The Lasting Scars of War | No Man Left Behind

[Music] When I joined the regiment, you read about SAS history, and um, I can remember uh reading a story about a guy called uh Jordi Silico. He held the record for walking through the desert in North Africa, and it was 100 miles. It was the longest escape in Asia. When I found out that I'd walked some 200 miles, I never felt like it was breaking a record. I didn't think it was ever anything special. It was uh, you know, we were just doing our job. We were sent in actually to do something that uh was quite important. Sadly, it went wrong, and uh, you know, it cost three men their lives.

Sadly, two of them died of hypothermia, and one was killed by Iraqi forces. Once I got out and uh, had the checks and everything else, it took six weeks for the feeling to come back into my fingers and toes. I had a damaged liver, kidneys, and a blood disorder from the contaminated water that I had consumed. The blisters healed, you know, after a few weeks. The weight loss came back after a few months. The mental toll, well, that came out on another operation several months later.

Basically, that was just a matter of time before you get over that. You know, there is a big thing about, you know, post-traumatic stress and everything else. Basically, time's a great healer. The blood disorder uh, that's still haunting me at the moment, 25 years after the event. Once you get home, you contemplate on what we've achieved and what went down and who you lost. The first thing is you think of your colleagues that aren't coming back and uh, the devastation on their families.

Then you think of the other side and the devastation, you know, the Iraqis went through and what did we achieve from that? You can run it through your mind, you're not going to change it. You know, it's happened, so you've got to accept it and just move on. If you let it play on your mind, you'd go crazy.