The star of Channel 4’s SAS: Who Dare Wins has revealed how it feels to kill and why he misses the adrenaline rush of pulling the trigger.
Ant Middleton, a military veteran born in Portsmouth, says he was surrounded daily by death on the front line of Afghanistan.
After joining the Royal Marines in 2002, he completed two tours of duty of Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008.
The 37-year-old explains that most people he encounters don’t feel like they can ask him what it was like to kill a man.
The star of Channel 4’s SAS: Who Dare Wins has revealed how it feels to kill and why he misses the adrenaline rush of pulling the trigger
Ant Middleton, a military veteran born in Portsmouth, says he was surrounded daily by death on the front line of Afghanistan
Yet in his new book, First Man In: Leading From The Front, the now TV star, admits: ‘It feels like getting the job done. It feels satisfying. But beyond that, killing someone feels like nothing at all.’
The father-of-five warns his response isn’t ordinary and that he ‘thrived on the combat…perhaps too much’.
And unlike many other soldiers, Ant decided never to call home or open his wife, Emilie’s letters, for he was worried he would lose focus.
Ant was part of the Special Forces’ ‘hard arrest’ team which meant working in life-threatening conditions on a regular basis.
He says that successfully pulling through an operation and deciding who gets fired at or not is ‘the closest thing to feeling all-powerful, like God’, report the Sun.
So when back in the civilian world, the former Special Boat sniper thought that after surviving suicide bombers and ‘AK-47-wielding Taliban thugs’ it would be easy.
However he soon realised returning back from war would be harder than he anticipated.
On a night out Ant found himself in the middle of a brawl and says he was upset by police officers’ alleged inaction and forceful manner.
This led to a fight with the authorities with Ant later being found guilty of unlawfully wounding two police officers in a nightclub brawl in Chelmsford, Essex.
Unlike many other soldiers, Ant decided never to call home or open his wife, Emilie’s letters, for he was worried he would lose focus
After joining the Royal Marines in 2002, he completed two tours of duty of Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008
He was sentenced to 14 months in prison with an aim to be let out early for good behaviour.
Fighting inside could see him being kept in jail for years and so he knew his biggest enemy would be himself, adding: ‘This war would be fought inside my head’.
The former sniper is one of the cornerstones of the reality programme, SAS: Who Dare Wins, which saw civilians put through eight days of intense special forces training.
The aim of the show – which recently had its third series – is to recreate special forces training conditions and recruits were forced to endure 21km hikes, interrogations and intense exercise sessions known as ‘beastings’.