’S H CRACK
fore yelling: “Are you ****** baby? I said, Are a f ****** baby?” brutal 3km mountain pulling a 120kg sledge, screams at the last four Lo and behold the last ****** chicks. Surprise prise.” ine, from Livingston, hian, refuses to be by their taunts. She’s e. llies,” she explains. “My lin has special needs and badly. s felt like I needed a ll to protect him.
unched
n be nasty and horrible s the next level. ften punched in the face. to a tree and had mud wn my throat. I made a o be the bully of bullies. p a tough persona and if someone being bullied I black and step in. wn I naturally avoid all violence but after that I decided I would have the attitude that I didn’t ever want to be ssed with.” ut when Nadine fought 5,000 applicants to start her career as an aviation firefighter, she found herself at the sharp end of taunts and bullying by her male colleagues.
She reveals: “I’ve always been fit, outdoorsy and a bit of a tomboy but at the same time I like to look nice, get my hair and nails done.
“Lads at the station would say, ‘What have you done to get this job’ and ask ‘Who at the top have you been having a relationship with?’
“To them I didn’t deserve to be there and was just ticking a box for the bosses. I had to be stronger and better than all of them to earn my place and their respect.
“Still, if I made a mistake all eyes and blame would be on me, yet if one of them did, it would barely be noticed.
“There and then I became thickerskinned and fitter than the lot of them to prove a point.
“I never got any preferential treatment.”
Her time in the Aviation Fire Service, she says, prepared her for living, dressing and even using the toilet in close quarters with men.
As duty recruit, she’s at home pulling everyone together as a team, even as she struggles with extreme altitude sickness.
But as SAS man Ant Middleton is famous for breaking down his recruits’ weaknesses, Nadine is forced to reveal her underlying demons during an interrogation session with Foxy and Ollie.
As well as escaping an abusive boyfriend who left her struggling with mental health issues and failing to cope in a relationship since, she reveals she was delivered a shocking blow by a person closest to her.
“I’ve been through some heavy stuff,” she explains.
“When I was just 23 and starting out in the fire service a close male figure in my life who was supposed to be protecting me betrayed me.
Liar
“If an army of men came out at me he was supposed to protect me. He didn’t.
“He sexually assaulted me. I’ve only just started talking about it.
“His family said I was a liar and that I had been flirting with him, I led him on.
“I ended up all over the place. I feel that now I am the strongest mentally and physically I have been in a long time.
“I need to prove something to myself and give this my best shot.”
But Nadine gets off to a less than great start when she comes under fire from chief instructor Ant during the very first task for failing to take off her wet bra. In expletivefilled scenes, the ex-Marines and Special Forces hard man tears into Nadine after all the recruits were told to change into dry clothes following a jump into a freezing river high in the treacherous Chilean Andes.
He yells: “Are you f ****** taking the p**s.
“You’ve compromised yourself and the entire team for having a f ****** bra on. Are you taking the f ****** p**s.”
But Nadine remains defiant: “In my experience your body heat dries your sports bra off quickly.
“As someone with fairly decentsized boobs, I didn’t feel comfortable running around without one on.”
She continues to strive to prove Ant wrong. “He’s scared of change. He worked his way up and is passionate about the SAS to the point where he doesn’t believe women have what it takes.
“But his points will be proved to be invalid in the long run.
“And I am determined to show that we can be just as mentally and physically strong as men.”
Of her own outcome on the show, she says: “I want to be known as someone who is happy and strong.
“I never want to be labelled a victim because that’s not what I am.”