LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

and cradling him against my shoulder. ‘I’ll get it booked.’

      A sudden wave of excitement washed over me and I grinned in her direction.

      ‘How good is it going to be, standing on top of the world?’

      CHAPTER 2

       HOW TO HARNESS FEAR

Why did I want to climb Mount Everest so badly? Why was I taking deliberate, crazy risks when crossing busy roads? Why was my mind slipping into violent fantasies at the very moment I was being made to feel most coddled, in a Mayfair private members’ club over expensive whisky and cigars? What kind of a man would imagine such horrific things? Believe me, I didn’t want a terrorist to come bursting in with an AK47 and a bomb vest because I’m some psychopath. I didn’t want people to get hurt. What I wanted was to be handed a reason to leap up and stop people being hurt. I wanted to be forced into action. I wanted to be put in a position in which I had no choice but to perform or die. What I wanted – what I’d started craving almost like a drug – was fear.

This might seem strange, but that’s what my relationship with fear is like. I crave it. I need it. And as much as I need it, I also dread it. As I travel up and down the country meeting people on my tours, one of the questions I always get asked is a variation on this – ‘How did you get to be so fearless?’ The answer is, I didn’t become fearless. I don’t believe that’s even possible. I feel fear all the time. Not only do I feel it all the time, I hate it. It’s not that I’ve learned to conquer fear or enjoy it. It’s that I’ve learned how to use it. My experiences fighting in Afghanistan with the Marines and serving as ‘point man’ as a member of the Special Boat Service, the first man in as part of an elite team that was charged with capturing some of the world’s most dangerous men, taught me that fear is like a wild horse. You can let it trample all over you, or you can put a harness on it and let it carry you forwards, blasting you unscathed through the finish line.

      More than anything else, I believe that my ability to harness fear and use it to my advantage is the secret of my success. There’s no way I would have come out of Afghanistan, or any other theatre of war, in a healthy psychological state if I hadn’t learned how to do this. And more than that, there’s no way I’d have been a success in my personal or professional life if I hadn’t developed the ability to grab hold of the incredible power of human fear and let it take me where I wanted to go. I’ve now got to a place where I rely on fear. When it goes missing from my life I find myself becoming anxious and dissatisfied. Without fear, there’s no challenge. Without challenge, there’s no growth. Without growth, there’s no life.

INTO THE BUBBLE

      This method for harnessing fear has changed my life in ways that are almost unimaginable. It’s transformed me from the naïve, angry and dangerous young man I once was to the person I am today. The good news is that anyone can learn it. I call it the ‘the fear bubble’.

      Back when I was in the military, there were many times in the breaks between tours when I caught myself thinking that I didn’t want to return. The fear you experience on the battlefield is unbelievably intense. There are many different levels of fear, but ‘life or death’ is surely the worst of them all. Most people never experience the feeling that when they step around the next corner there’s a decent chance they’ll take a bullet in the skull. I had to deal with that time and time again.

Many amazingly brave and tough operators didn’t find a way of processing that level of fear and horror. I’ve seen the hardest and best soldiers brought to their knees, reduced to crumbling, quivering wrecks, in floods of tears. That’s what fear can do to you if you fail to harness it and let it trample you. Today, many of these men are suffering from serious, debilitating mental disorders from which they might never recover. Their marriages have fallen to pieces, they can’t sustain regular employment, and they’re utterly lost in drugs and alcohol. Some are homeless, some enmeshed in a life of street crime. They’ve been destroyed by fear.

      Although I was determined not to become one of these men when I served with the military, I could feel the effects of fear creeping up on me. When I was in the Special Forces, I’d be dropped off in a war zone in some grim and dusty back-end of the planet, and then for six interminable months it would feel as if I were utterly trapped in this enormous bubble of constant, crushing dread. As soon as I left the theatre of operations and my plane touched down in the UK, the bubble would suddenly burst and life would be great again. But when I began counting down the days until the start of the next tour, I started to experience that gut-wrenching feeling all over again. I didn’t want to go back.

      For a while I couldn’t work it out. What was wrong with me? What was that heavy, greasy sensation in the pit of my stomach? I loved my job. So why was I feeling that I didn’t want to go back? I had to be brutally honest with myself. The truth was, I was shit scared. Fear had got a grip of me, just like it had got a grip of thousands of brave and capable men before me.

I didn’t know what to do. How could I ever solve the problem of experiencing intense fear on the battlefield? Of course you’re going to be scared when the air is filled with bullets and the ground is filled with IEDs (improvised explosive devices). Surely this was an impossible task? It then occurred to me that if I couldn’t get rid of fear completely, perhaps I could break it down into smaller packets so that it was a little less all-consuming and relentless. So that’s what I did. After giving it some thought, I realised I needed to adopt a coldly rational view of why I was feeling scared and, even more importantly, when I was feeling scared. Why, for example, was I experiencing such dread two weeks before my deployment, when I was still in the safety and joyfulness of my family home? There was nothing to be scared of there. Nothing whatsoever.

      And while I was at it, what was the point of being scared when I landed in whatever unnamed conflict zone to which I happened to have been assigned? We were usually stationed in a secure area inside some form of military base. If you actually thought about it, a military base was one of the safest places on the planet, teeming with highly trained men and women, and guarded with the latest military equipment. There was not much, realistically, to be scared about there. Statistically, you were probably more likely to be walking around with an undiagnosed tumour in your body than you were to be killed by the enemy in a place like that, and nobody on the base was running around all day fretting about whether or not they had cancer.

And what about when I was on an actual operation? When I was dropped off behind enemy lines, I didn’t need to be in that bubble of fear. No bullets would be flying. We’d land in a safe space and be entirely incognito. The lads would be with me. When I was approaching the target location, where we’d often be attempting the hard arrest of a terrorist leader, there was no point being in that bubble of fear either. That would be a lengthy walk in complete silence through the darkness – several hours of relative safety. It was only when I actually got onto target, where the bad guys were, that it was really appropriate to feel scared.

      From my very next mission onwards I put this coldly rational approach to fear into practice. I tried to make it a cast-iron rule. The proper time to feel scared was when we were inside the process of an active operation. At all other times, I told myself, the fear was irrational. Pointless. So shake it off.

      And it worked. Kind of. As soon as we hit the target, the fear would take me. I’d be inside that bubble, gripped with absolutely gut-wrenching dread until we were done. After the completion of the mission I’d run on to the helicopter, and the moment the door had closed and we’d lifted off to a safe altitude I’d be out of the bubble. Happy. Elated. Delirious. Thank God. And I wouldn’t allow myself to feel fear again until the next mission was in play.

But after a couple of months of this the old feeling started to return. As much as I genuinely loved being a Special Forces operator, the grinding, bubbling sensation in the pit of my stomach when I thought about getting on that helicopter came back. Brutal honesty. I was shit scared. Again. Although I’d managed

Скачать книгу