Starting with Ben’s first near-death experience—in a Nazi-themed bar in wartime Yugoslavia— High Risk is a whirlwind tour of everything from service in the SAS, combat in Iraq, and encounters with a gambling-obsessed 9/11 hijacker, to veterans blissed out on MDMA, hook-ups in the world of extreme sex, and battling a heroin habit on a remote Scottish island. Dozens of soldiers on their way back from Iraq or Afghanistan would drop in and spend the day getting high with chefs, waitresses, documentary makers and anyone else who happened to be around and at a loose end. Having said that there's no denying this book is literate, a modern day Seven Pillars of Wisdom perhaps but with much less military battle and more of the personal.

I have given this book as a gift to two veterans in my life suffering from PTSD; they said they never thought they could laugh about such topics as war trauma and healing.There are many highs in High Risk, Ben Timberlake’s adrenaline-laced memoir of Special Forces soldiering, undercover missions, madcap sexual adventures and messing around with drugs. Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item. His social life between missions of one kind or another revolves round a houseboat on the Thames populated by a sex an drug hungry crowd of Special Forces between jobs, strippers, rock stars, air hostesses and other denizens of the edge. According to the book’s cover blurb, Ben Timberlake has been an archaeologist, Special Forces soldier (21 SAS), combat medic and drug addict.

In fact, Timberlake's description of his time in the SAS is not a story in itself; it serves instead to illuminate the tenor of the book.

It left me reeling - unsettled and relieved - and just as the author shared his experience in living this extraordinary life, so I can but share my experience in reading about it. Other than that it's a funny, interesting book with some good material on the effects of chemicals on the brain. The Americans work nuts hours – the smell of every ops room is the smell of coffee that’s been reduced to nail polish to keep everyone going. Repeated or prolonged exposure to an odorant without any positive or negative reinforcement produces experience-dependent plasticity, which results in habituation and latent inhibition.