Jack Laurence

I got away with that stunt by the skin of my teeth.

Now here's a thing worth understanding.

Jamie was doing all of this as a reservist, not a full-time soldier, a part-time one, someone with a civilian life, a job, responsibilities outside the military.

He was choosing to spend his spare time completing some of the most demanding and arduous physical and military tests in the British Army.

Think of it like the US National Guard or the Australian Army Reserve, soldiers who serve alongside their regular counterparts, trained to exactly the same standard, but fitting it all around the rest of their lives.

For Jamie, the military wasn't his day job.

It was something he chose to push himself through on top of everything else.

Yeah.

It kind of feels like, eerily, this is all really setting you up to be utterly prepared for what would happen to you later down the track, putting yourself through extreme situations where you have to keep thinking on your feet.

Even the officer training of making decisions in tough situations, all of these bits and pieces, even down to how healthy and fit you were,

And that pedal to the metal mentality would lead him first to tackle SAS selection, another grueling test of endurance, willpower and determination.

But it would also lead him somewhere else entirely.

Somewhere that had nothing to do with the military, really.

And everything to do with the dream that he carried since he was a small boy.

Jamie grew up near Luton Airport in the 1980s.

Back then, it was a relatively modest airfield, a fraction of the busy international hub it is today.

His grandfather worked for British Aerospace Engineering, and on the weekends he would take young Jamie to the perimeter fence of the airfield, where the two of them would stand and watch the planes take off and land.

It was there, at that fence, as a child pressed up against the wire, watching those aircraft climb into the sky, that the seed of a dream was planted.

A dream that one day, he too would be up there.

And he never forgot it.