Ant Middleton - Mental Fitness

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

HarperCollinsPublishers

1st Floor, Watermarque Building, Ringsend Road

Dublin 4, Ireland

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2021

FIRST EDITION

Ant Middleton 2021

Cover design by Claire Ward HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021

Cover photograph Andrew Brown

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Ant Middleton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Find out about HarperCollins and the environment at

www.harpercollins.co.uk/green

Source ISBN: 9780008472267

Ebook Edition November 2021 ISBN: 9780008472306

Version: 2021-11-01

This ebook contains the following accessibility features which, if supported by your device, can be accessed via your ereader/accessibility settings:

• Change of font size and line height
• Change of background and font colours
• Change of font
• Change justification
• Text to speech
• Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008472267

I dedicate this book to two very close military friends, Carnage and Concrete Head. Ive fought multiple battles side by side with them, and they both stepped up in my time of need, when most turned their backs. Fuck me, we had some fun, didnt we? But the real fun is yet to come ... Standby! Standby!

CHAPTER 1

Unite your body and mind.

At first the village was just a beige smudge in the far distance. After a couple more minutes, as our Chinook hauled us closer, I was able to see more detail. The settlement was a huddle of dusty brick and mud surrounded by green rice fields. A brackish-looking river snaked along its southern edge. If I looked carefully, I could make out beaten-up trucks trundling around the villages perimeter and tiny figures darting through its streets. Some of the figures were pushing barrows stacked with goods, others were leading donkeys. None of them knew what was coming.

Above all of this, the sun was climbing into a vivid blue sky that was broken up here and there by ragged shreds of cloud. I shaded my eyes with my hand for a second, tried to block out the insistent scream of the helicopters engines and thought about what had brought a group of Royal Marines to a seemingly unremarkable settlement in a remote part of Afghanistan.

For weeks our intelligence guys had been picking up rumours of strange activity. At first it was just a rumble or two, but gradually a fuller picture had emerged. We learned from village elders who were speaking in confidence that the inhabitants were petrified. This was enough to tell us that something shady was going on. There was talk of narcotics, a training school for the insurgents, IED facilitators. And we were told that the Taliban were storing all sorts of illicit equipment, using the village as a centre for dishing out improvised explosive device components and weapons. The whole circus in just one village.

Thats what these fuckers did. Whatever claims they might have made about their desire to protect ordinary Afghans from the foreign infidels who had come to their country in the aftermath of 9/11, they were parasites. They didnt give two shits about the locals. They didnt care how much danger they exposed these ordinary people to or how much disruption they inflicted on lives that were already precarious and tough.

We did care. We genuinely believed that we had a responsibility to do everything we could to keep them safe. Otherwise, what was the point of us being here at all? We also knew that we had to stamp out the Taliban wherever they appeared. This meant we had to walk a thin line. The insurgents took up residence in these sorts of settlements precisely because they knew that we were bound by our own rules of engagement. While we had a duty to preserve life, and acted accordingly, they would use the farmers and traders and wives and kids who lived there as both a disguise and a human shield. I found that despicable.

The simplest thing for us to have done would have been to blow the place to pieces and then search through the wreckage for clues. The Americans would have blitzed up the whole fucking village, and theyd have felt justified doing that. Theyd point to all the weapons and explosives that were allegedly being cached, and that would be enough for them to ruin the livelihoods of all of the other poor sods who were just trying to get on with things. There would be carnage, and anyone or anything that got in the way would be collateral damage. Bad luck for them. But that wasnt how we wanted to conduct our business. Instead, the powers that be had decided to send a detachment of Royal Marines to find out exactly what was going on. We were there to ask questions and find out what was going on. Using force would be a last resort.

The plan was that wed be landing during the day on the outskirts of the village where the compounds met the scrub and dust of the desert then make our way into the village and have a dig around. We werent going in expecting a vicious firefight, but we didnt know exactly what lay in store for us. Perhaps the Taliban had prepared a trap. Perhaps they wanted to draw us into the villages narrow, winding streets then gun us down. Perhaps one of them was waiting, his finger hovering over the button of a detonator, ready to set off one of their murderous IEDs and blow us into bloody tatters the second we walked past. It didnt pay to dwell too long on those thoughts.

And whatever the elders might have said to our intelligence officers, we couldnt be sure whether wed get a friendly reception from the villagers. Any given individual we approached would be aware that the Taliban were probably watching our interaction with them. The wrong move could see them and their family punished. So the stakes were high, and the demands on our concentration and application immense. We had to be firm, but not aggressive; friendly, but vigilant. Even assuming that what wed been told about insurgent activity was true, it was unlikely that wed catch anybody red-handed the Taliban had an incredible ability to just melt away at the slightest sign of danger. But if we did everything properly, and located what wed been told was there, then wed be able to seize enough of their gear to seriously disrupt their operations.

As we began our descent, we all went through the routines that had become second nature to all of us over the course of the tour: checking weapons, making sure that all the straps on our Bergens were tight; exchanging glances with the guys sitting near us to make sure they were ok. I could feel that increasingly familiar prickle of adrenaline along my spine: my body telling me that it was prepared for whatever was about to unfold. I knew that we were ready for our encounter with the villagers. The question was, were they?

A Boeing CH-47 Chinook is 30 metres long, can weigh up to 15,000 kg and has two 4,733 hp engines. Its so loud that when one approaches it can feel as if its personally attacking your eardrums and it kicks up so much dust as it comes down to land that you could be forgiven for feeling youve been caught in a sandstorm. Which is all an elaborate way of saying that if youre an Afghan farmer, and a pair of Chinooks explode unannounced out of the sky when youve barely finished your breakfast, then it can really fucking ruin your morning.