Ant Middleton - First Man In

By the time I was halfway round the airfield I realised with a shock that there were only two men left in front of me. The sight of all the beautiful clear space in front of us spurred me on. I could feel myself surging with that angry competitive drive my stepfather had always instilled in me. I could practically see him there at the side of the field, with his big leather trench coat and his Rottweiler, shouting at me, telling me I wasn’t giving it enough, that I needed to push harder. I’d fucking show him. I picked the first man off and left him comfortably behind, as spots of cold mud flecked my legs and heat burned in my knees. Two hundred metres to go. I took the last bend, my legs pounding. The last man and I were neck and neck, sprinting with everything we had. From out of nowhere I was hit with a flash of the humiliation I’d felt earlier. I imagined my competitor laughing at me. A furious thought entered my head: these bastards think I’m nothing. They think I’m some skinny, monobrowed, nice middle-class boy. I found myself surging forward, faster and faster. By the time I got to the finish line I was a full twelve seconds in front of him. I couldn’t believe it. I’d won.

Following that race, I charged with everything I had into this brutal, confusing and sometimes thrilling new world. Every day of Basic Training that followed was painful. We’d have press-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, assault courses, cross-country running with heavy bergens on our back. With all that and the fieldcraft lessons, we’d hardly a minute to ourselves, and any minutes we did have were spent ironing our kit or making sure our lockers were immaculate. During our first proper inspection, I was waiting by mine and the corporal stopped in front of the lad next to me, a nineteen-year-old called Ivan.

‘You look like a bag of shit,’ he shouted at him. ‘Look at your fucking boots.’ As Ivan looked down to see what he was talking about, the corporal punched him in the chest and sent him crashing through his locker, right through the wood at the back, which snapped in half. Ivan lay there, gasping like a fish, in a nest of splinters and dust. One thing I knew for sure: I wasn’t in Saint-Lô anymore. I was going to have to toughen up.

At that time I’d only ever thrown one punch in my life, and that was only because the situation had been forced upon me. It had all happened when I was living with my mum and stepdad in Southampton, shortly before my family had left for France. I’d been having some problems with a bully, a guy a couple of years older than me who’d taken it upon himself to make my life as miserable as possible, tripping me up, throwing me against walls and just generally being dumb and menacing. I tried to avoid him as much as possible, but it inevitably started getting me down, to the extent that I didn’t want to go into school anymore. When my stepfather noticed something was wrong, I made the mistake of telling him the details.

‘Well, what are you doing about it?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ I shrugged.

‘Do the teachers know? Have you told them?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Anthony,’ he said, ‘listen to me. I do not want you to come back to this house until you’ve punched that boy square in the face. If you don’t do that, do not come home tomorrow.’

I couldn’t believe what he was saying. I didn’t even know how to throw a punch.

‘I can’t do that,’ I said, trying to reverse out of the living room and escape upstairs to my room. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘I’m not fucking about, Anthony,’ he said, barring my way. ‘Until you’ve properly hurt him, don’t even think about coming through this door again.’

The next time I came across the bully he was waiting in the dinner queue. I saw him before he saw me. He was holding a tray with a bowl of chips covered in steaming hot beans and a carton of Ribena on it. He was with his mates, I was alone. Despite the fact that I had no backup, I decided it was then or never. I walked up to him.

‘I just want to put everything to bed,’ I said. ‘Is that all right? Do you want to shake hands?’

The bully just stood there, looking at me, dumb as an ox. To be fair, he was probably trying to work out how he was supposed to shake my hand when he was holding his tray. But whatever it was that was going through his head, I decided that that was my moment. I punched him square in the bridge of the nose. He fell back, chips and beans flying everywhere, cutlery and tray clattering to the ground. I didn’t hang around to see what damage I’d done. I was gone.

Later that afternoon my stepfather received a phone call from the headmaster.

‘I’m calling with unfortunate news,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I’ve had to take the difficult decision to suspend Anthony from school for a period of one week.’

‘Suspend him?’ said my stepfather.

‘I’m very sorry to have to let you know that Anthony physically assaulted another pupil today. We can’t let something like that pass without taking appropriate steps.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

‘Well, yes, you obviously understand then that even though this was very out of character for Anthony, we do have to …’

‘No, no, no,’ he interrupted. ‘I’m not saying I’m glad you suspended him. I’m saying I’m glad he hit that prick. I told him to do it. How long did you say he was suspended for?’

‘A week.’

‘You’ll see him in two.’

I can’t deny there was a certain pleasure in seeing my tormentor caught under a scalding orange rainstorm of Heinz’s finest, though to be honest I wasn’t especially proud of myself for hitting back. It might have largely ended my problems with that particular bully, but it just didn’t feel like who I was. I did at least manage to take one crucial bit of positivity out of it. From then on I knew I had that capacity within me. When push came to shove, I learned that I could react with some level of violence and cause a bit of damage. But that wasn’t the only thing I learned. Over the two-week holiday from school that the punch had earned me, I played the scene over and over in my head. I’d obviously been scared before the moment I struck out, but what exactly had been the source of all that fear? What had been holding me back from sorting the problem out for so long?

I realised it was a dread of the unknown. I was scared of punching the bully because I didn’t know what was going to happen next. He could have thrown hot food in my face. His mates could have piled on top of me and kicked me shitless. He could have barely flinched, calmly placed his tray to one side and then calmly broken my jaw. Anything could have happened. That, I realised, was the truth about most of the fear we’ll experience in our lives. Humans don’t like being in the dark about things. We hate not knowing what’s behind the door. We like to be able to see the future, to put one foot in front of the other and walk through life steadily, carefully and predictably.

Learning to cope with deep states of doubt would be the journey of my life in the military. That’s one of the things it teaches you – and it’s a long, tough lesson, because it’s going completely against the grain of your human nature. It was only years later, going into war zones as an operator, that I truly learned to cope with the fear of stepping into unpredictable situations. By that stage I knew that if I got to my target, I could act. I could punch through an enemy position, I could cope with being shot at and, if I needed to, I could pull that trigger and end a life. I had that capacity in me. And the seed of that capacity was planted way back when I was a boy, at that moment in the dinner queue.

When I was a new recruit at Pirbright, those lessons were still an extremely long way off. Three weeks after I’d seen that young lad being posted through a plywood wall, I found myself on the parade ground beside him. We were in formation, waiting for the corporal to arrive for inspection. Next to us, looking confused and out of place, was a new recruit called Neil. He’d joined our troop after falling out of Basic Training, having suffered a broken ankle on week five of his intake. Now he was mostly better, he’d been inserted back into the programme. Neil was a big, leery lad and slightly chubby round the middle, probably out of shape after being out of action for a while.