Apache

Two months after my eighteenth birthday, I enlisted in the Parachute Regiment. I didn’t particularly want to be a soldier, and I only asked for the airborne because The Paras was on TV at the time. It looked like a good challenge.

‘You’ll never pass, son. You haven’t got what it takes,’ my dad said. It was a textbook case of reverse psychology, but I didn’t recognise it as such at the time. It gave me all the determination I needed to pass P Company.

I was posted to 2 Para. I got one hell of a kicking as a crow – military slang for a junior paratrooper – but everybody did in those days. It was the 1980s, and the battalion was full of hard men with droopy moustaches who’d fought at Goose Green during the Falklands War.

Once my bust nose, dislocated jaw, three broken ribs and split testicle had healed, I fell in love with life as a paratrooper – surprising everyone, myself the most. After a couple of years and a six-month combat tour to Enniskillen fighting the IRA, I won promotion to lance corporal.

But I was still an angry young man, and getting into too many fights. I never started them, but I always had to be the one to finish them. The red mist would descend and I could never back down. I even once flattened an RMP sergeant who wound me up on a train, and had to do fourteen days in the regimental nick.

After promotion to full corporal and with the promise of sergeant’s stripes if I could keep out of trouble, I began to take my military career a little more seriously. I wanted to challenge myself at the highest level, so I began to prepare for SAS selection.

Months of hard, self-imposed training followed, but my ambitions came to a sudden end one night in Aldershot during a gruelling bicycle ride in the pouring rain. I’d let half the air out of the tyres to make the pedalling twice as hard. A Volvo clipped my handlebars on a main road, sending me careering across the road and under the wheels of an old man’s oncoming car. My head hit the bumper and my feet peeled round and went through the windscreen, before the bloke drove over my right arm and shoulder. My heart stopped in the ambulance on the way to hospital.

In the days that followed, I learned the true meaning of pain. During one operation I was handcuffed to a bed and a vice-like clamp was strapped around my haemorrhaging kidneys for half an hour to squeeze the blood out of them.

It was six months before I put on a uniform again and nine before I could run. I was no use to the Paras any more; my bust shoulder, spine, hips, knees and ankles could no longer bear any real weight. My front-line fighting career was at an end, and I was devastated. I had lost my purpose in life and was forced to abandon all my dreams of SAS selection. My gloom deepened as I contemplated my lack of a future – until a mate suggested the Army Air Corps. If I couldn’t fight on the front line, perhaps I could fly people to it instead. Perhaps I could even fly for the SAS.

Then came a stroke of luck – my doctor lost all my medical records. Suddenly, and against all expectations, I stood a chance of passing the Army Air Corps’ stringent medical with my battered body.

I was accepted, and came top of my class at flying school. I had to – it was my last chance. I loved flying and the freedom it gave me and I relished playing my part in battle formations. But I hated flying routine ass and trash flights, so whenever anything interesting came up, I went for it. It was always about the next challenge – it always has been.

I got a place on a reconnaissance squadron, flying Gazelles. Five years later, I began to fly for the SAS, hunting down war criminals in the Balkans. The work was amazing, the most exciting I’d ever done.

Something else happened in Bosnia. In late 2002, I met Emily. She was a nursing officer in the RAF. After a night out in the local town, I hitched a lift back to base in the back of the same Land Rover. In thick fog, the vehicle left the road, flipped and rolled down a bank into a muddy irrigation ditch. Emily was trapped in the back, under four feet of water. I pulled her out.

I went to see her in hospital the next day. I was single again – I was the proud father of two children by two previous relationships, but neither had worked out. Emily was a pretty blonde Scot, and as sharp as she was funny. She was way out of my league and we both knew it. By the end of the week, I’d decided I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.

But Emily wasn’t convinced. At least she was honest with me.

‘Listen Ed, I don’t date full stop. If I did date, I certainly wouldn’t date a Pongo. And If I did date a Pongo you can bet your life I wouldn’t date a flyboy Pongo. So why don’t you quit with your pride intact?’

‘Aha – so that’s not a no…’