I remember stepping into a doorway. There was always one. And I would just literally look from here to where that puddle is away
and there's, with a smile on his face. Yep. With an AK, and let rip. Anytime, you know, one of those guys popped up,
you were chasing him down. He actually said, "I'm Saddam Hussein, the leader of Iraq, and I wanna negotiate."
And he's behind the sights and he's just clicking the T&E, click, click, click, like he's dialling in on something,
and it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, like, "Man, it's about to go down."
Yeah, so I think we're a generation apart, so yeah, you're a little bit older than me, but- No, but does that allow me to have a walking stick right now?
No. Or is that just experience we're talking about? No, no, but we definitely have some overlap, so I'm curious to hear some of the stories
that you've got and talk about, you know, kind of our path and how we got here. So let's go back to growing up, I suppose.
What was that like for you? Where did you grow up? Sure, I grew up on the East Coast of the States. Delaware, small-town upbringing.
My interest in the military came pretty early. I had... both my grandfathers, my mum's dad and my dad's dad
were both in World War II. [Billy] Okay. And my mum's grandfather, or my mum's father in particular,
I got him at an age where, you know, World War II guys didn't typically talk about stuff. I was young and he was old enough
that he finally started sharing some of those stories. And when he would tell me stories from World War II, he just talked about it, like, with such reverence,
like, I'd see his eyes light up. You know, he missed his mates, but whether he was telling a good story or a bad story, he was really excited to share it with me.
And I think that's what really lit the fire for me and kind of sparked my interest at an early age in the military. What were you like as a kid? Were you a good kid?
Good education, good family stuff and...? Yeah, good family. I mean, parents got divorced at a pretty early age.
Not a bad childhood. I was a bit of a troubled kid as a teenager. I was probably good when I was little,
but you know, as I got a little bit older, got into drinking and kind of having fun. When you're from a small town, you got nothing to do but get in trouble,
so I tended to a little bit. But yeah, sports kind of kept me on the straight and narrow a little bit,
and kind of kept me doing enough of the right things that I didn't get in too much trouble. Well, me, I grew up in a council estate
in the West Midlands into a family of five. I was a middle child, and I always tell people, anybody that's a middle child,
we're slightly different, and we were. It was a loving family. It was a very poor family. It was gangs where I grew up and I remember starting
from the age of nine, I started getting in a lot of trouble. I started to wanna be the guy who had the reputation
for being a tough guy and thinking that was the way to go, and it wasn't. So long story short, from nine, got into gangs,
11, I was already in juvenile court for actual bodily harm, grievous bodily harm... fighting, basically.
[Chris] Yeah. And then by 13, thinking I was cool being in a gang,
had a great idea while I was at school, and the idea was this: to be the big boy, I glued the maths teacher to the chair,
and it didn't go down too well, and I got thrown out of school. And really, I never really went back.
And then by 15, the gang warfare thing got a bit wild and I ended up in a fight and I got stabbed.
I got stabbed in the back and nearly died. [Chris] No s**t. Whilst I was recovering, I was lying there in the hospital bed, and I remember looking at my mum and dad and thinking,
"I've gotta get out of this. I've gotta stop this." This is at 15? Yeah, at 15. It's not me, the pain I'm in,
it's the pain I could see in their faces. And I thought, "This is just not right." And I knew what I was doing, you know? I had no one else to blame. I was the problem.
And it was then that I decided I've gotta get into the military. I knew it was gonna be difficult, I knew it was gonna be hard, and I always said to myself,
"I have to be here, I need to be here." It was that light that was gonna save me, and it was. Yeah. You know, like I said,
I was a kid that got in trouble quite a bit. I drank fairly young, and I knew, I just knew inside me that if I went to college, I was gonna p**s it away.
So the military definitely, about probably my junior year, probably about 17 years old, it really started to get into my head
as something that I wanted to go do, and so I did. I enlisted, same thing, infantry.
I had an airborne contract outta the gate. So went to basic training immediately out of high school in 1995.
Where was that? Where did you go? Where was your training? Fort Benning, Georgia is where they do infantry basic training in the States.
Yeah, and so yeah, basic training, then off to Airborne School, and while I was in Airborne School,