Solo Escape from Iraq | No Man Left Behind

I was a 28-year-old guy loving life and everything else. And uh, I was in the Special Air Service. I can remember flying in; the first thing that came over the headset was the pilot saying, "Welcome to Iraq." From that point, a new game was on. The 8-man patrol was tasked to insert 140 miles into Iraq to locate mobile SC launchers. When they call the SAS, it's not to do negotiations; it's to resolve a situation with violence.

Saddam had sent messages out that if any local found a coalition soldier, you'd be rewarded in some way. If they capture us, then you're going to be subject to interrogations. The chance of being compromised was going to be really, really high. Fear is a good emotion to feel; it keeps you alive.

We're sitting in the W. This kid came right on top of the overhang; his reaction was immediate. We'd actually been badly compromised, and we've got to get going now. We've got to move.

More or less the same time, two vehicles turned up, and straight away the firefight happened. It's gone noisy; everybody was opening up. Rounds were going back and forth. We started getting rid of all our equipment—unnecessary equipment in our rucksacks—just ditching anything that we didn't need to lighten the load.

Any other day, they could have had all eight of us. I mean, it was a shooting gallery, so we were very lucky to get out of it. At that point, we crossed a series of tracks and got to the foot of the ridge line. I turned around expecting to see the whole of the patrol, and to my shock, there were two men standing there—nobody else.

How we became separated, I have no idea. But the bottom line is, during the night, we ended up by ourselves. It's such a fright because you've diluted this patrol now into three men with two weapons. I was thinking it can't get any worse; it just can't get worse. But it was going to get a lot worse.

At the beginning of this operation, if I had been told this is what's going to happen to you, I'm not sure if I could have carried it out. I reached that point where I thought, you know, two days, maybe three, and you're going to be lucky if you get the third day. Now, every time you get knocked down, you get back up, and then you start looking at things positively. You can see a way out.

I think I've got a technique in terms of blocking things out of my mind when I've been hurt and then moving on. If you don't do anything, you're going to die. It's just you or death, and are you willing to accept it? When you read about stories of men on the battlefield dying, they'll either call for God, or they'll call for their mother, or they'll call for their wife. For me, it was my daughter, and I suppose that's what pushed me on right up until the end.