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Your lists: Former #SAS soldier Chris Ryan talks #Afghanistan and Strike Back (starring Richard #Armitage) in todays #Telegraph - http://bit.ly/aOrwRP
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The ex-SAS man on the TV version of his novel Strike Back and how modern warfare is tougher than ever. By Olly Grant - Published: 12:01AM BST 28 Apr 2010

Action Man: Chris Ryan, whose novel Strike Back has been adapted by Sky1. Photo: Sky

Election week is an interesting time to launch a war drama. For months, Army chiefs have been firing warning shots at the Government about underfunding. Now MPs are making promises about defence reviews and more resources being allocated to our Armed Forces. If you were a war hero with 16 years of SAS service, you might take all this with a pinch of cynicism.

Chris Ryan – whose bestselling novel Strike Back comes to Sky1 next week as a punchy new drama – the feeling is more like weary resignation. “History repeats itself,” shrugs the soldier-turned-writer. “The Army is always badly equipped. In the Falklands you had guys going down with trench foot. In the first Gulf War I went into Iraq without the correct pistols and ammunition.”

No fiery salvo for Gordon Brown, then, who earlier this year was forced to admit the defence budget did not rise in real terms – even though he had previously said that it had – during certain years recently when British troops were pouring into Iraq and Afghanistan: “Every government will be as guilty as the others,” Ryan says. “I only hope that the election promises [regarding the Armed Forces] get backed up.”

It’s 16 years since Ryan left the SAS, where he rose to fame as one eighth of the 1991 Bravo Two Zero mission that went so disastrously awry in Iraq. Ryan was the only escapee. He endured eight days with no food and little water on a 200-mile trek to safety, the longest escape and evasion in SAS history.

Like all Ryan’s novels, Strike Back weaves elements of his experiences and military dilemmas with page-turning fictional derring-do. So its hero is a crack special-forces soldier called John Porter (Spooks star Richard Armitage), but one who struggles to reconcile his compassionate instincts with the brutal reality of the job. On a hostage rescue in Iraq, Porter finds himself unable to shoot a suicide bomber, only to see his buddies gunned down by the same boy (or so we are led to believe). The rest of the series deals with his quest for atonement as the body count rises during further assignments.

Probe deeper and there are parallels between Porter’s post-mission meltdown and what Ryan went through in the wake of B2Z. Though Ryan remained in the regiment after Iraq, he succumbed to post-traumatic stress. Like Porter, that manifested itself in sudden bouts of rage. “I would get terribly angry,” he says. “To the point where somebody would only have to look at me the wrong way and I’d throw a wobbler.”

In darker moments, he admits that he even contemplated suicide, though how close he came he prefers to keep to himself. “I don’t know what close is,” he says. “To me, close is dangling from the rope or taking the pills.” He pauses. “I considered it.”

He has little truck with psychiatry. Time is the better healer, he says. That and the sort of zeal for positive thinking that was inculcated, ironically, by his SAS training. These days Ryan makes documentaries, writes prolifically, and is a tireless literacy campaigner, visiting schools to encourage children to take up books. Just occasionally, though, he is reminded of what he misses about the SAS. Last year he came under fire again while filming a Bravo series about the world’s toughest police forces. He was visiting one of Rio’s drug-torn shanty towns and found that a gangster was shooting at him. “I actually started laughing,” he recalls. “And not through fear. Through sheer enjoyment. I felt like I could breathe again.”

With a wiser head on his shoulders, Ryan can see these adrenaline surges for what they are. Indeed, he says, for all the bravura in Strike Back, there’s a deeper message in it about the reality of modern war – the costs, the delayed fall-out, the real-life operatives behind the fictional ones. (Ricrar comment: take this paragraph for what it is - liberal spin by the writer, which makes me believe The Telegraph leans to the left, as do the majority of newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic. You see, most modern journalists have drunk the lib koolaid and consider themselves to be among the world's brilliant elitists, existing on an oracle level beyond we mere mortals.  Always read their reports on terrorism, and the fight to neutralize it's horror on innocent people, with more than a dram of skepticism. There's usually a political agenda behind their words)

These costs, he thinks, are getting higher – he often wonders at the pressures faced by today’s soldiers. Afghanistan, says the man who survived Bravo Two Zero, might be beyond him.
“Recently I met some lads from the Parachute Regiment,” he says. “One guy said his last tour lasted six months and there were only three days that he wasn’t shot at. He saw colleagues vaporised, lose limbs, vehicles blown up in front of him. And I thought, ‘How do you get through that?’ I ask myself, truthfully, could I do it? And I’m not sure I could.”

Chris Ryan’s Strike Back begins next Wednesday, 5 May on Sky1 at 9.00pm