a lot of steam building up. I can feel it. And if I don’t let it off up that mountain, I might end up doing it outside some bar or something. If I don’t get the buzz I need, I’m going to find that buzz myself, whether it’s breaking the law or offending someone or fighting someone. I can’t end up back in that place again. We’d lose everything. It is sixty grand. But you should see it as an insurance payment.’
‘It’s not dangerous, is it?’
‘Not for me it isn’t. I could walk up Everest backwards. They’ve had all sorts up there on the summit. Postmen. Celebrities. It’s just an adventure holiday. Just something to sort my head out.’
To be honest, there was never really any chance of Emilie standing in the way of my going. Although she sometimes worried about me, she always trusted me, and I always respected her enough to run anything I wanted to do past her. When I’d served in the military, she hadn’t been like the wives and girlfriends of some of the other men, worrying and fussing and distracting them with the anxieties and problems of home life. As had been my wish, Emilie just let me get on with serving my country when I went away, and that allowed me to keep my head clear and focused on the job in hand. She didn’t call. She didn’t write letters. And that’s exactly how I liked it. Her strength of character helped keep me alive. I’m not exaggerating when I say that Emilie has always been the perfect partner for me. We instinctively understand what each other needs and we always do our best to provide it. Me and her are an unbreakable team.
She also knew I wasn’t lying when I told her I could walk up the mountain backwards. In Everest I’d found the ideal challenge to tame that warrior ghost inside me, at least for the time being. Nobody could deny that climbing the world’s highest mountain was dangerous. Its list of confirmed kills was impressive. But I wasn’t just anyone.
I’d often told Emilie that I was invincible, and I wasn’t really joking. I didn’t really believe anything could kill me – and it was this belief that had kept me in one piece. Nothing that had ever been thrown at me had taken me out. All those people I’d read about on Wikipedia who’d fallen down crevasses or succumbed to exhaustion or organ failure or a cerebral oedema, whatever that was – I felt bad for them, but they weren’t me. Everest would give me a taste of the danger that I’d begun to crave, that was probably true, but it wasn’t going to pose me any genuine problems. If anything, it would be too easy. This would be a camping trip. A walk in the park.
‘Thanks, Emilie,’ I said, lifting Bligh out of his seat 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
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
