Mark Wales - Survivor: Life in the SAS

About Survivor

Forging resilience

Finding purpose

Mastering transformation

How do you rebuild your life when youve hit rock bottom?

Mark Wales thought his life would end in a cornfield in Afghanistan.

Mark and his SAS troops emerged from that scorched battlefield twelve hours later, his mentor gunned down, his dream career now a nightmare. Over four deployments of intense warfighting, Mark watched the line between right and wrong become blurred. When he left the SAS he was adrift, crippled by guilt.

On a mission to rebuild himself, Mark turned his life around. He fought his way into the gates of a US Ivy League business school and into the boardrooms of top-tier international corporations. He spent years navigating failure in a quest to find new meaning in life. With every setback Mark counterattacked, discovering the tactics and tools needed to become more resilient, and to find happiness, belonging and purpose.

Told with gripping suspense, humour and touching warmth, Survivor is Marks extraordinary life in and out of the SAS, a story of resilience and a testament to the power of transformation.

Praise for Survivor

A powerful, honest story of courage, redemption and finding purpose after experiencing so much horror and hardship with the Australian SAS in Afghanistan.

BEAR GRYLLS OBE

British adventurer, author and SAS veteran

In Special Forces it is often said the thinking is at least as important as the fighting. Through these pages Mark Wales is shown as a thinking soldier. And further, a person of magnificent generosity, taking us to rarely trespassed ground, the battlefield within.

CHRIS MASTERS PSM

Gold Walkley award-winning journalist and author

Mark Wales is one of those men to whom we have outsourced the responsibility to kill and be killed so we may live as we do. If you read one book about the SAS, Afghanistan, those Australians who fought the war on our behalf and the price they have paid for it, this is it. The power is in the story. In this one, discover your own and be inspired to be a better person and a better Australian.

HON DR BRENDAN NELSON AO

Former Director of the Australian War Memorial and former Minister for Defence

Searing, humbling and uplifting by turns, this story vibrates with the energy of a former SAS officer and his empowering search for peace and a new life. This man is a remarkable package: elite warrior, hungry entrepreneur, and a survivor determined to overcome his emotional wounds. Mark Wales is a true inspiration.

MAJOR GENERAL JOHN CANTWELL AO, DSC

Bestselling author of Exit Wounds and retired Australian Army general

Marks book is a great lesson that even the strong can feel weak, and that allows the weak to feel strong in the face of adversity. Survivor is action-packed and reminds us all that a veterans sacrifice is not for a period of time in a foreign land. It is here and it is eternal.

MERRICK WATTS

Comedian and joint winner of SAS Australia (2020)

When I met Mark on Australian Survivor I knew instantly he was a big tough guy with an even bigger heart the size of Texas. What I didnt know was the daunting rollercoaster ride of courage and pain, risk and terror that he had been through to arrive there. A true survivor! His book is a must read the tribe has spoken.

JONATHAN LAPAGLIA

Actor and host of Australian Survivor

Modern war can be confounding, confusing and unyielding, but this modern warriors story invites the reader to understand the fear and resilience, strength and incredible innovation of the Australian combatants involved. A very personal story with an international scope, this is an engrossing book thats about triumphing in life during and after a war that was often less than triumphant.

BEN MCKELVEY

Author and journalist

This is a story of a man tested by both war and peace a gripping read for young Australians.

HON ANDREW HASTIE MP

Federal Member for Canning and SASR veteran

CONTENTS

To Harry and Samantha. Turns out the light at the end of the tunnel was both of you.

To Keegan and Leigh, as promised.

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

Authors Note

There is a side of war that is rarely told by those who experience its rough embrace. Most military books focus on the hard-won battle but not so much on the blaze that war starts in your mind and which follows you home, where it continues to burn, often scorching those around you. Combatants, civilians, families the survivors... war costs us all dearly.

I joined the military as a young man, wanting to rescue people in need. I had studied battles and wars as a history undergraduate; I had listened in awe to the stories of men including my own relatives who had fought in the jungles of New Guinea and Vietnam. I decided my mission in life would be to join the SAS, the famous unit that terrorised the Afrika Corps in World War II and, 70 years later, would earn the nickname the red beards in the mountains of Afghanistan.

I passed selection to join the revered unit (with an unusually high population of redheads). Standing on the shoulders of giants, we helped grow the unit into a 21st-century combat outfit. Over six years, I fought alongside my mates in Australias longest war the twelve-year Afghanistan campaign. I was professionally trained in warfighting by then, so I believed I knew enough to survive... How wrong I was.

I did survive the conflict but what I didnt anticipate had no idea of was the cost of the war. Cost in every sense: personal, professional and human.

In the decade that followed, a blaze smouldered away in me every single night. The residue of combat was insoluble. I tried to wash it away, hide from it, mask it, outrun it, outdrink it, outwork it and even bury it. Sitting alone in a one-bedroom apartment in Canberra, then Perth, Philadelphia and New York City, my mind never quite left the mountains and muddy aqueducts of Afghanistan. I tried to move on into new professions. I wandered the corporate landscape in a grey suit and leather shoes, bewildered, hoping to find a new tribe, trying to fit in only to realise I would never fit in again. Eventually, I stopped trying. I knew I would have to find my own path.

This book is my record of those years, from the battlefields of south-central Asia to the silent battle fought within, and how I overcame their legacy. It is my intention to reveal the human side of special operations soldiers a side that is rarely seen, given the secrecy in which we operate and to show that, despite the way we might be characterised, we are not robots, devoid of the normal range of human emotions. Like everyone else, we feel fear, anger, empathy, embarrassment, sadness, wonder, grace, humour, anxiety and hope. I have come to believe that, far from representing weakness, emotions such as these are our greatest assets.

I hope that my story will help you to harness your own blaze, and inspire you to hope, to love and to stay in the fight, no matter what the battlefield.