for another? Who was I going to be when this new journey ended? If I’d known the answer to that, I’d have opened the car door and jumped straight out.

The truth was, back in 1997 I didn’t have much of an idea who I was as a person. Who does when they’re seventeen? At that age we like to think we’re fully defined human beings, but the fact is we’re barely out of life’s starting blocks. We’ve spent our childhood being defined by teachers, parents, brothers, sisters, tinpot celebrities on the TV and, in the middle of all that, is a squishy lump of dough who’s constantly being shaped and reshaped. That’s why, especially when we’re young, it’s crucial that we’re surrounded by people whose influence is going to be positive and who are interested in building up our strengths, rather than drowning us in our weaknesses. I know that now. I wish I’d known it then.

Eventually, on the side of a narrow road, a red sign came into view. I couldn’t read what it said through the steam and raindrops on my window, so I rubbed the condensation away with the sleeve of my sweatshirt. MILITARY ROAD: ALL VEHICLES ARE LIABLE TO BE STOPPED. I sat up and took a deep breath. The car slowed down. There was another sign, a white notice that just said PIRBRIGHT CAMP. Beyond that was a guard room outside tall, black gates. And then, the sign I had been looking for: NEW RECRUITS REPORT HERE. ‘Here we go, Mum,’ I said, trying to disguise the nervousness in my voice. ‘This is it.’

She pulled up in a lay-by. I got out, lifted my heavy black bag from the boot and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. If she was sad to see me go, she did a good job of hiding it. My stepfather wound his window down, gave me the thumbs-up and said, ‘Good luck. See you later,’ then looked away. Before I had the chance to think, Mum was back in the car, closing her door and turning her key in the ignition. The engine fired up and I watched them vanish into the grey-green scenery. I took a moment to steady myself. This was it. From now on, everything was going to be different.

I took a deep breath, picked up my bag, slung it over my shoulder and turned towards the domineering complex of red-brick buildings. It looked like a prison or maybe a large hospital. There were rolls of barbed wire on the tops of the walls and security cameras on tall poles facing this way and that. I couldn’t see anyone else or hear any voices. I felt completely alone. It was almost creepy.

I approached the guard room nervously, almost expecting there to be nobody behind the glass window. When I was two steps away it was pulled open with a crack and a skinny guy in his mid-twenties, wearing military greens and those round John Lennon-style glasses, peered out. I flashed him my best friendly, charming and disarming smile. ‘I’m reporting for Basic Training, sir,’ I told him.

The soldier gave me a look like a bird had crapped on his spectacles.

‘Sir? Don’t call me Sir. I work for a living. It’s “Corporal” to you. Name?’

‘Middleton, Corporal,’ I said. ‘Royal Engineers.’

He picked up a clipboard that had been lying on his desk and scanned it lazily. ‘Middleton … Middleton … Middleton …’

I shifted my bag onto my other shoulder and tried to squeeze some blood back into my hand. He turned the sheet over and carried on running his fingertip down it. Then, very slowly, he reached over, picked up a second clipboard and began examining that one instead. The winter wind whipped around my neck. Finally, his finger stopped.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Anthony. Is that it? Anthony Middleton?’

‘Yes, Corporal.’

He smiled at me warmly. ‘Found you!’

I felt a huge rush of relief. Maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad after all.

‘You’re not due until next week,’ he said. And with that, his window slammed shut with another loud crack.

I was so stunned that all I could do was stand there, gazing at my reflection. Looking back at me in the glass I saw an immaculately presented, naive, skinny teenager with blue eyes and thick black eyebrows that met in the middle. A nice young lad with not a clue what to do. I walked back into the road with my head down but could only go so far before I had to put my bag down again.

What was I going to do? How the hell had I got the date wrong? I couldn’t believe it. My mum and stepdad would be a couple of miles away by now. I scanned the muddy landscape in the vague hope I might spot a telephone box so I could call someone. There were trees bare of leaves, some far-off horses in a field and a flock of anonymous birds careening in the distance. There was no telephone box. And who would I call anyway? Where could I sleep? I had no sleeping bag, nor enough money for a B&B. Maybe I could find a dry spot out of the way by the barracks wall. How was I going to last a week in the wet with no food? How could I begin my British Army basic training course starving, soaking and probably ill?

I had a sudden, almost overwhelming urge to get as far away from the army buildings as quickly as possible. Instead, I put my head down, gritted my jaw and paced up the road, back towards those imposing black gates. I’d have to find somewhere to camp out in the dry and my best bet, I thought, was to use some of that man-made infrastructure. Once I was settled somewhere I’d come up with a plan. I tried to think positively. There must be a town not far away. I could find a call box there and get hold of Mum. I wasn’t sure whether she’d come and get me, to be honest, but towns mean homeless people, and homeless people have shelters and maybe I could …

‘Oi!’ came a shout. ‘Where you going, mate?’

I stopped and turned. On my way I’d passed a smaller brick guard hut. It hadn’t looked occupied but a man in army fatigues was now hanging out of the door, barking at me.

‘You can’t go up there, mate.’

I stopped and turned back.

‘This is a military area,’ he said. ‘What you doing here? Who are you?’

‘I’m afraid I’ve got my dates wrong,’ I told him with an embarrassed shrug. ‘I have to come back next week, so …’ I smiled, as if the whole thing was no bother at all.

‘New recruit?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

He shook his head and pointed with his chin back towards the large guard house. ‘Get over there and knock on his window,’ he said. ‘He’s fucking with you.’

Half an hour later I found myself standing in a large, spotless room in a line-up of new recruits. We’d come from across the length and breadth of the British Isles in all shapes and sizes, young, spotty, greasy and hairy, none of us comfortable in our own skin and yet all of us desperately acting like we were. A corporal was walking up and down the lines of bodies, silently examining us with an unimpressed eye. The sound of his clicking heels echoed around the shining walls and polished floors. He seemed to tower over us, his spine erect, his broad shoulders filling out his shirt so that the khaki material stretched tightly against his skin. I tried to stop my eyes following him around the room but it was impossible. As he approached closer and closer to me, I forced them forwards and raised my chin just a little bit higher and puffed out my skinny chest as far as I could. The corporal stopped. He stopped right in front of me. My eyes widened. My heart froze.

‘Name?’ he said.

‘Middleton, Corporal.’

He turned and bent down so that his face was barely an inch from mine.

‘Middleton,’ he growled. ‘In the British Army we prefer our men to have two eyebrows.’

‘Yes, Corporal.’

He walked on. My eyes didn’t follow. My cheeks burned. I was intimidated, I was disorientated and was wondering what the hell I’d got myself into.

After some brief words from the corporal, we were sent to our accommodation block to settle in. We were shown into a big room with a gleaming parquet wooden floor. There were rows and rows of identical beds with itchy blankets, and wooden lockers with their doors hanging open. Everything in there was immaculate. Spotless. For the first time I felt almost at home: this was exactly how my stepfather had always forced us to keep house. I found myself a bed – a bottom bunk in a far corner of the block – and took the opportunity to have a scan of all the others. There must have been about thirty lads in there, some teenagers like me, others in their early twenties. I guessed it probably wasn’t a coincidence that I’d been highlighted, like that, by the corporal. I looked different from the others. I wasn’t like them. You could just tell.

The truth is, most of the young men who’d turned up for Basic Training that day were tough working-class lads who’d grown up immersed in the British culture of drinking, bantering and bashing the shit out of each other.

My childhood hadn’t been anything like that. After my dad had died completely unexpectedly on 31 December 1985, my mother and stepfather had suddenly come into a lot of money. There was some confusion over my dad’s true cause of death, but it was eventually ruled that he’d had a heart attack. This official verdict meant his life insurance could pay out. My mum and her new boyfriend Dean, who’d been around from almost the precise moment my dad passed away, were suddenly awash with money. The family moved from a three-bed house in Portsmouth to an eight-bed mansion outside Southampton.

Suddenly, everything was different. Me and my brothers were decked out in designer clothes, driven about in expensive cars and educated in the better private schools. My mum really started spoiling us. One Christmas it took us about three days to open all our presents. Then, when I was nine, the whole family upped and moved to northern France. We had a large, rambling plot of land with a big house that was once a farm on the outskirts of a town called Saint-Lô, twenty miles from Bayeux. I attended a well-respected Catholic school and was always neatly presented, and extremely polite and respectful. Almost overly so. People would love it when I came to their house because they knew the dishes would get done. I was a product of that much more gentle and civilised French culture.

I’d experienced my first hint of difference between the two nations on a visit back to the UK to see my maternal grandparents. There’d been a guy about the same age as me walking down the street, strutting along, and he just started staring at me. In French culture, you tip your hat, you’re polite and respectful. When you pass someone in the street you say ‘Bonjour’ and ‘Ça va?’ So I said, ‘All right?’ He just glared at me like he wanted to kill me. I didn’t realise he was doing that stupid young-lad thing of who can stare the other one out. I found it so strange. I just thought, ‘What a weirdo.’