My life kind of worked on like ten-year blocks, like I did ten years in the Marines, ten years of the charity.

I just kind of felt I needed to do something different and, you know, my gut was telling me you could achieve more and be more and give more outside of this environment.

I had no idea what I was going to do.

Mark, I want to start with a quote from you.

People want to hear the gory details about getting my limbs ripped off.

So, can you take us back to Christmas Eve 2007?

Absolutely.

So I was 24 years old at the time.

I was a serving Royal Marines Commando.

And I was halfway through Sigma Tour of Afghanistan.

Now, my job, our job as Royal Marines, when we go into places like this, is to be at the front, you know, doing the dangerous stuff.

Not about patrolling to villages, meeting with civilians that lived in the area, providing them with food and water and security and that kind of stuff.

And obviously, you know, we're not out there being proactive and taking the fight to the enemy.

We had a position that we had to defend from any income contacts.

And we've been there about three months, three and a half months doing a, what I'll say, a very good job.

We had sustained no injuries and no casualties to that point.

And on Christmas Eve, myself and a couple of my friends were called up to the headquarters compound of the base that we were working out of.

And given the brief on what was to be our next routine foot patrol.

Now, we had not been given any intelligence to give us any cause for concern.

So we've been doing this for three, three and a half months, so we were very well versed in what it is that we had to do.

So we got the brief went back to our compound, got all of our kit, like we had done a million times before, went up to the rear entrance of the camp and we got ready to leave.

Now, normally, what we would do is we'd be given a task or a mission, we'd push out five, six, seven miles, be out for seven, eight, nine hours at a time, then come back.

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