The Fear Bubble by Ant Middleton

Author:Ant Middleton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-07-13T13:40:59+00:00

GET READY TO HARNESS FEAR

By practising these techniques you’ll soon be able to begin using the awesome power of fear to your advantage. If you train yourself to experience fear as your body saying ‘Get ready’, rather than it being a destabilising experience, the fierce, rushing energy that possesses you when you step into your bubble can ultimately make you feel as if you’ve got jet engines strapped to your legs.

But beware. Just because you’ve managed to harness fear, it doesn’t mean it’s automatically under your control. Like an amateur jockey on a thoroughbred racehorse, you still need to learn how to control it. Anybody who’s served in the military has heard the horror stories of what can happen when soldiers get swept up in their fear. Although they can use it as an energy, to power them from bad situation to bad situation, when they fail to control it and it begins controlling them, terrible things can happen.

I still have a vivid memory of the time I realised I’d learned not only to harness my fear but to keep it under my control. We were in the battlefield, seeking the hard arrest of a terrorist who’d recently taken out four Marines by hiding explosives in a wheelbarrow and making a child push it towards them before blowing the whole thing up. Hearing that story during the briefing, I was already finding it hard to prevent waves of negative emotion from overcoming me.

My job was to take out the sentry who was guarding the base where this man was staying. But when I arrived at the correct location, the sentry seemed to have vanished. I crept up to the corner where he was supposed to be stationed thinking, ‘Where the hell is he?’ There was nobody there. Surrounding the base was a low, ruined wall. I peered over it. Empty. What was going on? Had the enemy been tipped off? Did they know we were coming?

Gingerly, and with my weapon ready, I stepped over the courtyard wall. And trod right on the sentry. A jolt of fright bolted through me as the man, who’d been sleeping or hiding, leapt up with a shout, only for the entire place to erupt. As three or four enemy combatants began shooting at us, I rode the relentless waves of my fight-or-flight response, allowing them to lift me into a place of peak awareness and performance. My team and I fanned out and began dealing with the job at hand, and, as we did, out of the corner of my eye I saw a figure jump up, run into a one-storey building and slam the door shut behind him. That would have to be my next target.

I ran up to the door and took my position against it. My arms and legs were shaking. I was at a code red level of fear and anger. I took a fraction of a second to harness their power and kicked the door. That’s when I really knew I was on the verge of losing control.

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