THEY have been smashing new recruits into shape on Channel 4’s addictive new Army-style reality show, SAS: Who Dares Wins.
And the programme’s hard-as-nails ex-Special Forces trainers — including Matthew Ollerton, Anthony Middleton and Jason Fox — have won over a legion of female fans.
Admirers have been bombarding them with tweets, making them telly’s newest and hottest hunks.
EMMA COX caught up with Ollie, Ant and Foxy to hear their amazing stories of derring-do.
SAS: Who Dares Wins continues tonight at 9pm.
Ollie
MATTHEW “OLLIE” OLLERTON, 44, joined the Royal Marines in 1990 aged 18, and his first tour was to Northern Ireland.
He says: “I thought it would all be about the uniform and impressing the chicks. But on my first night, a 500lb car bomb went off at an Army checkpoint.
There was a helmet on the floor and my sergeant walked over, kicked it and said, ‘We need to see if there are any more of these’.
“There was a head inside the helmet. That’s when I realised it wasn’t a game.”
The following year Ollie joined Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, evacuating Kurds from villages that had been torn apart in brutal massacres.
He says: “It was shocking and traumatic. There were all sorts of terrible things — body parts and burned homes.
“There are a lot of things I can’t talk about because I’ve blocked them out.”
In 1994 Ollie joined the Special Boat Service — the naval equivalent of the SAS — after passing the selection process while ignoring a broken ankle.
Initially he worked in maritime counter-terrorism, but also smashed criminal operations involving £100million of cocaine and £50million of marijuana.
He says: “We’d balaclava up and abseil into the ship and bust them just before dawn so they were totally unaware we were coming.
“You’ve got boat teams coming up the back and helicopter teams abseiling on to the bridge. It’s proper Bond stuff, really satisfying. It was awesome.”
Ollie left the Forces but spent five years working privately in Iraq, and a year busting children out of sex traffickers’ camps on the Thai-Myanmar border.
He recalls: “It was the most humbling experience of my life. They are now being looked after and educated, which is a real achievement.”
Ollie thinks he now has symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder — but suspects he may have been suffering since childhood.
Bizarrely he was mauled by a circus chimpanzee when he was ten, leaving him scarred for life.
He says: “It sounds funny now, but I heard a big screech and this 60-kilo chimp pinned me to the floor, ripping chunks out of me.
“I can still remember it with blood dripping from its teeth. It was incredibly traumatic.
“Also my parents divorced and then my grandparents passed away. I went off the rails, scrapping and skipping school. Joining the Forces saved me.”
Ollie’s private life as an adult has not exactly run smoothly.
He was with a previous girlfriend for 12 years while he was in the military and after leaving, they married. But he left her eight months later.
He says: “The reason that relationship had worked for so long was because we weren’t actually spending any time together. Once we were living together it just didn’t work any more.
“I didn’t see my son for seven years. He’s 14 now and we’re reconnecting, but it’s been hard.”
Of his new-found fame, Ollie claims he does not receive as much female attention as the others.
He says: “They get all these flirty tweets and propositions. I get people asking me what sort of boots they should buy!
“Ant and Foxy are the ones getting all the attention. And quite right too — they’re gorgeous blokes, aren’t they?”
Ant
ANTHONY “ANT” MIDDLETON, 35, the show’s lead instructor, joined the Special Boat Service in 2008 after a career in the Royal Engineers and the Marines. He was deployed to Afghanistan as section commander.
He says: “I was point man, which meant I was the first through the door, hunting down Taliban commanders, knocking down forts every night.
“The first time, we’d walked more than seven miles to get there and people were coming out with weapons from everywhere. They were running out like rats.
“The moment I squeezed that trigger, everything slowed down. This surge of fear comes but it’s not negative. It turns into adrenalin and you learn how to harness it.
“You know if he’s going to go down or not, then you’re stepping over him, and all this training kicks in and you’re just thinking things through methodically.
“You get better at it each time and after a while you’re going into a hail of bullets and you can judge by the sound how close they are. That means you can keep running while looking for the flash of the muzzle.
“I was leading a squadron of 40 people and I always thought, ‘Rather me than anyone else’.”
That is not to say there were no close calls.
Ant says: “One time I was working as a helicopter sniper and this vehicle was firing at us, so we did what we had to do. Flying back, the Chinook was a bit shaky and the pilot told me that four bullets had gone through the window where I’d been sitting and hit the inside of the roof of the helicopter.
“The bullet holes were about three centimetres from the hydraulics.
“A few centimetres to the left and they’d have hit my head.
“A few to the right and they’d have brought the whole chopper down.”
Ant left the Special Forces soon after a close friend died in Afghanistan in 2011.
He recalls: “He got shot in the head because of a mistake by an Afghan policeman.
“I was a pallbearer at his funeral and I thought, ‘If that was just us as a team, would that have happened?’
“I didn’t want to fight alongside amateurs any more.
“Also, I was brought up without a father and I didn’t want that for my two children.
“I was quite selfish and put my career first for a long time, but I wanted to spend more time at home.”
Ant’s wife Emilie gave birth to their daughter, now eight, in 2007, just six days before Ant went to Afghanistan with the Royal Marines.
Their son was born ten days after Ant got back from his second tour of Afghanistan with the SBS.
Now Ant, who also has a son from a previous relationship, works in the private mining sector in Africa as well as for several charities.
He admits that loyal Emilie is the reason he has been able to pursue such an extraordinary career and adds: “I used not to write home much. It’s easier just to focus on what you’re doing when you’re out there.
“I had a single-minded attitude towards what I was doing and I was quite selfish really.
“I couldn’t have done it without knowing that Emilie was at home looking after the kids and holding everything else together for me.”
He adds that his devoted wife does not mind too much that he has gained a legion of new female fans since the TV series began.
He says with a laugh: “She’s dealing with it well, bless her.
“Some days I’m like, ‘Hi honey’, and I get the 1,000-yard stare because someone’s said, ‘You’re hot’ on Twitter and I’ve replied, ‘Thank you’.
“I call her The Long-Haired General. She’s the only woman who can boss me around.
“I’ve had marriage proposals, the lot. We’re doing it to inspire the young kids, that’s the important thing. Everything else is just a bit of nonsense, it makes me laugh.”
Foxy
JASON “FOXY” FOX, 39, joined the Royal Marines at 16 and ten years later joined the Special Forces as a demolition and counter-terrorism expert and combat swimmer.
One of the biggest battles he was involved in came when he was tasked with rescuing a civilian hostage from an estimated 400 Afghan insurgents.
He says: “We were in the helicopter, all geared up with our night vision goggles and helmets. All of a sudden, the whole sky lit up.
“The helicopter was getting bounced across the sky. There were rocket-propelled grenades, tracer fire, air burst.
“You could see muzzle flashes on the ground from heavy machine gun and heard ‘zip zip’ going past you.
“I was sitting next to a guy and without even realising it, we were gripping each other’s knees.
“As soon as we landed we went straight into a proper gunfight.
“It was the worst night of my life, completely horrific.
“I lay in a ditch and just for a second wanted to go home to my mum.
“But we rescued the dude and fought our way back out.
“I came back from that tour feeling pretty detached.”
Despite the trauma of being in a war zone, Foxy did find a few positives.
One of his favourite roles was becoming the first Special Forces dog handler in Afghanistan.
He says: “The dog can detect anything — explosives, weapons, people — and it is very good at attacking.
“You abseil with them, parachute with them. You get very close to the dog, they are awesome.”
Around three years after his tour of duty, Foxy was listening to a talk about post-traumatic stress disorder and realised many of the symptoms could be applied to himself.
He says: “I felt this black cloud looming over me at the idea of going on tour again, which was weird because I’d always been so enthusiastic.
“I went to get myself sorted out. But they had a bit of a one-size-fits-all attitude towards treatment.
“They wanted me to close my eyes and think about the moment I contracted PTSD.
“But I was like, ‘F***ing hell, which time? I was in gunfire every night for six years — it could have been any one’.
“Eventually I felt I was given no other choice than to leave, even though I still had a lot to give.”
For three years Foxy struggled to come to terms with what had happened.
He admits he was drinking too much and getting angry and tearful.
The divorced dad of two, who is currently dating, holed himself up at home and didn’t see any friends for months.
He recalls: “I was ashamed. I said I’d left because I had tinnitus.
“But then I realised that I could help other people, so I started talking about it.
“It’s only been since January this year that I’ve felt normal again. This TV series has sorted me out.
“It’s given me an enjoyable focus again.
“More needs to be done for PTSD.
“Guys are still committing suicide.”
— Foxy and Ollie are now running their own business, Break Point, which gives civilians a taste of the SAS selection process.
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