Visceral and compelling, Eight Lives Down is the most exciting and nerve-jangling work of military non-fiction since Bravo Two Zero. If fate is against me and I’m killed, so be it, but make it quick and painless. If I’m wounded, don’t let me be crippled. But above all, don’t let me fuck up the task. So goes the bomb technician’s prayer before every bomb he defuses. For Chris Hunter, it is a prayer he says many times during his four-month tour of Iraq. His is the most dangerous job in the world—to make safe the British sector in Iraq against some of the most hardened and technically advanced terrorists in the world. It is a 24/7 job—in the first two months alone, his team defuses over 45 bombs. And the people they’re up against don’t play by the Geneva Convention. For them, there are no rules, only results—death by any means necessary. The job of a Bomb Disposal officer is a lonely one. You are alone with the sound of your own breathing and the drumming of your heart in a protective suit in forty-plus degrees of heat. The drawbridge has been pulled up behind you as you advance on your goal. It’s just you and the bomb. But for Chris Hunter, just when life couldn’t get any more dangerous, the stakes are raised again. From the Hardcover edition.
Author
Chris Hunter is the author of Eight Lives Down, a riveting first-person account of a high-threat bomb disposal tour – the world’s most dangerous job in the world’s most dangerous place. He joined the British Army in 1989 at the age of sixteen. He was commissioned from Sandhurst at twenty-one and later qualified as a counter terrorist bomb disposal operator. He served with a number of specialist counter-terrorism units and deployed to numerous operational theatres, including the Balkans, Northern Ireland, Colombia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Seconded to COBR-A as an IED and suicide terrorism expert, he played an instrumental role during the July 2005 London bombings. In early 2007 he retired as the MOD’s senior IED intelligence analyst to become a writer and Counter Improvised Explosive Device consultant. For his actions during his Iraq tour he was awarded the Queen’s Gallantry Medal by HM Queen Elizabeth II. His citation read: ‘There can be few other individuals who have so willingly played Russian roulette with their own life to safeguard the lives of others.’
