From decorated heroes to madmen and murderers

Andy McNab's new book reveals tragic fate of SAS pals

By Douglas Wight, 24/08/2008

THEY are Britain’s elite troops—but after the last whiff of gunsmoke in their careers of courage disappears, the men of the SAS often find themselves in a new kind of hell.

And unlike their famous motto, when it comes to coping with LIFE after DANGER, Who Dares does not always Win. In a gripping new book, Seven Troop, SAS hero Andy McNab—author of best-seller Bravo Two Zero—today reveals how some comrades were driven to MADNESS, SUICIDE and MURDER when their glory days were over.

TWO SAS heroes freefall into action hand-in-hand at the height of their glorious military careers.

But for the one on the left in our picture, life AFTER his days in the service would be the most brutal battle he would ever fight.

And when tormented Charles Bruce—Nish to his SAS mates— finally surrendered after being driven so insane he tried to KILL his girlfriend, the skydiver chose to DIE as he lived.

He leapt from a plane . . . but this time WITHOUT his parachute.

“Nish was devastated,” says his old comrade-in- arms Andy McNab. “I knew for sure he had planned it.”

McNab is also certain why another of his close pals, Frank Collins, gassed himself in his car in 1998.

The former curate had been the first SAS man through the skylight when they dramatically ended the 1980 Iranian embassy siege, freeing 16 hostages.

But he couldn’t cope with life on the outside—or the loss of two close friends in action.

“Nish and Frank were two of the best friends a person could ever hope for,” says McNab who believes post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) played a part in their deaths.

“We’d been through a lot together, the three of us and the others from Seven Troop.

“We had killed and some of us had been killed—and the outcome was a closeness outsiders might find hard to understand.

“But brotherhood forged under extreme dangers comes at a price. Some had already gone mad—others were well on the way.”

Others like Dr Thomas Shanks, also a veteran of Seven Troop who left the service after the first Gulf War only to end up serving life for gunning down his ex-fiancee Vicky Fletcher in a hail of bullets in May 1998. “After he returned from the Gulf, Shanks suffered increasingly severe mood swings,” says McNab, 48.

“Three guys who served with him, two of them doctors, had already committed suicide— apparently because of the strain of their military experiences.

“I always wondered if Shanks had had post traumatic stress disorder when he’d shot Vicky.

“From a professional soldier’s point of view, two erratic bursts of gunfire were a sign of a disturbed man. If he’d been in control, he would just have put two rounds into her head.”

After years of fighting in the army’s elite, McNab himself knows what it’s like to stare into the abyss of madness.

He needed to undergo therapy after a failed mission in Iraq on which three SAS colleagues died and he was captured by the enemy.

“Until quite recently PTSD had been perceived in the military as a sign of weakness—guys often wouldn’t admit they were suffering,” he says.

He claims today’s soldiers are exposed to horrors in Iraq and Afghanistan that used to be reserved for special forces.

And he calls for more counselling to be made available for our crack troops before a “major mental-health crisis faces those who have served our country”.

McNab’s pal Frank Collins turned to God to try to cope with what he witnessed during his time in the regiment.

He was a curate at St Peter’s and St James’s church in Hereford, where the SAS is based.

But within a year of leaving the army, Geordie Frank took his own life aged just 41—tormented by the death of his best friend Al Slater, gunned down in a shoot-out with the IRA in Northern Ireland. McNab says: “Frank had always been rock steady. If he was covering your back, you were in good hands. His motto was, ‘Better to spend one day as a tiger than a thousand years as a sheep’.

“Frank found God and got out of the army. But he missed his old life and missed Al, and missed the opportunity to kill the man who’d killed his mate.”

McNab says “post-career anticlimax” was the reason given for Frank’s demise. But he adds: “I thought it was just another word for post traumatic stress disorder.”

Charles ‘Nish’ Bruce was only 46 and a sky-diving specialist when his SAS past caught up with him.

Returning from an exhibition in France, he was at 5,000 feet when he slid his seat back and undid his belt. His co-pilot tried to grab him but he pushed the door open and went out head first.

After Nish left the service in 1994, he’d suffered a breakdown and had tried to murder his girlfriend after becoming convinced she was the devil and was trying to poison him.

He stabbed her in the chest with a pair of scissors during a trip to France. She survived but French cops wanted him sectioned.

McNab said Nish too had been haunted by the death of Al Slater and that of another colleague, known as Hillbilly, who died in a secret operation against the Khmer Rouge in Thailand.

McNab says: “I knew he’d never really got over their deaths.

“Special Forces men are never going to have an easy time of it in the real world. They just have to try to get on with it, and some do that better than others.

“But it’s a chilling fact that more guys—about 300—have killed themselves since returning from the Falklands than the 255 that were lost in action there.”

Best-selling military author McNab has been to the brink himself.

The Army’s most decorated serving soldier when he left the service in 1993, he was captured in 1991 and held hostage and tortured for six weeks before being released.

He claims he nearly lost his mind in his Baghdad cell. But the advice from a shot-down US pilot who spent six years being tortured as prisoner in Vietnam gave him strength.

“Every major bone in his body was broken, he never got any medical care. He ended up with no teeth, no hair, no muscle mass. He was a mess, but he was alive,” says McNab.

“If prone-to capture troops like us listened to his advice there might be one sentence that would help: ‘Hold on to the memory of those you love and want to see again’.

“I thought about Frank’s tiger and his sheep and decided the silly f***er had been right.”

But McNab continues to struggle with his own past. He says he is still haunted by the images of the first person he killed — “the heavy 7.62mm rounds blasting into his chest and the exit wounds that ripped his back open.

“And, 12 years later, I can still see the face of the last man I shot.” He adds: “We need to do something now, before we discover in another decade that more soldiers have killed themselves since returning from Iraq and Afghanistan than were killed there in action.

“We need to remove the institutional and cultural barriers discouraging soldiers from counselling. Seeking help should be seen as a sign of strength and professionalism, a desire to keep yourself at peak efficiency.”

So far 17 serving personnel have killed themselves after returning from the on-going conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, equivalent to ten per cent of our total casualties there.

Meanwhile at night McNab deals with a recurring dream . . . about his three “brothers” who are now dead — Al, Frank and Nish — all of them freefalling in a parachute exercise.

“We scoffed at the notion of brotherhood but that’s what we were—brothers in arms,” says McNab.

Now he’s the only one left alive, fighting for the kind of treatment for our troops abroad that could have saved his SAS mates.