Mark Spicer. Understanding PTSD: An Injury, Not a Disorder.

0:00 Hello everyone. Thanks for joining us for another episode of Arthur's Round Table. We've had a flurry of really interesting interviews, which I'm grateful for. And I'm also grateful for the attention that the Family Office insights community is paid to this podcast and also grateful for you sharing it with others. And so thank you for that. And we have another very interesting beginner is a prior guest who some of you may have seen and we've recently become acquainted and friendly and she excitedly and without any reluctance suggested that we speak to Mark and Mark kindly agreed. And so we're super excited to have this conversation today. You're going to find out in a minute what it's all about.

0:42 South Mark, welcome. Thank you for doing this. Really appreciate it. So thank you very much for inviting me. I'm very honored to be here. It's my honor. Let's start with the beginning of your journey here, where things all began. In fact, your origin story would be great. Yeah, I mean, to be honest, I'm English, born of bread. I'm an American citizen now, you know, I've been here for 20 years now, but my hometown is is Portsmouth on the South Coast of England. I just another sort of poor lad in in a naval town that sort of grew up, followed my father into the Army. I then spent 25 years certainly with the British Army and various NATO allies. And the one thing I always, I always convinced myself of was that it doesn't matter where you start in life because you have no control over that. And but the way you end is entirely up to you. And so I guess some would say I aimed my my sights way too high, but I didn't agree and I decided to push them through with that. My military career was split with the special operations and predominantly infantry.

1:45 My mate, something of a name of myself within the sphere of sniping and a counterterrorism, which saw me then selected by the US government as the expert witness and on the Washington DC sniper trial. So I got flown across from the UK, attached to the FBI task force, and then I helped them work through the process of understanding exactly how a sniper would operate. Why the person who doesn't pull the trigger is just as important as the person who does. So therefore both men were as guilty as each other and obviously with a very successful outcome on that. When I left the army, I don't think there was any real well, I didn't have any other skills to, to be quite honest.

2:26 You know, the army taken up the majority of my life at that stage. So I didn't see any reason why I should sort of give that up and drive a bus. So I then did what most soldiers did at that period and I sort of moved into the private security world. And it's a, it's a very small world where it's who you know rather than what you know, because the, what you know comes with the justification from who you know. So I ended up working for what was they described as the boutique of security, a small company called Chanusianada, Central London, where we looked after, you know, corporate entities going into Iraq, etcetera. And also I I looked after the main insurance company in the UK called Hiscox, now Hiscock, to ensure the richest 500 people in the UK. So my job for them was when their insurance came up for renewal, they had to have a survey done by me on their place.

3:22 A risk risk assessment. Absolutely, yes. So they would, they would have to have a risk assessment on their that sort of permanent residence and also their business as such, if the business was insured as well. So I use then my sort of kind of terrorist skills to work out where I could get past whatever security they currently had. Then did a security survey and a detailed report of what they required on the back of that. Hiscox would then reinsure or not reinsure, they're depending on whether they took the advice. Great experience. You know, I've got to to meet some very famous people and, you know, explain to them. And the thing I guess that shocked me most was as an example, in one room there could be two or three paintings worth over $1,000,000. And my recommendation said that they needed maybe $9000 worth of security upgrade.

4:20 And they argued. So you're like, OK, that's probably why you're rich. After that told me I'd moved to the US and I I then started working in the defence industry over here. I work for, for various defence companies as well as starting my own company Offspring. So over the next sort of period of or the next decade, I helped establish various companies, training footprints about their training, et cetera, located their their ideal place for them to run the training and then offered their their training, their training curriculums for all their different classes that they wanted to teach. Based on obviously my experiences. I also became the lead instructor for all of them. It was interesting you say whilst I wasn't working for somebody else and working for myself, I got to travel the world.

5:11 I'd certainly worked in places like as far as Drifters as Jordan twice Sweden. I lived in India for a year while I was working with the, the Punjab Home Guard. And so we were up on the Chinese Pakistan border. Very interesting place. There's a lot of things are going up there and they don't necessarily hit the news, but I, I, I just found the Indian people in general to be extremely hospitable people. We, we never had a single problem in India. The food takes some getting used to. There's no doubt about that. But I guess once you're used to Indian food, just anything after that is, is kind of not very hot. So, so that was a good bonus. And it was a fantastic experience as well to, to live in that country for that long, to get to know the people to travel around the country was interested. And as I say, that was that was very much the same process that was establishing a, a new skill set that the Indian Punjab regiment didn't have.

6:04 And then again, author and all of their, their training doctor teaching their instructors. So the whole train, the training thing comes in again. And one of the things that I've found as I progressed from my time in the army was that the skills that the Army or the military in general give you actually transfer very well into the corporate world. That totally makes sense to me, right? Discipline, making sure things don't fall through the cracks, measuring out misery outcomes, right? Yeah. I mean, one of the things we're we're very good at, Arthur, is we're we're problem solvers. So when something goes wrong, we think on our feet, we find a way to achieve the mission, whatever it is.

6:46 Now the one thing that I did find difficult when I know speaking to others, former military guys as well and veterans, is our sense of humour tends not to fit in fairly well with the civilian world. But we've I've heard it called sort of dark humour and various other things and it really is a case of finding something to dull the senses to some of the horrific things you see. Yeah. And to be able to laugh actually keeps you going. But at the same time, when you transfer to the civilian world and you you discover such things as HR there, there can be some issues. Because what we consider funny something we do not, you know, though, in the 25 years that I was in the Army, the world changed a lot.

7:35 And it's, it's difficult because it's a, it's a culture shock when you leave because I retired as a assault major in the British Army. So I was a fairly powerful man that was gone overnight. You know, overnight I lost most of my friends. I lost my power. I lost my position, my integrity. Chain of command doesn't really exist, right? No, Gone. And then all of a sudden, I'm at the back of call of somebody half my age who's telling me why job can't be done, and I'm trying to tell him it can be done. So, yeah, there, I could kind of understand some of the issues that that soldiers have when they come out. And that really led to a book I wrote, you know, I'll talk about later on, if you don't mind, because it became obvious to me that that was a major problem for veterans coming out of the military.

8:28 Who's trying to fit back in now? The military spend up to nine months changing you from a civilian into a soldier where they will literally mentally strip you down and rebuild you into what they need. And it's a requirement that you know, it's not. I've heard people say about, oh, they shout too much. And you can't scream and shout at these people. You've got to be nicer to them. No, you don't, because from day one, soldiers are being conditioned for what we call conduct after capture. Your enemy is not going to tickle you and make you a cup of tea, right? They're going to or. Worry about whether they trigger you or not. Yep. And if you don't mind me saying, at least in this country, the world has become ultra sensitive to everything and so you can't even be funny anymore without offending somebody. Absolutely.

9:19 And it's, it's sad because you have to be in some people are in a position where they have to be mindful of that, especially in the corporate environment. And I'm only stopping you because, you know, the pendulum has swung so far in this country. And I love this country. I'm not disparaging it at all. I think it's fantastic to be here in so many ways. And I prospered as a result and so have my as my family. But and enjoy the freedom that we have here. But you know, we have to worry about cracking a joke and then someone's going to call HR and then you're going to get called to the mat by somebody half your age to tell you that that wasn't right. It's sort of like, lighten up, take a joke, it's funny, move on, right? Well, that was the one of the main things that I realized. It changed, you know, when I went into the Army, if somebody said they were offended, you apologized. You know, they actually said it to your face and they gave you a chance to apologise.

10:17 Because most of the time nobody means to upset anybody. No, nobody means to offend anybody. It's just we all have different senses of humour on different levels sometimes. But when I came out, it was a case of they didn't tell me I'd offended them, they would tell you. Right. And, you know, as a soldier, that was very hard to get used to because you're like, you know, just come, can you tell me, you know, if I offended you and I didn't mean to, I would apologise. So that so that was very that was very difficult. And I think working within the defence industry was, was almost like a safety net, working with exactly the same people that you'd been in the military with, got same sense of humour, weren't easily upset, but you knew you could rely on them. You knew when things went wrong, they weren't in Iran. So yeah, that was, that was actually very, very good and I enjoyed it.

11:09 Now, obviously within the space of the defense entry, a lot of people in the defense industry are not veterans, they're civilians or engineers or, you know, that people have got a different skill set than me. And I'm, I value that because one of the things the military teaches you is how to make a team. And the whole purpose of a team is you, you pull people around you that they can do something better than you can. You may have an understanding in that that topic, but you told somebody in who was a subject matter expert, and then that's the person you lean on for that topic. Now, the other thing that the the special operations side of life teaches is everybody gets an opinion. So the, the problem is put out there, everybody gives an opinion on how best to solve it.

11:58 But the, the boss, the commander is the man who makes the final decision and then everybody just falls into line behind that decision, whether it was their idea or not. And it works. So I value the skill sets that the civilians around me brought to the table that I most certainly didn't have. And I, I had no qualms at all about leaning on those people or going to those people for advice because I didn't know. And I think one of the hardest things for most people to do, male or female in any, in any position is, is sometimes, except somebody could do it better than you. And that's what a team is. I established A reputation for building teams and I ended up between different companies to solve problems.

12:40 In some cases, I solved the problem and then looked for a new challenge. In some cases, the people that brought me in to solve the problem didn't didn't listen. So it was absolutely pointless me staying there. So I moved to a different challenge. I guess really one of my, one of my biggest claims of fame was I just finished actually working in India and I got a phone call saying that a member of the Jordanian royal family was, was trying to reach me, which I just brushed off as as a joke until I got a phone call. His Rohan's Prince Stello called me and they then pointed out that they wanted to talk to me about a project they had coming up.

13:28 And Prince Stello flew to Phoenix, just where I live now. Three days later, he flew to Phoenix. We sat down over a three or four day period. We looked at the problem, I gave him my thoughts on the problem. And then they offered me a contract to to go to Jordan and change it. And what it was was they wanted to bring their sniping skills, equipment and training curriculum up to a standard that would be closer to the US and the UK standards. So I put together a team people had either trained personally or I knew personally and they, they crossed the whole spectrum of British special forces through to American Special forces, Marines and Army.

14:10 So we had, we had a lot of knowledge in a six man team. We then spent the next three years in, we assessed everything they had, including their frontline positions. ISIS were a very big problem at that stage for Jordan. We we then standardized their equipment. It amazes me that we have such a famous person as an opponent who pointed out to everybody you want to win a war standardized, or your cannons are the same, or your your ammunition is the same. But supply? Yeah, absolutely. And I still travel the world and find that to be not the case in in a lot of places. There are a lot of ivory towers when you go to different countries, Jordan being one of them. 11 Prince control, 1 regiment, another Prince control, another regiment.

14:54 Well, King Abdullah gave me full authority to just scrap that and start again. And we literally did remove the qualifications from everybody who was qualified sniper and make them go through training again. I wasn't popular for a while. I bet. But I was being paid to be popular, I was being paid to achieve an aim and I was lucky. I worked directly to King Abdullah's office. The only person I answered to on a day-to-day basis, I was Prince Stella and we became very good friends even now. So anytime I had an issue, I just spoke to Prince Stella, who not only a Prince, but he was also Brigadier General. They commissioned me and my my team into the Jordanian Royal Guard, my commissioners, A Lieutenant Colonel, my second in command was a major and my other instructors were all my captains.

15:44 So that we basically, we had the military authority to get the job done without people. Well, you're a civilian. You can't tell. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were we were also trusted and cleared to carry firearms 24/7. So and I spent a lot of time in in offices alone with His Majesty the King. So we would we would definitely trust him and our initial remit, if you like, expanded quite considerably once we were in country down to I planned and oversaw a lot of state visits. King Salman from Saudi coming into to Jordan. I plan to cover the sniper coverage for that. The Arab summit with all 22 Arab states. I plan to commanded that on the sniper side open in a state parliament.

16:28 There were a lot of stuff and that included aerial platform snipers and helicopters down to snipers hiding in the desert just watching Rd. jump chicks. Except. Did you have to learn the language or was that not an issue? No, I mean we we would. They gave us the option to go to their Arabic language school, which we did, but we had interpreters with us 24/7. And to be fair, a lot of the Jordanians spoke very good English. I mean, Prince Salah certainly speaks English better than I do. So yeah, I was. It wasn't anywhere near as challenging as as we expected it to be. And the Jordanian people, very much like the Indian people, absolutely lovely people. They welcomed us in every aspect of their life.

17:10 We were involved in, in everything from visiting some of the Bedouin families, the Jordanian royal guard Bedouin, all the way down to shooting the young Prince and princesses at paintball games. So we we really were absorbed into their system and treated very, very kindly. That had to be super exciting. It, it really was it, it would have been easy to let it go to your head. I mean, I could, as a Lieutenant Colonel, I would walk into a brigadier's office and I'd get treated like the guest because they knew I'd worked directly for Prince Salah. And I didn't want to upset Prince Salah. But I was always very careful, you know, to salute when it was, when it was appropriate to do so, pay the normal respects.

17:54 There was a very clear cultural routine. I would say when you, when you visit somebody, there is, there is tea, there is water, there is cakes and there's, there's either more tea and then there's sort of Turkish coffee, which kind of is a thing that finishes the meeting. So, and to just say, you know, I don't want that is deemed to be a little bit rude. So you, you learn to follow the process. You learn all of the, the small stuff that can actually be offensive. You know, you don't shake hands with the left hand, you don't show people the, the soles of your feet, which is all considered to be rude in their culture. But they were also extremely accommodating in understanding that it wasn't our culture, but they certainly appreciated when we we put the effort in to live as they would live and understand what they would do. And the hardest thing I think for me was I was a cancer survivor, very strong, very dignified man and probably one of the best soldiers I've I've certainly met. But he was vehemently against smoking, which anybody that's been to the Middle East, everybody still smokes a lot. So when he made the sniper school, because I, I designed the sniper facility and then a project manager's construction and then, and then ran it for a year before we handed it over to, to the guy I was mentoring.

19:12 When he made that facility non-smoking, that was quite difficult to enforce because they, they really didn't like non-smoking, but rolls and rolls pretty well. I was the boss when he said it couldn't be done, then we had to make sure it wasn't. Was he a smoker and that's what caused the cancer? I believe so. Certainly. I thought one night I was being amazingly cultural and I told him, you know, we put out for coffee and everything that we hubbly bubbly and all the rest of the stuff, just a big sort of container that you kind of smoke and suck and it's flavour etcetera. And he went, he went mad at me because he was like, don't, he's like, Colonel promised me you will never do that again.

19:54 That is like smoking 20 cigarettes in one go. Yes, pretty rough stuff. Yeah, I didn't, I didn't know that, you know, but I just thought it was one of those fun cultural things to do. And it tasted like apple that didn't even taste like a cigarette. But it's like that's how they get you. They flavour it. Yeah. And say that that was that was a very interesting three years. I then obviously came back to to the States. COVID kind of hit not so long after that, which caused an awful lot of problem because. Nobody had any training budgets and everything was shut down. So it became a difficult time. But I took that time up initially as part of a challenge. It had come out, the 22 veterans a day in the UK and in the US were committing suicide.

20:41 Some of my friends from the army that we all challenged each other that you have to do 22 push ups a day out of respect, but you had to video it because nobody trusts anybody in the military. And then we were encouraged to tell a small story of anything that had gone wrong in our life and how we got through it. Well, I, I lost, I lost my wife to suicide. That was, that's probably the worst thing that happened in my life. Sorry to. Hear that It's OK. So it was you guys come on for 15 years ago now am I over it? No, think, I don't think you ever are. Do I manage it? Absolutely. But at the time it was, it was absolutely devastating.

21:22 You know, my wife shot herself in the room next to me. I obviously heard the gunshot. Well, told myself it wasn't a gunshot because I didn't want it to be. But for me, and I guess even to this day, the hardest thing for me was calling her name and then the silence that followed. I've found her on our bedroom floor. It's pretty obvious what she'd done. And then you kind of the Army just takes over. Because I remember in my head I just thought breathing, bleeding, breaks, burns, and they've kind of changed that order nowadays. But that was that was a sequence. It was hammered into my head and I could tell from where she collapsed there was enough room to work on her. So I just grabbed her by a shirt and I and I dragged her across the floor to the open space at the end of the bed. She wasn't breathing, so I knew there was no point in doing anything else unless I could get her to breathe. I remember I I hoped into her mouth and that there was a lot of stuff in her throat.

22:24 I I pulled all that out and she suddenly took a huge breath in. Hope is a, is a wonderful thing and a terrible thing at the same time. So that hope that it was going to be OK drove me to keep trying. I got a breathe in. I could see the entry wound. It was just, it was directly under a chin, but I couldn't find the exit wound. It wasn't where I expected it to be. And there was a little bit of panic. I'm not going to lie, not being able to find the exit wound and therefore stuff that bleeded caused a lot of anxiety. So I eventually, I eventually come up with a plan. If I sat on the floor and I pulled her up against me so her back was, was on my chest, I could keep my T-shirt underneath her chin.

23:11 And by elevating the wound, I would actually slow the blood flow from the accident. And I'd already called, called the the police and paramedics. I'd already shot MY2 German shepherds away because I particularly want them getting shot. And I'd left the front door open so they could come in quicker. And it took them turn around 12 minutes to go down. That was, that was probably the longest 12 minutes of my life. And the, the thing that gave me hope again was she kept lifting her feet individually, placing them on the floor. And then she would push like she was trying to stand up. And she, she did that about three times to the point that I have to tell her to stop because she was increasing the blood flow she tried to get when the paramedics arrived because I heard him tell her to stop doing it. Last time I saw her was when they they put her on the helicopter.

24:05 They wouldn't let me on it. They said there wasn't room. Sadly by the time I got to the hospital she was gone. Like they got her to the hospital but she she didn't make it. So COVID presented me with a challenge. By the way, Mark, thank you for having the strength to share that with us. No, I, I want to because one of the things I'd like to talk about is, is the book. And she was she was the inspiration me to write that book because when I found out there were 22 veterans a day committing suicide and that we'd lost more the soldiers to suicide than we had in the conflicts is something's got to be done.

24:46 After about day three of doing this 22 push ups a day, a lot of my friends were saying you you've got to write a book now. I'd written four books on sniping already. That was just, that's technical, that's right about something I did that was easy. And they just kept pushing me to write this book. And in the end, I kind of agreed. And I realized PTSD is wrong, calling it a disorder. It's not a disorder, it's an injury. But by calling it a disorder, nobody's coming forward. Nobody wants to be labeled with the word disorder. So. I totally makes sense to me. I, I decided the book was going to be about that. It is, it is post traumatic stress or as post traumatic stress injury.

25:34 And I want you to write a book that gave people a road map of, of how to survive. Because one of the things that I was asked was you survived that. You've got to tell people how you survived it. And I'm brutally honest in the book. I mean, and I'll be brutally honest with you now, the best part of three years, I'd put a gun in my mouth almost daily because I just couldn't deal with it. I would start fights. Me and my friend would start fights whenever we went out. And it wasn't until I wrote the book that I realized why. And that came down to the simple factors. Soldiers are trained to deal with pain, physical pain.

26:16 All men are are taught as they grow up to deal with physical pain. You know you're down to push you back into a fight. Be tough, yeah. Get tough, you've got to be tough or you're going to be walked over. And I found that all the time I was in physical pain, the mental pain stopped because it was a mental pain I couldn't deal with. My daughter flew over for she was a police officer in London. She flew over to sort of take care of me for a while. But it it was when she was out and I was in the house on my own. That was when I picked a gun up. And the only reason I'm alive today is those two German shepherds. That's a fact. They knew. They knew every time I hit a low point and they knew every time I picked a gun up there was a problem and they both landed in my lap so I I couldn't get the gun. In my head it's amazing how dialled in animals are. They absolutely knew.

27:11 And so I decided I would write a book. But I realized I had to get across to the world that it isn't a military condition, it's a human condition. Is the kid who's getting bullied? It's called the wife. Or the woman who's in a, an abusive relationship, a young nurse Doctor Who's just lost the patient that they've fought so hard to save a police officer or a firefighter who's just had to cut somebody out of a car and seemed what speed and it's smashed into the back of a truck does to a human body. It isn't just the military, it's a human condition. So I wanted people to stop calling a disorder and I, I wanted to get across the, the government needs to spend money on it because it isn't a military condition. It's human condition.

28:01 And nobody's coming forward because civilians won't say I think I've got PTSD or I've got PTSI because they're convinced you can't even been to war. Now, do soldiers see the worst that mankind can do to each other? Absolutely we do. But it's no less or more traumatic than picking a young kid up out of a burnt out house that you couldn't get to. It's no less traumatic than being terrified of going to school because you're going to be abused all day, or worrying when you hear the key in the door when your your drunk husband's coming home and he's going to beat you around the house. There's no difference. So I realized the book wasn't going to be about me as a soldier, it was going to be about my life. So I sat down and I went through stories and I think the first one really when I was about 6-5 or six, and then I picked points through my life, the from eventually going to a therapist I found out had actually seriously affected my life and I just buried it, buried trauma.

29:08 I don't want you to stop your thought process, but I'd like to ask you what catalyzed you going from. I'm having this really bad time in my mind and my daughter's here. When she's gone, I feel like taking my life to actually say, OK, I've got to pull my shit together and write this book and maybe I could have an impact that way, and so I've got to pull myself together to get that done. What was? What was the catalyst? Well, for me, it was a case of every time, every time. My sort of depression, PTSI, whichever you want to call it, it feels like you're spiraling down out of control. Something triggers you.

29:52 And one of the things that my therapist told me, because I wouldn't go to a therapist for over a decade, my attitude was I'm I'm a big tough soldier. I can deal with this. And I was wrong. I was absolutely wrong. But they told me what my triggers were. So now I know the feeling of when it's starting and I don't know how I can stop it because a therapist would teach you everything from meditation to breathing exercises that calms you down and stops it. Because it felt like I was spiraling out of control. And the way I explained it was every curve was almost me ticking something off. Has a sword? It's a sword.

30:34 Bill's a sword. And the only reason I never got to the bottom of that spiral was two German shepherds because they would interrupt that thought process. And when they interrupted that thought process and I stopped thinking about it and I thought about something else, hope popped in. And I was, I would shout at the dogs. There were even times I literally threw them off to my detriment and they hit the ground and came straight back and. Landed on me. And I'd, I would literally out loud say sometimes, OK, I'll do it tomorrow. You got it, I wonder. And I'd put the gun down.

31:16 So they put the gun down. They just laid it the side of me. If I went anywhere near that gun, they climbed on top of me. And that you learn to deal with grief better every day. And I eventually said to myself, I just got to get to it tomorrow. I want to get to tomorrow. I've just got to get to tomorrow. And I did it one day at a time. I had a plan. I was going to follow her on the 1st anniversary. I absolutely had a plan. And one friend stopped me because we went out drinking that night. Everyone thought I was great. I was playing a role. And this is one of the the things about, you know, Ptsi is you shut yourself down and you play a game. So nobody really knows what's going on in your life because you don't want to be interrupted. And on the the actual first year anniversary about her death, we were all out drinking one night and I was pretending to be drinking and everything else.

32:09 And I really wasn't. And I'll just wait until everyone was having a good time because 8:45 at night was when she pulled the trigger. 840I slipped out the back door of the bar and I went out into the into the darkened car lot and just sat on the wall. I had a 10/11 on my hip and I was just waiting. And then literally about a minute before a voice out the dark, which is all my friends just said to me, what are you doing? He'd notice I was gone. And I said, I'm just getting some fresh air, you know, go back in, I'll be fine. And he sat next to me on the wall. And he just said, well, if you're going to do it, I'm going to sit here with you. And he broke the moon. He broke that spiral down. And I didn't.

32:49 And it was, there's always a reason not to do it. And normally anything that interrupts that downward spiral, something pops that reason into your head At. At one stage I can remember thinking, well, I might as well stay until 2012 and see if the world ends. Yeah, the Mayan calendar or whatever. It was. Yeah. If the if the Mayans are wrong, yeah, I'll do it then. Yeah, right. But you, you literally get stronger and stronger every day. So in writing the book, I wrote up a whole series of things I got wrong in life and how it led to the fact that my wife's suicide pretty much pushed me over the edge. Nothing in my military career was that drastic. I've got blown up.

33:35 I've seen various other things. Nothing bothered me not being able to save my wife that that bothered me a lot. That would screw you up. Pretty bad. I was determined to to end it, but on my terms. And I believe in God. I don't necessarily believe in religion, but I do believe that there is there is a God somewhere, whether it's whether you want to call it God, the universe, whatever you want to call it. I don't think there's any doubt, Mark, that there's something divine what what you have faith in, because you know, it's pretty clear something's going on. It's super perfect. Yeah, it's, it's, it's almost impossible to believe that there isn't some divinity.

34:16 And you don't have to attach yourself to a dogma to embrace that, right? Absolutely. And you know, for the people to go to me, science, science, science, you go. How many times in science have people said this is absolute? And then someone like Einstein comes along and they go, OK, we were wrong. So when they say they more prove there's a God, my answer is prove there isn't. You know, there's it's much harder for you to prove there isn't. Totally. And when you look at the way that the universe is constructed and how much we find out almost every day, it's too perfect for me. It's just too perfect to be this random solution. So for me, it was God every day put something in front of me.

35:03 Just stop me pulling that trigger. So I, I wrote the book and one of the things I, I put in the book was it it never truly copes. You know, it's always, and I explained it that you, you kind of walk into the darkness inside your own head and, and the further down that spiral you go, the deeper into the dark you get until you get lost. You have no way to find your way out. And all the time the darkness is trying to convince you. It's your friend, you know, you know, you really would be better off on the other side. You're ruining everybody else's life. And you end up listening. I think that's what happens for a lot of people. Making arguments with yourself. Whether you're arguing with yourself or whether you're arguing with the devil, I don't. I don't know.

35:47 But you're arguing with somebody and you know when you come into your own house, you know exactly where the light switch is and you hit it every time I turn it on. That's familiarity, that's muscle memory, like playing darts, etcetera. Well, when you start walking into the darkness of your own head, you don't know where the light switch is. Pretty soon you're lost and the darkness suddenly becomes your own, your only friend. And I tried to convey that in the book of how I felt. And I had no idea what I was going to call it. And I was writing down various names that the book could be called. And then just something inside my head just said out dance the devil.

36:28 And I just went, OK, that's it. The books out dance the devil. Now, I don't know whether I did this on purpose or whether I'm just really bad English, but I might out dance one word. So it's out dance the devil instead of separate words. Why? I don't know, but I just, I just heard that voice in my head and, and I wrote it down and that's pretty much what it is. Now. That was, oh, that was a good few years ago now, but the initial publisher I just didn't feel was looking to achieve the same things I was looking to achieve. I wanted to save lives. I wanted to get people to stop calling it a disorder to the injury. And a doctor that worked with me on part of the book explained it best was he said, your brain is no different than your little finger. If you break it, you can heal it. It can be repaired, but the longer you take to treat it, the harder it is to fix.

37:24 And he said, we really don't know that much about the brain even now. But for me, the first time I went to to a therapist, you know, one of the first questions she asked me, well, she said, you know, what is your very first memory from being a child? And I can remember thinking what the heck has that got to do with what I'm here for? And then within two minutes later, I'd remembered the very first thing I'd remembered. And I was falling my eyes out and it was my dad kicked me out the bus. I was about 5 or 6 in front of the whole family and everyone burst out laughing and my dad was my hero.

38:07 So that crushed me and I ended up running upstairs in tears. My mum come found me and then my dad got the worst day of his life. But that stuck with me. And then she asked me, what's your first or worst memory about your mum? There was one. And we basically went through my life and as I was listening, I was writing the book because I was thinking, OK, all of these things shaped who I became. My fears, my prejudices and everything else was created in my youth. And then the army added to it and the whole man up syndrome that we all face means you just bury it.

38:50 They even tell you, forget it, bury it, move on. And to be caught honest as a soldier, you have to, you know, other people's lies are sake, especially if you're a leader. You have to keep going. But you also have to remember you need to get it out. And for me that became crying. All my life I was told and trained men don't cry. We should because that to me is that's the bodies way of emptying the tank. So now I say to people, if you get to that stage where you're tearful, go somewhere quiet if you want to bore your eyes out until you can't cry anymore and you're for great afterwards. And you do.

39:31 And it's like someone just emptied the tank. Now you can take the world on again, but if you keep burying it, eventually you're going to blow sometimes depended on other things that have happened in your life that isn't pretty for the rest of the world, you know. And I think with all the cutbacks and everything else and mental health issues and all the rest of it, that's caused a problem. But hopefully the book has done some good. I certainly still get a lot of emails from people I've never met that just thanked me for writing the book and saying that until I'd written in the book, they thought they were the only people that felt like they were spiraling out of control. So I I just. I just wrote the book as honestly as I possibly could after, but it took a while for me to publish it because I thought it made me look weak and a full. So I sent the manuscript to several people I truly trust. Mentors of mine, very very close friends of mine. Same question.

40:31 Does this make me look stupid? That's an ego issue. But but we all have, but I was thinking, you know, and I was also thinking, is this going to affect my career? You know, people are going to read this and go, oh, I'm not deploying him. He's a lunatic more he's weak. Every one of them said you have to publish this book. So I did. And most of them wrote references for me in the first couple of pages of the book. And it's been a, it's been a success so far. But I'm, I'm looking to reboot the book because I don't think my initial publisher published it in the way that I wanted to. It was only ever on Amazon. I didn't do the audio book because I didn't agree with the way they were doing it. So I'd like to kind of reboot that and get that back out there again. And at the moment, our mutual friend Meganner and another very good friend of mine are doing their best to have it made into a movie because we they agree with the message and they're trying to get the message out there to the whole world. What do you think?

41:31 It's clear. Let me ask it differently. I have always been puzzled by how badly the US treats their veterans, because one could argue without much resistance, that these people deserve the best healthcare, they observe the best to reintegrate. They deserve almost everything because they're preserving freedom for the rest of us. And I don't know, and I don't know how the citizenry of the UK feel about that, but let's just talk about the US because that's the. UK is worse, 10 times worse.

42:11 Yeah. The UK people love their veterans, they love their military. The UK government does absolutely nothing for veterans. And is it, I've, I've tried to process that and maybe you're on to something here. And I mean that the most affectionate way, not without, not without, is that if you treat it as a condition rather when, when something like in your experience with the military, the mission is this and you got thrown a curve, then you pivot and you adjust to get the mission done. With the military treatment of the the treatment of our veterans in the US, there's no urgency. These people are just floundering and nobody's feeding the hell to the fire to make it right. There's no, there's no really a threat of something else happening.

43:06 If we don't do that, it sort of gets wasted away. And some, you know, we have the problem like a lot of other democracies have in that we spend money on things that say they're going to have some impact, but no one ever measures it like you would in a business. And so it's just the optics that get accolades but no result, right. And so I always thought that nobody's being held accountable for the outcomes. So that's why it doesn't get better. I mean, I, I've said to to various businesses that I've been speaking about, it's because obviously I've done a lot on the on the security sideline. But one of the things I used to do was we would try and gain entry to corporate locations by lying, deceiving, passing their security, whatever.

43:51 And to be honest, it is very easy and one of the things I've suggested to multiple companies is if you have a lot of CCTV cameras where somebody's got to sit and watch a screen all day long, employ a disabled veteran. They're already trained observers, they're already security aware. They have to sit down. There's not much they can do. But you're giving them a chance to be involved again, be important again, have a mission again. Make a valuable contribution. They've got all those skills that never get tapped because maybe they can't walk up and down stairs. Put them in front of a screen, let them do your security for you. Let them send the able bodied people to where the problem is.

44:34 They'd be great at it. And I'm always looking for for teams like that to put together the, the current project I'm working on at the moment with, with Granite Valley Group is we're looking at converting a high end horse property with five star accommodation, everything else on it already into a very exclusive training conference facility, not just for the, the high end military, but also for corporate like you can host corporate retreats there, corporate team building. 1 of the things we want to do is we want to host, you know, traumatic injury military veterans down there on, on sort of weekends. Let them let them all get together and feel important again.

45:15 You know what that that's a thing on work at the moment. And one of that thing is, you know, we're going to have CCTV cameras down there. One of the things I've put forward again is the best people we can have operate in the drones, operating the cameras, the disabled veterans, because they have a security training embedded in them already. Their hands are great, their brains are great. They could work a drone probably better than me, to be quite honest. You bet when that stage were in the early stages. We're still looking for investors into that, but that's going to incorporate multiple aspects. It's in Texas, so we have a lot of scope to run everything from private security training and net worth individuals who want to learn, defend them, themselves and their families. Or you know, get some of the very experienced SF guys to come down and and host an evening with where everyone's comfortable.

46:10 There's an 8 foot security fence around the whole location. Nobody's getting in that we don't want in and give something back to the country, both on the corporate level. Put a skiff in down there. So whether it's the military or corporate, they can do all their business in total privacy and also have the luxury that maybe they're used to. So that's we're always looking to improve and give back. And one thing I want to do now is, is give back to what is now my country, America. I'm a very proud American now. So I gave 25 years of my life to the British Army and the UK. Now, I'd like to give whatever time I've got left to the US, and that includes, you know, this current project we're doing now and as many other projects as I can I can get my hands on.

46:55 I'm unlikely to retire after. I think if I retire, I'll have to get in trouble or I'll just die. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think retirements things have changed. I've always felt like I've I've said this before, my sister had really no idea what I do for the longest time. You know, I'm just an investor connecting the dots. But the she said, So what, are you in Arizona or No, No, she said, are you in Colorado? I said, no, I'm in Utah for part of the time she goes, are you retired? And I said, why would I ever do that? You know, in my idea of retirement is I, I, I have a better control on my calendar and that's nice, but no, I'm not stopping. Life's too short to stop.

47:36 Oh. And there's there's. Still, we have a winter. There's still so much in here from my life that isn't in a book. It isn't in a document anywhere. I just want to give it back. Otherwise, we do this, I learn it, nobody records it. Somebody else spending all these years to learn what I already know down here. We need to transfer knowledge better. Well, have what would be helpful in relation to not just the book and the movie, but having people look at it the way you've been able to to discern that it's not a condition, it's an injury. What what would be helpful for people to get to that point? And let me ask also, are people more willing to step forward to say I have an injury that's caused this because seemingly they would rather than a condition to get? Absolutely.

48:31 And the most obvious example is TBI. You know, traumatic brain injury is now a recognized injury for for military operators. You can't be blowing things up, shooting guns and various other stuff without your brain getting knocked around. Now, 90% of us seem to be OK, but there are guys that really suffer from TBI. But it injury, they're not calling it traumatic brain disorder, they're calling it traumatic brain injury. So I guess whether it's Mr. Kennedy at the top of the tree or whether it's just getting, you know, the medical profession to stop calling it a disorder, then people will come forward. We get injured from the time we're born upwards.

49:13 We don't mind being injured. You know, there's a certain element that says chicks like scars and people like stories. We'll do that for an injury. I'm not talking about a disorder that makes me sound weak, that makes me sound like can't be fixed or that maybe I'm some time bomb waiting to go off so people won't come forward. I mean, I certainly didn't I, I didn't want to talk to anybody about on when I was first told, you know, you're you're suffering PTSD and and deep depression from your own suicide. My first answer was no, no, Yeah, fine. No, no, they weren't. You are. And they explained, OK. Do you do this?

49:55 Do you feel this? Do you? Yeah. Yeah. And I was like, it's not a disorder and I do not have a disorder. So but if they said to me young brain injury, I would have accepted it immediately and said how do I fix it? How do I fix it? Have you explored and have any thoughts or comments on the whole trauma healing talk that goes around psilocybin and ibogaine and those type of modalities? Have you had any exposure to that? I have not, no. I know there's there's a lot of good things being done towards it now, but usually comes down to lack of funding or people won't come forward because they're not admitting to a disorder.

50:38 I haven't had another American special forces friend say to me, I will not. And this was President Biden was was still in position at that stage and the whole gun lobby was trying to ban guns. And he said I am not ever admitting to a disorder because somebody eventually will use that to take my guns off of me. Take my guns away, that's exactly. Right. So he would, he wouldn't even go and see a doctor just in case he didn't want anything on a medical record that said disorder. So you're not going to get people come forward. And the the sad thing about that is it's, it's higher than 22 a day now. So it's it's not getting better. So sad. You know, and this is, this is guys and girls who just don't feel they have anywhere to turn. And one of the things I can tell you I experienced was I, I isolated myself because the first thing you do is you call your friends, your military friends and you you say I'm not doing well and they're going to need help. And they tell you the only thing they've ever been trained to tell you, you're fine.

51:42 You can do this. You're strong. Enough sucked it up. Right up. Man up comes out every time. And then you you hang up the phone and for about 10 minutes you feel, yeah, that was good. And then you suddenly go, I'm a burden. I've just let them down. They're in the Army. They're they're still risking their lives. I I I'm a bird. And you never call your friends after that. Yeah. And then you start never going out. That's really important to share, Mark, because it's it's what you said. I hadn't thought about that way except in the context of, for example, we have friends that like to smoke marijuana, but they won't get a credentialed license to buy it because they don't want their guns taken away, right? Makes.

52:26 Sense it actually does. And you know, people say to me multiple times I never ever enlisted does, you know, a disorder. And I think the medical profession, they know it isn't a disorder. They know it's every doctor. Sunder actually pointed out to me it's a brain injury. It can be fixed. I just want the medical profession to stop calling it a disorder so we can actually start helping people stop people taking their own lives. You have a copy of the book there to hold up. Handy, I can get one. Give me 30 seconds. Yeah, take your time. Almost missed the chair then. Yeah, as the book.

53:08 Here we go. Out dance the devil. Yeah, I mean, they came up with a great cover. Yeah, scary. An interested line that I can't claim credit for, and you know the subtitle is a sniper's account of the scariest enemy he enemy he ever fought. Me it's a good line. Like what? What's wrong? And it is true, everybody's ever scared me in my life apart from me. When I thought about giving up 2-3 times a day, you know that I would have missed all this, you know, and I say to people now you know, you, you never know what's just around the corner. So get to tomorrow. Once you get to tomorrow, get to tomorrow. Because eventually you'll be going to get to the end of the week, then you'll be going to get to the end of the month. Then you'll be thinking about next year. Will you have days that are very difficult? Absolutely.

54:01 I still have days where I don't particularly know why. I just become very tearful and I've learnt to understand that. That's just me saying probably follow up. Yeah, I need to empty. I need to go and empty the tank. Fine, today, not a problem at all. Don't have suicidal thoughts, loving life. But there was a time when all I wanted was my life to be over. But being a soldier and having kids and, you know, things that to look after, I had to put everything. I had to have a plan. I had to put everything in order before I could do this because otherwise, and I'll consider myself to be selfish. And, and that led me to believe that I've heard people say that suicide is a is cowardly.

54:43 It most certainly is not. It takes a lot of courage, not knowing really what's on the other side and to pull that trigger, swallow those tablets, jump off that bridge. But it is selfish. You don't mean to be selfish. You're in a horrible dark place. You definitely don't need to be selfish. You think you're doing everybody a favour, but all you actually do as you transfer all of that pain that's just stopped in you. Everybody who loved you, because everybody else would do what I did. And they will then wonder why wasn't I strong enough? Why wasn't, why didn't she talk to me? Why didn't she tell me what was going on? Yeah, that's the selfish part. Right.

55:24 And you destroy yourself because you couldn't save them. You don't mean to be selfish. You know, when I, when I was in that place, the reason I had a plan was because I wanted to make sure it was as easy on other people. I even planned to lay out plastic on the floor so they could clean me up much easier because I know some old police officer or paramedics is going to have to find me. Yeah. And I didn't want that to happen. But it was still going to be amazingly selfish to to my son and my daughter, my mum, to to my my friends and colleagues who maybe you'd just see me an hour or the day before and there would be times I'd go out drinking with all my friends and then I'd be the solar bike.

56:04 The second I came back through my front door I collapsed. I just cut up to the floor and didn't want to move. Do you, would you say that you've said it in some some ways that the therapy definitely helped? Absolutely. I've had no time for therapists whatsoever until I went to one. And then I realised that these people actually very, very good at walking you down an alleyway in a route that you don't want to go down. It's for your own good, but they make you face things that you don't want to face. And me as a rafty, tufty soldier, I didn't want to have it pointed out to me that I wasn't strong enough. You know, I didn't want it pointed out to me that I was making mistakes, that I was ill.

56:51 I had an injury, and I didn't know it, and I had to face it. Yeah, I didn't like it, but it was probably the best thing I ever did. And I strongly recommend people go to see a therapist. They're very good at what they do. And the argument has been historically is that you need to talk to somebody who doesn't have skin in the game, your friends, your family, somebody that it's not that they're not going to be square with you, but they have skin in the game to maybe lie to you a little bit to keep you from. And they do You're fright. Your friends most definitely lied to you because they're trying to help you. They're not sure you can take the truth. My only advice on on a therapist would be I went to three different therapists in one day.

57:39 Like an initial assessment, but they wanted to speak to me and I then chose the one I felt most comfortable with. And that worked for me because I think it's going to be good about therapists, you know, and I think a lot of it is whether you click with them. So I went to C3 in one day and I chose the one that I felt most comfortable with and, and then stuck with it. My initial attitude was, why do I go to therapists? You know, they'll listen to me for an hour, then I'm going to leave. And if I run out of money, they don't want to listen to me at all. So I I decided it was fake and I wasn't going to do it and I was wrong.

58:20 I was 100% wrong. What got you over the hump to go to the therapist to begin with? Make it beyond that. I don't want to go to a therapist. I think it was realizing I wasn't, I wasn't getting past one doing my life, but it took me a decade. It was a decade before I went to a therapist. I would I'd say the first three years were the worse you. There are things I apparently did during those three years I still have no recollection of. And I think the brain very, very specifically shuts things out for your own mental well.

59:01 Being I'm going to get this wrong with they say trauma is the thief right? And it was, it was then there were a couple of other things that went wrong in my life in that, in that 10 years where you, I certainly got to the stage where you think, OK enough. I've tried, I've tried to get back on my feet. I cannot get up again. And then I just read a meme that said, get knocked down 7 times, get up 8. And then the Army started me coming. I've never quit. And I went, you know what? I'm not going to do this. I won't quit, but if I had to pick one thing that that saved my life, Dogs. Dogs, without doubt my dogs. I'm a great believer.

59:44 That dog is God spelled backwards for a reason, and if there's ever an Angel on this planet, it's got 4 legs and foot. Yeah, boy, they are so dialed in. They they can feel what you're feeling. They know when they're needed and you could take the trash out and they're just happy to see it when you come back in the door. There's a joke in England that says, you know, how do you know that dog is man's best friend? And the answer being you lock your wife and your dog in the garage for an hour and see which one's pleased to see you when you open the door. So pretty true. But no, I've got, I've got 7 of them now as we spoke about at the beginning for you. Yeah, they're all German Shepherds. I don't know whether that was a mistake or whether God thinks I've got I've got some more trauma to come up yet and I'm going to need more than two, but they most certainly make any day brighter.

1:00:39 Yeah, the German Shepherds are great too. It's not really a joke, but in the US we say that the reason why we love our dogs so much is because they don't know how to be anything but themselves. That itself is very true as well, and to me they're the most perfect example of what unconditional love is. They totally. You could not feed them, leave them, kick them, whatever. And they're still happy to see you. Yeah. Not that I would ever kick my dogs. I hasten to hat. Yeah. And if somebody ever comes to try and take them off me, that'll be the day I'll die. There'll be a fight over that. I believe it, yeah. It's a it's a wonderful thing to have them. And it's also, you know, I have three adult children and we always had dogs, and it really gives them perspective on life.

1:01:24 Right. Absolutely. It gives them something to take care of because the dog needs you or the dog's going to start without you. But I, I don't think it's by mistake that the medical profession is now issuing sort of therapy dogs and, you know, they're allowing dogs into hospitals because they've realized the power the dog has in rebooting someone's determination to live. I think there's so much more we can learn from it and animals in general, to be honest. I mean, I've watched, I've watched horses and even dolphins, you know, with disabled kids and they're amazing, absolutely amazing. But we, we certainly haven't a title mankind. We may be a man, but kind we most certainly are not 90% of the time.

1:02:09 Well, you know, the, the, the Buddhists and you've experienced the people in India and I just call them the Buddhist because I don't know what else to call them. But they seem to get the loving kindness pretty locked up. Like they figured it out right? Like the every I've never seen so many stray dogs in one country in my life. But every single one of those dogs is well fed, not scared of anybody because nobody kicks them, nobody tells them to move. You can walk around shopping precincts and the dogs are just asleep on the pavement everywhere. Yeah, they're fantastic. And they have a day of the dog thing where they just celebrate dogs. Totally makes sense. Well, Mark, this has been amazing and I really appreciate you having the courage to share this with us. And it was a fascinating story.

1:02:55 Thank you, thank you, Thank you. Let me do it. Yeah, you're, you're very welcome. And I and I'm certain of this, there will be people who hear this in our community and audience that will appreciate and at very least appreciate. But you may hear from them not only to thank you, but give you some help. Yeah, I am more than happy for you to give my contact details to anybody that wants help. You know, if they did want to read the book, it's it's on Amazon so you can find it on. Amazon I just hit the send button it I think I'll have it in 2 days. I'm going to send you one. No, no, no, no, no. I appreciate you saying that. I just when we first spoke, I said I was going to do it. I put it in my my shopping cart and I didn't hit send till today. So it's.

1:03:39 OK, yeah, it could be terrible. You never know. As long as I can keep helping people, and for me, I'm massively, my life will be very successful. If I can, I can get people to call it an injury and not a discipline, yeah. Then then people will come forward. Yeah. Super appreciate. It thank you, Arthur. Thank you again for letting me on. I really appreciate the time. Very, very welcome. Thank you for thank you, Sir. We'll let Meganna know too. Thank you. Great. OK. Thank you, Mark.