Survivor

Life in the SAS

By Mark Wales – check out his website here
Published by Macmillan
RRP $34.99 in paperback  |  ISBN 9781760982751

Published in 2021, this book has only now come to my attention. Given my most recent blogpost was Flawed Hero, it seems appropriate to follow this post with another SAS-inspired story.

As an impressionable Year 9 student in Perth, Mark Wales became fixated with the idea of joining the SAS. He was accepted into Royal Military College, Duntroon in Canberra as a 17-year-old. By the time he was ready to leave the Army, he had completed four deployments to Afghanistan between 2006 and 2010, by which time he was suffering burnout and trauma. When he left the SAS, his life was adrift, crippled by his experiences.

Interestingly, in the Epilogue, he comments on his response to seeing the newspaper headlines about war crimes allegedly committed by special forces in Afghanistan. Here is what he has to say:

‘The press rightly jumped on the stories, but the context to the war was rarely examined. I doubt these incidents occurred in a vacuum. Men were not waking up, heading to the team rooms and laying out their deliberate plans to destroy civilians in the field. More likely, it was the result of a creep in psychological damage, moral standards and culture over a decade – in line with the mission creep we experienced over the years.

We had fought Australia’s longest war by double. I deployed there every year from 2006 to 2010. If the smattering of combat I had engaged in had unhinged me morally and mentally, what did people think would happen if we sent the same unit back into combat time and again over not just a couple of years but a decade?

We became brittle. In some cases, we snapped. Even soldiers have limits. I know I found mine.’

He came to question Australia’s reasons for being in Afghanistan, secure in the belief that, after what he had witnessed during his deployments, Afghanistan was ‘not a fight you could win unless you wanted to spend a generation there.’ He lamented the lack of strategic clarity. In the end, the only satisfactory explanation for Australia’s presence, he was told, was ‘… our relationship with the US’.

His post-military career included studying for an MBA at the Wharton School in Philadelphia, a foray into fashion – check this out, it’s an interesting part of his story https://www.killkapture.com – and appearing on Australian Survivor. He also met Sam, who became his wife. They have a son, Harry.

VERDICT:  Told with humour and a rare level of self-awareness, Mark Wales’s book is an engaging and thoughtful read, his story an inspirational one. Despite some struggles along the way, he has moved on from his military life to embrace a new and different life, proving there is life beyond the SAS.