Soldier: Respect Is Earned

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DEDICATION

To everyone who has influenced my life for the better and for the worse. To my family who have always been my family regardless of the shit I put them through. And to you, the reader – I hope my experiences and the lessons I’ve learned will inspire you to believe there is always more and there is always a way.

PROLOGUE

MOUNT EVEREST, MAY 2019

I’m in trouble here.

A thin cone of light from my head torch cuts through the darkness. It’s just enough for me to see the rocks and snow beneath my feet and in front of my face before the beam peters out and fades, swallowed up by the night. I can only hear three sounds: the wild howl of the wind, the clinking of my carabiners and the ragged gasping of my own breath. I don’t know what time it is, other than that it’s the middle of the night, the witching hour at which anyone with a modicum of sense would be tucked up in a sleeping bag and tent. It’s a long time since I left Camp 1 and a long time till I arrive at Camp 2.

If I ever get there, that is.

Like I said, I’m in trouble. Big trouble. Real trouble. And that’s not a figure of speech.

I’m freezing cold, and no matter what I do I just can’t get warm. My body’s struggling to generate heat, even though I’m wearing all the kit I could find. It’s because I haven’t eaten or slept enough. I’m so cold I’m not even shivering, and that’s not good. Shivering is your body’s way of trying to warm itself up. If I could go quicker then perhaps I’d get a bit warmer, but I’m so tired that I need to rest after pretty much every step. It’s a vicious circle. I need to move quicker to warm up, but I’m too cold to do anything other than trudge. The slower I go the colder I become, and the colder I become the slower I go. I’ve got no energy left, absolutely none. Even though my body’s trying to work hard – it’s a steady climb at an altitude of more than 6,000 metres, where there’s half as much oxygen as at sea level – nothing hurts. I can’t feel any lactic acid in my legs or muscle burn in my arms. I can’t feel anything. That’s the problem. It’s like someone’s turned the tap off or taken the plug out, and there go my last reserves of energy, dribbling away down the drain.

One step. Rest. One step. Rest. One step. Rest. And each time the gap between steps seems to grow just a little. Have to keep going. Want to stop. Want to rest up here a while and get some strength back, though how that’s going to happen without warmth or food is anyone’s guess. Still. Just stop for a bit, eh? Summon up the old sinews for a final push.

Body shutting down. Mind shutting down.

Through the fog in my brain, I realise that I’m going hypothermic.

There are three stages to hypothermia. First it’s mild, where the body is doing all it can to preserve heat: shivering, quick and shallow breathing, elevated pulse rate, contraction of blood vessels. Next comes moderate, where you become confused and forgetful, your speech gets slurred, your reflexes slow down and your fine motor skills start to go. Right now I reckon I’m in the early part of stage two.

And I really don’t want to go any further down Hypothermia Highway, because the last stage – and often the terminal one – is severe. It’s a gradual shutdown of bodily functions, basically: your heart rate drops, your respiratory rate drops, your blood pressure drops and most of all your core temperature drops. You become so confused that you start to hallucinate, and your senses are so scrambled that quite often you start to take your clothes off because you feel too hot rather than too cold – and taking your clothes off when it’s 20 degrees below with a savage wind chill to boot is only going to end one way. Plenty of corpses have been found partially or totally naked on the higher reaches of mountains.

I’m not at that stage yet, but if I stop for too long I will be. Even though I know what might happen, I’m not scared or panicky either. I’m quite chilled, in fact. That’s the killer here, that it’s so easy to accept, so welcoming and seductive. I could sit down and never stand up. I could lie down and drift off to sleep. All very serene and painless.

A sudden vision comes into my head: all the blokes in Camp 2, just up the mountain from me but right now as remote as the moon, waking up to find that a body’s been found just short of their tents. Some poor, stupid bastard who’d tried to get there but had fallen just short.

Some poor, stupid bastard called Jay Morton, in fact. This is my own death I’m seeing.

I made it to Camp 2, of course, or else you wouldn’t be reading this (or at least it would have taken the concept of ghostwriting to a whole new level.)

It wasn’t the first time I’d faced the prospect of my own death, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. That’s not me being all macho and full of bravado, but just matter of fact: when you voluntarily put yourself in dangerous situations you accept that sometimes you’ll be taken to the edge. As you’ll read later in the book, me being alone on Everest that night was actually the least worst option, bizarre as that may sound. I wasn’t doing that climb solo and knackered because I wanted to. I was doing it because every possible alternative was more rather than less likely to kill me.

A brief bit of background. I was born in 1984 in the Lancashire city of Preston, and spent my childhood there. Some lads who went on to serve in the Special Forces have real horror stories of being brought up, proper Oliver Twist stuff or worse. Mine wasn’t anything like that. It was just a pretty normal, unremarkable childhood. I was an adventurous kid who never liked being indoors, and I had a short attention span. These days I’d be diagnosed with ADHD or hyperactivity, but back then I was just a low-level pain in the arse, constantly distracted and getting into trouble. I wasn’t a bad kid, and I certainly wasn’t a mean kid: I just didn’t like school much, and the feeling was pretty mutual. The best times I had at school were on the sports pitch, where I played rugby league (and to any southerners reading who think that league isn’t proper rugby, you’re very welcome to come up north and say that …).

So I left school as soon as I could, aged 16, and though I went on to college (still in Preston) to study sports science, I jacked that in after a year. Part of it was that I was already earning decent money as a delivery driver, but more importantly I just didn’t want to be cooped up within four walls with a lecturer droning on. Delivery driving wasn’t the most exciting job in the world, but at least it didn’t involve being in an office, which was and remains my idea of hell. It got me out and about, and within reason – I had to do my pick-ups and drop-offs, obviously – I could do my own thing: listen to music, enjoy my own company.

But even then I knew it wasn’t a long-term career prospect. I didn’t want to be doing that all my life. I wanted to get out and explore, to push and stretch myself. I knew that some of my mates would never leave Preston, would be happy to plough more or less the same furrow from cradle to grave. Good luck to them if that’s what they wanted, but I couldn’t think of anything worse. That’s nothing against Preston in particular: I’d have felt the same way about anywhere. There was a whole world out there: why restrict myself to just one place?

The seeds of what I really wanted to do had been sown years before, when as a young kid I’d gone with my older brother to the library. I wasn’t exactly a bookworm, so that visit was a collector’s item right there. He showed me a book with a black cover, and on the front was a picture of a bloke with a respirator on and carrying an MP5.

‘SAS’, it said in big letters.

‘What’s the SAS?’ I asked.

‘It’s a secret fighting force,’ my brother replied. ‘They’re like spies for Britain.’

I thought that sounded pretty cool.

But of course even as that kid I realised that I couldn’t just walk into the SAS. I’d have to join the regular army first to have even a chance (and right from the start I knew it was a small chance, a very, very small chance; but I also knew it was the kind of chance which would be entirely in my own hands). I learned that there are two infantry units, the Paras and the Marines, which are kind of a halfway house between the regulars and the SAS. I figured if I could get into one of these then I’d be a little bit further down the road towards my ultimate aim, and for some reason I’d always reckoned that I’d go for the Marines. God knows why: Preston’s miles from the sea, and I knew so little about anything maritime that I may as well have been living in the Sahara. But I had my heart set on the Marines, so the Marines it was.

Well, at least until I walked into the recruiting office.

A big sergeant-major looked me up and down, this scrawny kid from Preston. He didn’t look impressed. I could hardly blame him. He asked me a few questions. I gave him a few answers. He gave me a booklet.

‘Read this, son, and if you’re still keen then come back and we can see what you’re made of.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

I was about to walk out when he asked me one final question.

‘Can you do pull-ups?’

‘Of course.’

‘How many?’

I thought about bullshitting him, but I knew he’d see straight through me. ‘One or two, sir.’

‘Don’t bother coming back till you can do 12.’

12? 12? I doubted that even Arnold Schwarzenegger could do 12.

I walked out of the Marines office and straight into the army office. I bet they wouldn’t ask me to do 12 pull-ups.

They didn’t. They tried to get me to join the local regiment, the Queen’s Lancashire, but I was having none of it. I wanted to join the Paras, and for me it was that or nothing. No offence to the Queen’s Lancashire, which is a cracking outfit, but if it wasn’t going to be the Marines then I wanted, needed it to be the Paras.

I became a Para in 2004, aged 20. I did four years there, including tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then ten years in the SAS (or simply ‘The Regiment’, as we call it), where I was deployed on multiple Tier One operations (the most elite and secretive ones there are). I’ve trained in a multitude of different skillsets, including high-altitude parachuting, patrol medic, mountain guide, protective security, mentorship and training … the list gets pretty long.

Since leaving the SAS, I’ve done lots of different stuff – helped set up companies from scratch, turned my hand to racing cars, climbed some of the biggest mountains in the world, written this book – but the best known of them all is of course appearing on the Channel 4 show SAS: Who Dares Wins, in which a bunch of former Special Forces instructors put civilian volunteers through a tough and gruelling selection process. My participation had a bit of a twist, though, as I saw it from both sides, both contestant and instructor. For the first six days I was a contestant, reporting back to the instructors on my fellow contestants: who was going well and who wasn’t, who needed taking down a peg or two and who needed a bit of encouragement. Then, in a big reveal, I was brought out as one of the instructors myself, and for the last ten days I worked alongside the other four instructors: Ant Middleton, Jason Fox, Mark Billingham and Ollie Ollerton. The series has been a huge hit ever since it first aired in 2015, and appearing on it has raised my profile in ways I could never have imagined when I was in The Regiment, let alone as that kid looking at the SAS book in the library all those years ago.

My experiences both in the army and outside it have taught me so much about life and how to approach it. Those lessons are what this book is about. I didn’t want to write a straight memoir for three main reasons. First, every Tom, Dick and Harry who’s ever come within so much as sniffing range of Hereford, the regimental headquarters in Hereford, has written their life story. Second, half of those books belong in ‘fiction’ rather than ‘biography’ – for example, the balcony on the Iranian embassy would need to be about the size of Old Trafford to accommodate all those who claim to have been there during the 1980 siege – and I don’t want anyone to lump me in with that kind of stuff. Last, but by no means least, I signed the Official Secrets Act, and I take that very seriously. There’s a lot of stuff I did which would blow your mind if you knew about it, but legally I can’t write about it, and even if I could I wouldn’t want to. Those things are secret for lots of sound reasons, and I’m not going to compromise operational security just to make myself look good.

But what I can do is take things I learned from those missions and pass them on in ways which don’t endanger anyone. Hence the title Soldier. When you’re a soldier, it’s not just a word: it’s a way of life, and it’s all-encompassing. It’s how you live every aspect of that life: the standards you set, the values you uphold, the methods you use and the systems to which you belong. Being a soldier isn’t a nine-to-five job. You don’t take the role on and off with the uniform, and you don’t leave it in the barracks when you go home at night. When I read news reports about ‘an off-duty soldier’ – well, I know what they mean, but in a very real way as a soldier you’re never off-duty. Your duty is your life, and it’s with you and in you 24 hours a day.

The army is very keen on acronyms and mnemonics, so I’ve made one out of that single word ‘soldier’. There are seven chapters, one for each letter, and between them they cover much of what soldiering has taught me about various life challenges:

S is for Self: knowing yourself, looking after yourself and pushing yourself.

O is for Opportunity: how to be open to it and maximise it.

L is for Leadership: the importance of it and the best ways to accomplish it.

D is for Danger: the thrill of facing it and the ways to relish rather than fear it.

I is for Intelligence: the twin meanings of the word, intellect and information.

E is for Excellence: how to set, achieve and maintain the highest standards.

R is for Resilience: keeping going through all the setbacks life throws at you.

The lessons I’ve learned in all seven areas have made me not just a better soldier but also a better person, and the two are intertwined. I hope these lessons help you as much as they’ve helped me.

SELF

To be one’s self, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity.

Irving Wallace

You can’t be your best self until you know yourself. It sounds so obvious put like that, but you’d be surprised how few people really try to know themselves. In many ways, self-knowledge is actively discouraged in our society. It’s often seen as self-indulgent navel-gazing, an unhealthy egocentric fixation, rather than something properly worthwhile. ‘Finding yourself’ sounds very hippy-dippy Californian, and who’s got the time or inclination for that kind of stuff – especially in Britain, where we like to think we don’t take things too seriously?

Well, we make time for all kinds of stuff which in the scheme of things aren’t really that important, so spending a little time on something which is (to use a military term) mission critical is pretty much by definition time well spent. And crucially, this doesn’t need to involve a whole lot of angst and agonising, still less a weekly visit to a therapist to unburden yourself of every last childhood trauma. You simply need to apply basic analytical skills, the kind of stuff you do every day in any number of areas almost without thinking.

The best place to start is with a simple personality test. There are several different models around, each with their own strengths and weaknesses and also with their supporters and detractors, but the one I’ve found most useful is the Myers–Briggs test. This rates you in four main areas:

How you focus attention or get your energy (extraversion/introversion)

How you perceive or take in information (sensing/intuition)

How you prefer to make decisions (thinking/feeling)

How you orient yourself to the external world (judgement/perception)

You’re assigned to one category in each area, which means there are 16 possible personality types. There are no right or wrong answers, no ‘better’ or ‘worse’ personalities. I come out as ENFP – extraverted, intuitive, feeling and perceiving personality traits. (‘Intuitive’ is given the initial ‘N’ because ‘I’ is already taken by ‘introversion’.) ENFPs are known as campaigners, and among a campaigner’s main characteristics (both positive and negative) are the following ten, all of which apply to me:

Charming, independent, energetic and compassionate. I’ll let other people judge me on the first, but the other three definitely apply. Independence and energy were the things which got me in trouble as a kid!

Tends to embrace big ideas and actions that reflect their sense of hope and goodwill towards others. I’m always keen on new projects, the more ambitious the better, and I like to be around people and look for the best in them. I want to go out and experience things, and if that means stepping out of my comfort zone then so much