As Jaco van Gass lay in his hospital bed, he knew he had a choice to make. Anguished since losing his left arm to a Taliban bomb blast, which nearly cost him his life, while serving in Afghanistan, the young soldier knew he was at a crossroads.
If he was unable to adapt to the new reality facing him, then he could not see a way out. Lying in the darkness, in pain, he resolved to fight on.
“I remember just how sad, depressed, anxious I was,” Jaco says. “I had all these emotions and I started asking all these very, very difficult questions. I was overwrought with all these emotions.
“Why did this happen to me? Was I a bad soldier? Why did I survive? Suddenly I started thinking, Would it be easier to be dead? I don’t know what my future looks like.
“That was probably the lowest point of my whole life. I was crying in the bed, on my own, in the dark, probably about 1 o’clock at night.
“For me that was the defining moment when I made the decision. I realised that if I can’t deal with this, I need to end my life. But if I do end my life, then I’m letting the Taliban win. For me, I was still in such a military mind, the Taliban to me was still the enemy.
“Either I end it somehow or I see this as a new opportunity and I thrive. And I showed them that they’ve not defeated me yet. I saw this really big change once I made that very specific choice.
“There was this whole change in my mindset but also physically as well. I started to heal faster, I started feeling better.”
Since his life changed forever on that night in 2009, Jaco has gone from one awe-inspiring chapter to the next and hopes his exploits serve as a positive influence for those facing battles in their own lives.
From learning to ski, conquering Manaslu, the world’s eighth-highest mountain, attempting Mount Everest, reaching the North Pole on an expedition alongside his friend Prince Harry, and earning an MBE, the Parachute Regiment member is now a highly-decorated Paralympic cyclist for Team GB, winning two gold medals and one bronze at last summer’s Paralympic Games in Tokyo.
“I don’t go out to seek hardship,” he says. “I know to some degree hardship will come to us every single day. It just depends on how much that is and how you deal with it.
“Once you find the process to deal with it, it doesn’t matter how big or how small the problem is. As long as you have the process in place to deal with these hardships.
“I take on these big challenges, Everest and the North Pole and stuff like that. But other people face smaller challenges which are just as big on a daily basis.
“Whether you’re climbing Everest or you struggle to get out of the house, for that person that is their Everest.
“You can’t just get to the top of Everest. You have to acclimatise, you have to go up and down the mountain, you go from base camp to camp one, camp one back to base camp. Then you go from base camp to camp one to camp two. And it’s the only way you can climb.
“And these small little adjustments, acclimatisation, we make on a daily basis of something we face today.”
South African-born Jaco enlisted in the Army aged 20 and the lessons he learned as a soldier have remained with him to this day as he plans his next quests.
“You have that operation to go and conduct,” he says. “You know it never goes quite to plan, so having the ability to then actually think on your feet and compromise, adapt to the changes and continue. That’s kind of based on that mentality I see of myself.
“I always had this love and passion for the army and I was always going to be a career soldier to some degree.
“From the incident, and that career door kind of getting shut, to then reassess and revalue your life you’re like: ‘Wow!’.
“This was something I loved so much and it literally ticked every single box. That was the hardest thing, what’s going to tick so many boxes again?”
Jaco’s life and times are detailed in his new book, Unequivocal - My Story, which culminates in his success as a Team GB cyclist.
He is gearing up for Paris 2024 and his desire to maintain his presence on the team is undiminished.
“It’s not just because you’ve done well in the previous one that means you’re going to the next one,” he says. “You’ve got to constantly perform and really show that you’re at that level.”
That said, Jaco does not view his cycling career as the be all and end all.
“There needs to be a good balance,” he says. “I see it now in the younger riders, they work extremely hard - which they need to - but they’re so focused on that constant performance.
“Over the years I’ve kind of just perfected the craft of how to perform. I look at what I’m racing for the year, and what’s the most important race that’s going to get me selected for the Olympic Games.
“I’ve learned to take out the emotion of those other races; younger riders just want to win everything, and want to prove themselves from the 1st of January all the way to 31st of December.
“For me it’s just another chapter in my life. It’s not everything I have in my life, and that’s quite a nice thing because there’s always ambition to go onto other things.”
So what do those ambitions currently include? For Jaco it could mean a one-handed ocean row.
“Can you do something amazing like that with one arm?” he asks. “Something where you really require two arms and you go and try to do that when you only have one good working one.
“At this moment the rowing stands out. A big ocean row. My wife is really supportive of everything I do. But every time we have this conversation and I mention rowing she starts shaking her head. She’ll go: ‘Why do you put your body through this?’
And all these years later Jaco still thinks about the army, his fellow soldiers, and about Afghanistan, which fell back under Taliban control last year.
“I can only imagine the heartbreak and sorrow for the families of the soldiers who paid the ultimate sacrifice for going,” he says.
“We’ve lost fathers, sons, wives, daughters… so many people. Those families will probably struggle a lot more in terms of: ‘Why has that relative passed away? For what reason?’ And that it now should be back in Taliban rule.
“My thoughts go out to them.”
Jaco van Gass: Unequivocal is available on Amazon with delivery in time for Christmas: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jaco-van-Gass-Unequivocal-Story/dp/1915306108
