Today Everything Changes: Quick Read (6 page)

Within weeks of joining the SAS, I found myself in the education centre wearing headphones and learning Morse code. I’d thought
I was going to be running around in my SAS beret, doing SAS stuff, but instead I was back at school.

Part of the Special Air Service’s job is to work with other nations’ armies. But you can’t expect everybody to speak English, so you have to speak their language. It’s no use being in another country with weapons and ammunition if you can’t actually talk to the people you’re fighting the war with.

During my ten years in the SAS, I learned to speak Spanish because I did a lot of work in Colombia on anti-drugs operations. I also learned Swahili because I spent so much time working in Africa. Two old Christian monks with long, white beards who had worked as missionaries in Africa came into the education centre to teach us. It was a funny sight, those two in their dark-brown robes with rope tied about their waists like a belt, teaching a classroom full of rough, tough SAS men.

I started to learn more about grammar, the way words are formed and used. When it got hard, I used to think, I’m not thick, just not educated yet. But from today everything changes.

No one in the SAS was embarrassed if they didn’t know something. Nobody on the planet knows everything. The whole point of being in
a classroom is to learn, so it was good to put your hand up and say, ‘I don’t understand. Can you help me?’

When I did the demolitions course, I thought, Fantastic! I’m going be running around blowing up power stations and bridges. But again I found that it wasn’t about the bang-bang. It was all about maths. I went back to school before I got my hands on any explosives at all.

Explosions are not like they are in Hollywood films, with a big blast, a massive fireball, and the bridge comes tumbling down. An SAS strike uses the minimum amount of explosives to create the maximum damage. Then there’s less to carry and less to conceal.

With a bridge, the aim is to make specific cuts so that it will collapse under its own weight. To take down a building, you initiate its fall, and the building itself does the rest.

We learned how to blow up everything from telephone lines to power stations, trains and planes. Everything had to be destroyed in such a manner that it couldn’t be repaired or replaced or – if it could be – it must take a long time to do it. Destroying something did not always mean taking it off the face of the Earth. It might just mean penetrating a machine far enough to disturb its turning parts so that it destroys itself. The skill is in working out where the weak part is, getting in there to do the job and getting away again.

A large factory or even a small town may come to a standstill if you take out an electricity sub-station.

Many motorways and other structures are built with concrete, so we learned how to destroy it – and that did take a lot of explosives. Sometimes it wasn’t enough just to take down the spans of bridges: the piers had to be cut as well to maximise the damage. Gaps can be repaired; high sections of a motorway can be replaced in a fortnight, as Californians prove every time they have an earthquake.

If you’re in a foreign country to blow something up, you probably won’t have arrived in your uniform and carrying all the kit you’ll need. You often go in undercover, in civilian clothes, with a cover story and cover documents.

First, you use your navigation skills to find the target. Then you use the maths you learned in the education centre to work out where you’re going to place your explosives and in what amounts. After that, you go out and buy the ingredients to make a bomb.

You have to go to the local equivalent of Tesco and Boots, using the language you learned in Hereford, to buy boring, everyday products that will combine to make explosives. All the mixtures need to be in your head. Every spare
moment we had was taken up with learning by heart the nine different types of high explosive. You can’t be undercover with them jotted down in a notebook in your back pocket.

But it wasn’t only the ingredients you had to learn. It was also the complicated processes for putting them together.

Once you’d made the explosives, you would use maths to be sure they were going to be effective. That was the only way to work out the exact amount of explosive that would be needed. Maths ensured that, when I pressed the button to blow up the device, I wouldn’t end up with a big bang and a cloud of smoke that cleared to show the target still standing.

All that learning took three months in the education centre in Hereford. It was the first time I’d ever really got to grips with maths. I’d done a bit to pass my exam, but now I had to apply myself to it. I remembered the captain’s words: the only reason I couldn’t do it was because I hadn’t done it before. And the more I learned, the easier it got.

When the first Gulf War started, in 1990, I was once again a sergeant and in command of an eight-man foot patrol whose radio call sign was Bravo Two Zero. Our mission was to go to the north-west of Baghdad before the ground war started and cut a fibre-optic cable that ran from Baghdad into the Western Desert. Iraqi Scud missiles were being fired from there into Israel.

The idea was that if we could cut the control cable that told the Scud missiles when to fire, they wouldn’t be fired into Israel, and Israel wouldn’t be drawn into the war. The mission was a failure. We didn’t find the fibre-optic cable. Out of the eight men who went into Iraq, three were killed and four were captured, including myself. Only one made it to the safety of Syria and back to British lines.

I spent just over six weeks in Baghdad where we were interrogated by the Iraqi secret police. We were blindfolded, handcuffed, beaten, burned and whipped. I even had some teeth
pulled out as they tried to discover what our mission was.

When the war ended, the four of us were exchanged for Iraqi prisoners and returned to the UK.

I served for another three years in the SAS, a total of eighteen years in the army, before being offered a job with a private military company. I took it, with about twelve other people who left at the same time. It was now that I was asked to write about the Bravo Two Zero mission and my experiences during the first Gulf War.

Write a book? I thought. Why not? I knew the subject pretty well. And since the first Gulf War, I had had to write several reports and give talks on the mission. I thought, I might be able to do this. I might actually be able to write a book.

It took me four months to write it and, to my surprise, it went straight into the bestseller lists after it was published.
Bravo Two Zero
is now ranked as the biggest-selling war book of all time, anywhere in the world. Its success sparked off a whole new career for me.

Now, instead of reading the back pages of the
Sun
, I write articles for the newspaper regularly. I also write for many other national newspapers and magazines. I write bestselling thrillers,
children’s books and film scripts. That doesn’t mean I know it all. I don’t. Nobody does. I still learn from others. I go and listen to famous scriptwriters and others and soak up their advice. I’m still not embarrassed to ask questions if I don’t know what people are talking about. How else am I supposed to learn?

I still read for pleasure. At the moment, I’m interested in the classics, written by people I’d never heard of when I was younger, like Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and Mark Twain. I’m still boring people silly when I talk about what I’ve just read. They all seem to have read those books when they were at school. But I don’t care! I like talking about books.

Maybe I’ll stop reading the classics soon and try some history. It doesn’t matter what I’m reading. All I know is that what the captain told me when I very first read a book was true: reading gives you knowledge and that gives you choice and opportunity in whatever you want to do in life.

These days, I go to junior soldier camps and talk about my experiences. I tell them everything you’ve just been reading, and I always repeat what the captain told me and the other lads sitting in his classroom for the very first time.

‘You’re not thick, you’re just not educated yet. The only reason you can’t read is because you don’t read. But from today everything changes.’

I’ll end with a sentence of my own.

If I can do it, so can you.

Andy McNab became a soldier as a young man and joined the SAS in 1984. During the Gulf War he led the famous Bravo Two Zero patrol. He left the SAS in 1993, and now lectures to security and intelligence agencies in the USA and the UK.

Andy McNab has written about his life in the army and the SAS in the bestsellers,
Bravo Two Zero, Immediate Action
and
Seven Troop. Bravo Two Zero
was made into a film starring Sean Bean.

He is also the author of seventeen bestselling thrillers, four novels for children and two previous Quick Read titles,
The Grey Man
and
Last Night, Another Soldier.
He has also edited
Spoken from the Front
, a book of interviews with the British men and women serving in Afghanistan.

Also by Andy McNab

Non-fiction

Bravo Two Zero
Immediate Action
Seven Troop
Spoken from the Front (edited)

Fiction

The Grey Man
Last Night, Another Soldier
Remote Control
Crisis Four
Firewall
Last Light
Liberation Day
Dark Winter
Deep Black
Aggressor
Recoil
Crossfire
Brute Force
Exit Wound
Zero Hour
Dead Centre
War Torn
Battle Lines
Red Notice

and published by Corgi Books

TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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TODAY EVERYTHING CHANGES
A CORGI BOOK: 9780552168984
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781448154425

First publication in Great Britain
Corgi edition published 2013

Copyright © Andy McNab 2013

Andy McNab has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of the author. In some cases names of people, places, dates, sequences or the detail of events have been changed solely to protect the privacy of others. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in such minor respects not affecting the substantial accuracy of the work, the contents of this book are true.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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