Army education officer helped me turn my life around, says Bravo Two Zero's Andy McNab
Former SAS soldier Andy McNab had a successful career in the Army - but he only joined up after being arrested and sent to a juvenile detention centre - and hated his early days in uniform.
When he was 16 he burgled a house in South London and was sent to a borstal, a reformatory centre for youths aged 16 to 21.
After an Army training team visited his borstal, Mr McNab decided he wanted to sign up and was sent to the Infantry Junior Leaders Battalion (IJLB) in Kent.
Mr McNab said he had thought the Army was going to be an easy way out of borstal, but didn't appreciate how demanding it would be.
"For the first three months I hated it," he told the latest BFBS Sitrep podcast.
"I thought it was worse than borstal. Room inspections all the time... all that marching and shouting and all that sort of stuff.
"I joined an infantry regiment, light infantry regiment at the time. They're The Rifles now, but it used to be the Royal Green Jackets.
"To me it sounded like a football team. I had no clue."
But his attitude changed when, after three months' trainng, Mr McNab and his colleagues were marched off to a different part of the camp, which was the Army Education Centre.
He recalled how after arriving in the classroom "the world's oldest soldier came through the door".
"Now I know he was 40… and what we learned eventually was he used to be a regimental sergeant major in the infantry battalion and got a commission to become a late entry officer, but wanted to go into the Army Education Corps.
"And what he said to us, it not only changed my life, but everybody there, quite frankly.
"He's walking up and down looking at us and he went over to the windows, we're right on the edge of camp and there was… over the other side of the playing fields was a small town called Cheron.
"And he went 'that lot over there, think you lot in here are thick... but you're not.
"'The only reason you lot can't read and write is because you don't read and write. So today that all changes'.
"And what he then explained was that the reason we were sort of there and not flying helicopters... was that all of us had a reading age of between nine and 11."
Mr McNab said the teacher told him and the other troubled youths who had joined the British Army that power lay in education, and credits this as the moment that made him.
"He said 'remember every single time you read something, doesn't matter what it is, poster, magazine, you know, it doesn't matter, book, doesn't matter, every time you read something you get a bit of knowledge," Mr McNab explained.
"And the more knowledge you’ve got, the more power you've got to do the things you want to do, as opposed to people telling you what to do, because they've got more power."
He said at the time he just nodded along as he just wanted to get out, but after reflecting on the lesson, its message dawned on him.
"It not only changed my life totally… just in the military, but certainly when I got out," he said.
“When I got into writing and now sort of producing sort of TV shows now in America, none of that would have happened unless I'd sat in that classroom with the world's oldest soldier coming in and just explaining the facts of life and getting in a grip of us.
"One of the things that this educator constantly drummed into us was that 'you're not thick, you're just uneducated'.
"I started to like this Army business [and] thought, well, I've got to get a grip of this education stuff because, you know, I want to be a corporal, I want to be a sergeant."
Mr McNab told the BFBS podcast that he has applied this lesson ever since, including when he realised he wanted to climb the career ladder in the Army, when he joined the Special Air Service and when he published Bravo Two Zero.
"Chances are I would have sort of just bimbled through, maybe passed out Infantry Junior Leaders Battalion, but then just done the minimum amount of time and try to get out," he said.
"Nothing would have happened unless I was sitting in that classroom, good and bad.
"The way that I looked at the time in the military is that they gave me… a mutual contract. "They gave me loads of stuff, it just wasn't the pay and all that sort of stuff.
"Part of that that contract is they want you to do some bad stuff because you're in the infantry or you're in you know, you're in UK SF.
"So if you look at… the experiences, even as a young guy, 18-year-old in Northern Ireland, the very first tour contacts, a colonel got shot down in an helicopter, one of the patrol was blown up all that sort of stuff going on
"I looked at it as a mutual contract.
"They were giving me just as much as they wanted from me."
Nowadays Mr McNab helps prisoners increase their literacy and numeracy, and he also set up a new project called WeServe, which looks to amalgamate all the services veterans might need in one place.
He explained that is a "one stop shop for real life situations".
"People with kids, with the cost of living, with banking, with medical care, just trying to get it all together and make it cheaper and more accessible," he said.
You can listen to Sitrep wherever you get your podcasts, including on the BFBS Forces News YouTube channel.
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