I was reading that you commissioned and paid for a survey about the treatment of ex-service personal why did you did this and what did you find?
Well I have just written a book called Seven Troop and it's about the time in the special air service with the group I was in Seven Troop and when the guys came out there were three of them, out of a group of eight, suffered from post traumatic stress disorder and there was no help, once you are out of the army there's no help.
So the survey was trying to look at the UK's attitudes to ex-soldiers and it was fantastic 49% of the survey, it was a three thousand people survey, said they would pay an extra penny on income tax if it went directly to veterans welfare and that's great.
Soldiers and the army is very topical with more claims of bullying of the young recruits that has been uncovered by the BBC is it out of line or just part of army life?
I go to ITC once a year and I go and talk to recruits, not about soldiering, but about education and how to use the army education system to get on and I show them all the films that I have been involved with and say 'If I can do it lads then so can you'. So when a recruit turns up he is given a card and on that card is the number of every welfare association the army has got from the Pardres to the British Legion then all the civilian ones like the Samaritans so that if he feels he is being bullied he can phone them, their parents get a card as well.
Unfortunately what has happened in that programme is there is no bullying if there had been bullying it would have been reported by the people that were there and now five junior NCO's have been suspended, not suspended as in they have got to go home, but withdrawn from their jobs.
Unfortunately the downside to that whether they are guilty or not, and personally I don't think that they are guilty, that will effect their careers. What people forget is that the ITC (Infantry Training Centre) so every infantry soldier from a Gurkha to a parachute regiment soldier is trained their and the job of those people that recruit is to keep those eighteen and nineteen years olds alive when they go to Afghanistan.
So the training is hard and it is aggressive because they are in the infantry and the whole job of an infantry soldier is to close in and destroy the enemy so that's why they do bayonet training and all that because they have to be as aggressive as possible to keep them alive so if you start softening the process, and I'm not talking about bullying I was in the army of eighteen years I have the done the job of training recruits and I was a boy soldier in a boy battalion and there was bullying but all that stopped years ago, if you start doing that you lose that potential soldier.
So I believe that there wasn't bullying and chances are that the lad got shouted a bit too much, what you saw on the programme, but everything was alluded to what the situation could have been as opposed to the facts so I'm quite pissed off about it actually I think it's cheap journalism.
Away from the army you have had a very successful career as an author how did you make the transition?
Fluke really I got out to work for a private military company and go to Columbia, because of the drugs wars, and I got asked if I wanted to write Bravo Two Zero because there was a lot of conjecture in the media about this Bravo Two Zero thing, stories about power stations being blown up, so the idea was to write the book for military guys to buy, you know people who like that sort of thing. So no one was expecting the whole thing to kick off and I went back to Columbia and I got a phone call saying did I want to do another one and I was like what do you think?
Is there any part of military life that you miss?
Yeah I miss quite a lot of it that's why I like going back, I like the trips, it feels quite comfortable. it's weird, I didn't realise it at the time, but I came out of one extreme thing and, because of the success of bravo Two Zero, went into another extreme thing so it's been quite strange adapting into this, this is real life.
It is strange the language is different the whole social, the way people interact and deal with each other, is different so I feel more comfortable there than here.
Finally what is next for you?
Well tomorrow I'm going to Germany to promote Seven Troop. but basically now there's another book coming out in November, which is part of the Nick Stone thriller series, but I'm trying to finish off writing a film script for the film of the nick Stone stories. But I'm really looking towards doing another series of DVD's for next year, so very much following on the same thing looking at these guys doing interviews and trying to keep it to the same format.
What usually happen is when they want to do it again, it's showing in the states now so it's quite successful, they go to change it in a way that people think why did they do that. So we are just looking at it now but what we have discovered is that 45% of the viewing figures were women which is great and it's same with the books, actually it's a bit less it's about 42% of the readership are female, as it's identifying with people.
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw