Fighter-turned-writer Bob Shepherd

By Worcestershire Life on January 19th 2012

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Bob Shepherd’s peaceful home life in rural Worcestershire is a world away from the hostile environments of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Yet although separated by thousands of miles, he still lives in these volatile places on a daily basis, albeit only in his head, in his new role as a writer.

Warm and engaging and brimming with passion for his subject, Bob still seems a little surprised, although delighted, at this turn of career. At 57, he has retained the taut physical presence and barely-contained energy of an elite fighter, only slightly softened by the years.

After a difficult childhood that resulted in him running away from home at 14, Bob joined the forces at the age of 17 and after seeing the SAS fighting in Oman set his sights on joining the regiment. He was selected just after his 20th birthday, one of six out of more than 90 competing for a place, and spent 20 years with 22 SAS Regiment based in Herefordshire, serving in Northern Ireland, the Oman Campaign, Falklands War and Bosnia.

“I came out at the age of 40 as a warrant officer because I thought it was best to have a good career and then hand it to the younger generation. I never wanted to be a commissioned officer and stay until I was 55,”
he explains.

Since leaving the unit 17 years ago, he has worked as an international security advisor, tasked with maintaining the safety of diplomats, businessmen and journalists based in trouble-spots. “My work is low-key and unobtrusive. You are really flying by the seat of your pants and thinking ahead all of the time and in all those years I have never had to pull a gun on anyone … although have come close a couple times,” he says. The people he has met and places he has been to, off-limits to many westerners, now inform his fiction.

While his days may no longer be filled with an element of danger, there are still stand-offs, of an editorial nature, with his ghost-writer and wife, Patricia Sabga, a former foreign correspondent for CNN and NBC American news channels. The couple, who met in Palestine in 2002 during the Second Intifada, a period of intensified Palestinian-Israeli violence, have their different experiences and perspectives of the dangerous environments and situations of which they write. But their writing tussles are all part of ensuring the story and characters on the pages ring of authenticity.

“We are on the fourth book and still married so the working relationship must be working,” Bob notes with a laugh. “It is good fun and we love it. I’m still very in touch with what is going on in places such as Afghanistan, through local contacts and the occasional trip back and I feed this back to Patti. Sometimes we’ll have blazing arguments and do have sticking points, but there is nothing in any of the books that I don’t agree with 100 per cent and we will get there in the end,”
he adds.

“A lot in our books plays off actual news events and there is a lot of political analysis, but so woven into the tale that it doesn’t read like that. With every book we try to educate the readers on some aspect of the war on terror, although in a simplified version,” Patricia adds.

It is this aspect which was Bob’s principal motivator to turn to writing: the novels presenting an allegory of what he sees is happening, on the ground, in areas of conflict across the globe. It is his response to what he believes is widespread misreporting in the areas he has worked. “I had a very good life experience in the military because of my unit, but did I come out of there knowing it all? No I didn’t. I never questioned the operations we were going on. I went into the commercial world with my SAS head on but had a rude awakening. Here I was as a 40-year-old and learning all over, and it made me angry, so I’ve tried to pour my frustrations out on paper,” he says.

His first book, The Circuit, published in 2008, became a Sunday Times bestseller and focuses on the development of the multi-billion dollar unregulated private security industry, following 9/11. “I was very saddened by the number of lads dying in the private security industry in Iraq. Their bodies just came back in the belly of commercial aircrafts and no-one wanted to write about it,” he explains.

There followed a two-fiction book deal. The first, The Infidel, is set in Afghanistan and the second novel, The Good Jihadist, was published recently. Its protagonist is former SAS sergeant Matt Logan, whose mission is to infiltrate a Pakistani Taliban network, but he discovers there are many powers and competing agendas at work and that the situation in the country is far more duplicitous and confusing than he could have imagined.

Parallels can be drawn between the fictional characters of Logan and his girlfriend Emma Cameron, a television journalist for an American network, and Bob and Patricia. Both feed their own experiences into the narrative. “The action sequences are all Bob so are very realistic as a result,” explains Patricia. For her part, like Emma, Patricia found she was increasingly “tethered to a satellite dish on a rooftop” to deliver news stories every hour. The only reason I would know what was going on was because my fixers would tell me (local people retained by the media). That is why the book is dedicated to fixers, because without them western viewers would have no news.”

There is no end of inspiration for more novels and many issues which Bob wishes to make the British public aware of, including the effects of the planned cuts to the military and the continued presence of British forces in Helmand Province – “it has been going badly wrong for many years” – to name but two. And while enjoying family life in Worcestershire, including bracing walks up on the Malvern Hills with Elgar, the family’s pet puggle, he’s not about to become complacent. “People get up in the morning and switch the kettle on and don’t even think about it, but sometimes I’ve come back from these places and it’s been a luxury to switch the kettle on. It’s the simplicity of living in this country that everyone takes for granted, it’s the calm of talking to people in the street and knowing no one is going to try to
kill you.

“I have so much to say but I’m not a government spokesperson or a journalist, so don’t have a voice, but if I stick at this I may,” he adds. “There is no doubt The Good Jihadist is fiction, but it is up to the reader to decide which parts are realities.”

The Good Jihadist is published by Simon Schuster, £12.99 hardback. For more of Bob Shepherd’s writing visit www.bobshepherdauthor.com

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