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Mystery surrounds skydiver's last jump

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Almost exactly 20 years ago, Charles Bruce was crouched in the belly of a Hercules C-130 flying low over the south Atlantic, contemplating one of the most treacherous parachute jumps of his life. It was not merely that he was planning to leap into the surging southern ocean; even in perfect conditions the jump, which required pulling the ripcord at a mere 200 metres, was "a real bottle job".

There was no guarantee the chutes would open before he and the rest of his British Special Air Service (SAS) squadron, of which he had been a member for one week, hit the water. The slipstream, he knew, was often so volatile on exit that people could flip over and lose their balance, and the low altitude would give them no time to recover.

Despite being "the new boy", Bruce was by far the most experienced skydiver, having made several thousand jumps compared with the hundred or so of his colleagues, so his opinion was sought on the viability of the jump. "I don't believe in practising something you can only f--- up once," he said to grim nods. They decided to go for it.

Last Tuesday, Bruce, known as Nish to his SAS colleagues and everyone else, made his last jump. He and his girlfriend had been in Spain taking part in a skydiving display, and were returning to Northamptonshire after a brief refuelling stop in France. Judith Haig, Nish's partner and an experienced skydiver, was flying their jointly owned plane. Nish was in the passenger seat.

Exactly what happened next is unclear; even Haig may never be able to account accurately for her passenger's actions. But somewhere over Oxfordshire the plane got into difficulty, and Haig asked for permission to make an emergency landing, due to severe icing on the wings of the plane.

Sixteen kilometres from the base she radioed again. Nish had apparently slid his seat right back and undone his seatbelt. Haig reached over to grab him, a source in the investigation said, but he pushed open the door of the aircraft without warning and tipped himself out headfirst, his weight pulling him beyond her desperate, screaming grasp.

What leads a man like Nish Bruce, handsome, successful, well respected and well loved, to step into a winter sky and drop himself into oblivion?

Bruce's elderly mother told reporters that she did not believe he had been depressed, but friends are not so sure, and if it does indeed prove that Nish took his own life, those who knew him cannot claim to be entirely surprised. Charles "Nish" Bruce was no stranger to demons.

A former soldier in the SAS and member of the Red Devils parachute display team, he had seen sights, he later said, that "most people would not believe". "In the Falklands I saw dead men so deformed that their own mothers wouldn't recognise them - boys of 18 who had tried to slit their own throats because they had been so badly burned." In 1994 he had a complete breakdown, attempting to kill his then girlfriend.

Bruce was born in 1956 into a comfortable, middle-class family. His father and grandfather were both military men, and growing up he was instilled with awe for military endeavour. He joined the Parachute Regiment at 17, and a year later, in Northern Ireland, saw his first dead body. A year after that he married, his son Jason following in 1978.

In 1981 he joined the SAS, but while he made it through the gruelling training course that supposedly proved he could withstand extreme trauma, he found the process dehumanising. Seven years later he was discharged for "not being a team player".

In 1994 the bubbling anxieties finally, violently, surfaced. After the breakdown, he would separate his life into "the time before I went mad" and everything else. In 1998 he wrote Freefall, a startling book about his military service and his breakdown, told with excoriating honesty.

It is clear that his experiences in the special forces were never going to lead to an easy life after discharge. "We shouldn't be surprised by what happens when men experience what these men have experienced," says Bruce's friend and literary agent, Mark Lucas. "They are trained to survive in a landscape in which the dividing line between life and death is extremely thin."

Bruce's 1998 autobiography now looks like vivid evidence of what some had already begun to call the curse of the SAS. In several of the pictures, Bruce is accompanied by a close friend, Frank Collins, another former special forces soldier. Now both men are dead; just as the book was being published Collins had gassed himself in his car, a well-thumbed copy of War and Peace at his feet.

It is easy to conclude that Bruce, who was deeply affected by Collins's death, was a victim of the same post-career anticlimax. Certainly he was a thrill-seeker, climbing Everest after his discharge and becoming a professional skydiver. At the time of his breakdown he was training with the Russian space agency for an attempt to break the world altitude freefall record, leaping from 32 kilometres up on the very edge of space.

Lucas believes the extremes to which he pushed his mind and body during the training may have contributed to his collapse, but says in Bruce's case it is too simplistic to conclude the SAS was inevitably to blame.

Perhaps, the much-loved ancient pull of the sky to Bruce's troubled head became, at his end, just too much to resist.

"Nothing else comes close to those first few seconds after leaving the plane," he wrote in his biography, "because once you take that last step there is no going back. A racing driver or a skier or a climber can pull over and stop, have a rest, but with parachuting, once you cross that threshold, you have to see it through."

- Esther Addley in London for The Guardian

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