Andy McNab is a British soldier, serving in the infantry as a Royal Green Jacket, joining the infantry at the age of sixteen and serving in Northern Ireland before being selected for the SAS.In the SAS he served in the Middle East as well as Southern and Central America. He shot to prominence in 1993 when, after leaving the SAS, he wrote a book on the failed mission Bravo Two Zero, which told of the events that happened during the Gulf War.Since then he has gone on to write a series of fiction and non fiction novels and has, more recently, been behind the documentary Tour of Duty which looked at the soldiers serving in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. I caught up with him to talk about his new project.
You are promoting your DVD Tour of Duty can you tell me a bit about it?
For the past three or four years all the stories that are coming our of Iraq and Afghanistan it's always someone else telling the stories so the idea is is to get the guys that were involved in these things to talk about it themselves. Instead of me sitting there all day gobbing off about it lets get these lads in as they know the story well, they are articulate and actually what happens is you get all the emotion and you can identify with them.
The programme gives an insight into the soldier's lives whilst in Afghanistan and Iraq what do you hope the show will achieve?
Well just to show they are just the same as everyone else if you read the media first of all it's all doom and gloom these lads are hanging themselves and all that load of old rubbish and the other one is they are all monster going around killing civilians and it's just not so they are just like us. The average age in an infantry battalion is twenty one so it's just showing these faces and what they have been doing and some of these stories are amazing these lads from inner city Birmingham or whatever they are put into these situations and they perform really well.
How did you go about collecting the film did you go out there yourself?
Yeah I've just come back, I've been in Afghanistan and I came back about nine days ago, and what happens a lot of the guys do their own filming, they have got little helmet cams, so they take a lot of film and they send it to me. And I do a lot myself when I go out and I interview them and that sort of stuff so it's a mixture really. On the DVD you can see the footage they have taken during contact during a firefight or whatever it may be and the MOD have given us a lot of their official film from aircraft that were overlooking the area at that time and that sort of stuff so they have been very helpful, and obviously we couldn't have interviewed the guys without the MOD's help. It's trying to get the bigger picture so it's a mixture of everything and it seems to have worked.
And what was the experience like for you going back to a war zone where you were no longer a soldier?
I think it's great I can go over there for two or three weeks then I can come home I'm not there six months. No it's fun I really do enjoy it, I do about four trips a year.
And what do you think of these conflicts do you think it's time our troops were brought home?
It's a really difficult one because if you look at Iraq no one is going anywhere and when they talk about troops coming home they are talking about combat troops and they will be going to Afghanistan. it's a tough one because it's obvious that we went to war on a lie but actually, whether we like it or not, we are linked, joined at the hip, with American foreign policy, we have been since 1956 when the Suez Canal went wrong, so whether we like it or not we are joined at the hip with America and we will fight with America. Actually Iraq is starting to prove a bit of a success story now so yeah we went to war on a lie but it's, ok we went to war on a lie, but it's a lot better than it was.
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 EarnshawAndy McNab is a British soldier, serving in the infantry as a Royal Green Jacket, joining the infantry at the age of sixteen and serving in Northern Ireland before being selected for the SAS.In the SAS he served in the Middle East as well as Southern and Central America. He shot to prominence in 1993 when, after leaving the SAS, he wrote a book on the failed mission Bravo Two Zero, which told of the events that happened during the Gulf War.Since then he has gone on to write a series of fiction and non fiction novels and has, more recently, been behind the documentary Tour of Duty which looked at the soldiers serving in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. I caught up with him to talk about his new project.
You are promoting your DVD Tour of Duty can you tell me a bit about it?
For the past three or four years all the stories that are coming our of Iraq and Afghanistan it's always someone else telling the stories so the idea is is to get the guys that were involved in these things to talk about it themselves. Instead of me sitting there all day gobbing off about it lets get these lads in as they know the story well, they are articulate and actually what happens is you get all the emotion and you can identify with them.
The programme gives an insight into the soldier's lives whilst in Afghanistan and Iraq what do you hope the show will achieve?
Well just to show they are just the same as everyone else if you read the media first of all it's all doom and gloom these lads are hanging themselves and all that load of old rubbish and the other one is they are all monster going around killing civilians and it's just not so they are just like us. The average age in an infantry battalion is twenty one so it's just showing these faces and what they have been doing and some of these stories are amazing these lads from inner city Birmingham or whatever they are put into these situations and they perform really well.
How did you go about collecting the film did you go out there yourself?
Yeah I've just come back, I've been in Afghanistan and I came back about nine days ago, and what happens a lot of the guys do their own filming, they have got little helmet cams, so they take a lot of film and they send it to me. And I do a lot myself when I go out and I interview them and that sort of stuff so it's a mixture really. On the DVD you can see the footage they have taken during contact during a firefight or whatever it may be and the MOD have given us a lot of their official film from aircraft that were overlooking the area at that time and that sort of stuff so they have been very helpful, and obviously we couldn't have interviewed the guys without the MOD's help. It's trying to get the bigger picture so it's a mixture of everything and it seems to have worked.
And what was the experience like for you going back to a war zone where you were no longer a soldier?
I think it's great I can go over there for two or three weeks then I can come home I'm not there six months. No it's fun I really do enjoy it, I do about four trips a year.
And what do you think of these conflicts do you think it's time our troops were brought home?
It's a really difficult one because if you look at Iraq no one is going anywhere and when they talk about troops coming home they are talking about combat troops and they will be going to Afghanistan. it's a tough one because it's obvious that we went to war on a lie but actually, whether we like it or not, we are linked, joined at the hip, with American foreign policy, we have been since 1956 when the Suez Canal went wrong, so whether we like it or not we are joined at the hip with America and we will fight with America. Actually Iraq is starting to prove a bit of a success story now so yeah we went to war on a lie but it's, ok we went to war on a lie, but it's a lot better than it was.