Ant Middleton has bravely opened up on his terrifying days as a young army recruitment and claims he was attacked by Para troops with a sledgehammer.
The 39-year-old, who hosts the epic show SAS : Who Dares Wins, has told of his brutal start in his hardman career.
The chief instructor of the show spilled all in his new book, Zero Negativity: The Power of Positive Thinking.
And thinking positively is something Ant revealed he had to get onboard quickly with due to the nature of his job.
The star goes as far to recall the terrifying tale of how he was savaged with a sledgehammer back in the day.
Ant Middleton has revealed how he was tortured with a sledgehammer by Para bullies (Image: antmiddleton/Instagram)
Kicking off the chapter about the abuse he received, Ant recalled his past.
He wrote: “Some nights my dreams are full of debris — those broken parts of my past that I realise will probably stay with me until the day I die.
“I’m not tortured by them, yet they come back again and again — recollections from the most gruelling moments of selection, scenes from combat.
“Most persistent of all are memories of what happened to me from the age of 15 to 21. They were my lonely years, the time when I was most by myself. I’d left home at 15 and joined the military when I was 16.”
Ant says he started avoiding the bullies and thats when they turned on him (Image: antmiddleton/Instagram)
Recalling his early days with the Para troops, Ant said they would go out drinking, “savaging” the pubs and would go back to camp and drink “p*** out of pint glasses”.
He said: “Going into town, beating each other up and drinking until they were sick was the only way they could get the aggression and anger out of their systems.
“I got why they behaved like that, but it just wasn’t me. Still, for a while I tried to fit in. I matched them drink for drink. After a while I stopped trying to fit in. My attitude became: “F*** the lot of you.”
But tragically for the star, this meant things got a lot worse for him.
Ant has recalled the full story in his book, Zero Negativity (Image: Amazon)
Ant continued: “Things got bad. What I didn’t realise at the time was that they were about to get worse. In Signal troop, bullying was the mechanism the other Paras used to ensure conformity. There was a real pack mentality.
“For a long time it was something I’d see happen to other people. Then, once I’d begun to alienate myself from the regiment, their attention turned to me.”
He went on to recall the time they tortured him one morning with a sledgehammer.
Ant recalled: “There was one morning when I walked into the stores room and found [a fellow para troop] standing there, his little rat-like face full of malice, surrounded by a handful of his acolytes. ‘Ah, Middleton, we’ve been waiting for you.’
Ant is now having the last laugh and he has a successful TV show and a new book out (Image: DAILY MIRROR)
“They’d attached a sledgehammer to a bungee rope. I was 9st wet, a 17-year-old streak of p*ss, so I’d have to endure whatever their vindictive minds had prepared for me. ‘Middleton. Stand there. We’re going to swing this at you’ — he pointed at the apparatus they’d built — ‘and you’ve got to dodge it.’
He went on: “So they pinged it at me. I ducked and dodged. It was pathetic, as they’d gone to so much effort to set this thing up to torment me. Five, six minutes went by.
“But there was only a certain number of times I’d be able to evade it and they’d be bound to get lucky sooner rather than later. I really wasn’t up for a smack in the face.
“The situation was getting out of hand, but it stopped when the door opened and a sergeant from another troop walked in. Everyone froze. For a moment that sergeant was so stunned by the scene he’d stumbled across that he could only stand there.
“Then his bewilderment gave way to anger. ‘What the f*** are you all playing at? Get to work. You f***ing degenerates.’ As he said it, he shot me a look, as if to say: ‘You’re better than this.’”
Ant left the para troop soon after at age 21.
Zero Negativity: The Power Of Positive Thinking, by Ant Middleton, published by HarperCollins, out now, RRP £20.
Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
