Many motorways and other structures are built with concrete, so we learned how to destroy it – and that did take a lot of explosives. Sometimes it wasn’t enough just to take down the spans of bridges: the piers had to be cut as well to maximise the damage. Gaps can be repaired; high sections of a motorway can be replaced in a fortnight, as Californians prove every time they have an earthquake.
If you’re in a foreign country to blow something up, you probably won’t have arrived in your uniform and carrying all the kit you’ll need. You often go in undercover, in civilian clothes, with a cover story and cover documents.
First, you use your navigation skills to find the target. Then you use the maths you learned in the education centre to work out where you’re going to place your explosives and in what amounts. After that, you go out and buy the ingredients to make a bomb.
You have to go to the local equivalent of Tesco and Boots, using the language you learned in Hereford, to buy boring, everyday products that will combine to make explosives. All the mixtures need to be in your head. Every spare moment we had was taken up with learning by heart the nine different types of high explosive. You can’t be undercover with them jotted down in a notebook in your back pocket.
But it wasn’t only the ingredients you had to learn. It was also the complicated processes for putting them together.
Once you’d made the explosives, you would use maths to be sure they were going to be effective. That was the only way to work out the exact amount of explosive that would be needed. Maths ensured that, when I pressed the button to blow up the device, I wouldn’t end up with a big bang and a cloud of smoke that cleared to show the target still standing.
All that learning took three months in the education centre in Hereford. It was the first time I’d ever really got to grips with maths. I’d done a bit to pass my exam, but now I had to apply myself to it. I remembered the captain’s words: the only reason I couldn’t do it was because I hadn’t done it before. And the more I learned, the easier it got.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
When the first Gulf War started, in 1990, I was once again a sergeant and in command of an eight-man foot patrol whose radio call sign was Bravo Two Zero. Our mission was to go to the north-west of Baghdad before the ground war started and cut a fibre-optic cable that ran from Baghdad into the Western Desert. Iraqi Scud missiles were being fired from there into Israel.
The idea was that if we could cut the control cable that told the Scud missiles when to fire, they wouldn’t be fired into Israel, and Israel wouldn’t be drawn into the war. The mission was a failure. We didn’t find the fibre-optic cable. Out of the eight men who went into Iraq, three were killed and four were captured, including myself. Only one made it to the safety of Syria and back to British lines.
I spent just over six weeks in Baghdad where we were interrogated by the Iraqi secret police. We were blindfolded, handcuffed, beaten, burned and whipped. I even had some teeth pulled out as they tried to discover what our mission was.
When the war ended, the four of us were exchanged for Iraqi prisoners and returned to the UK.
Chapter Thirty
I served for another three years in the SAS, a total of eighteen years in the army, before being offered a job with a private military company. I took it, with about twelve other people who left at the same time. It was now that I was asked to write about the Bravo Two Zero mission and my experiences during the first Gulf War.
Write a book? I thought. Why not? I knew the subject pretty well. And since the first Gulf War, I had had to write several reports and give talks on the mission. I thought, I might be able to do this. I might actually be able to write a book.
It took me four months to write it and, to my surprise, it went straight into the bestseller lists after it was published. Bravo Two Zero is now ranked as the biggest-selling war book of all time, anywhere in the world. Its success sparked off a whole new career for me.
Now, instead of reading the back pages of the Sun, I write articles for the newspaper regularly. I also write for many other national newspapers and magazines. I write bestselling thrillers, children’s books and film scripts. That doesn’t mean I know it all. I don’t. Nobody does. I still learn from others. I go and listen to famous scriptwriters and others and soak up their advice. I’m still not embarrassed to ask questions if I don’t know what people are talking about. How else am I supposed to learn?
I still read for pleasure. At the moment, I’m interested in the classics, written by people I’d never heard of when I was younger, like Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and Mark Twain. I’m still boring people silly when I talk about what I’ve just read. They all seem to have read those books when they were at school. But I don’t care! I like talking about books.
Maybe I’ll stop reading the classics soon and try some history. It doesn’t matter what I’m reading. All I know is that what the captain told me when I very first read a book was true: reading gives you knowledge and that gives you choice and opportunity in whatever you want to do in life.
These days, I go to junior soldier camps and talk about my experiences. I tell them everything you’ve just been reading, and I always repeat what the captain told me and the other lads sitting in his classroom for the very first time.
‘You’re not thick, you’re just not educated yet. The only reason you can’t read is because you don’t read. But from today everything changes.’
I’ll end with a sentence of my own.
If I can do it, so can you.
About the Author
Andy McNab became a soldier as a young man and joined the SAS in 1984. During the Gulf War he led the famous Bravo Two Zero patrol. He left the SAS in 1993, and now lectures to security and intelligence agencies in the USA and the UK.
Andy McNab has written about his life in the army and the SAS in the bestsellers, Bravo Two Zero, Immediate Action and Seven Troop. Bravo Two Zero was made into a film starring Sean Bean.
He is also the author of seventeen bestselling thrillers, four novels for children and two previous Quick Read titles, The Grey Man and Last Night, Another Soldier. He has also edited Spoken from the Front, a book of interviews with the British men and women serving in Afghanistan.
Also by Andy McNab
Non-fiction
Bravo Two Zero
Immediate Action
Seven Troop
Spoken from the Front (edited)
Fiction
The Grey Man
Last Night, Another Soldier
Remote Control
Crisis Four
Firewall
Last Light
Liberation Day
Dark Winter
Deep Black
Aggressor
Recoil
Crossfire
Brute Force
Exit Wound
Zero Hour
Dead Centre
War Torn
Battle Lines
Red Notice
and published by Corgi Books
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA
A Random House Group Company
www.transworldbooks.co.uk
TODAY EVERYTHING CHANGES
A CORGI BOOK: 9780552168984
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781448154425
First publication in Great Britain
Corgi edition published 2013
Copyright © Andy McNab 2013
Andy McNab has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
A CIP catalogue record for
this book is available from the British Library.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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