The night in November 2009 that changed Toby Gutteridge’s life began like any other, except for the fact that it was Friday the 13th, a dark omen. As a soldier in the Special Boat Service (SBS), the elite counter-terrorism unit of the Royal Navy, Gutteridge, then 24, was one of the bravest, fittest soldiers in the world. He had fought the Taliban two years earlier as a Royal Marine and was now back in Afghanistan with the SBS, tasked with conducting a series of undercover raids to root out Taliban cells and compounds. 

Only two weeks earlier, Gutteridge had been shot in the arm but had refused to be flown home. The wound was dressed, he returned to combat. How different his life would be if he had boarded that plane.

‘Hindsight is a beautiful thing,’ he says today. ‘But my mind isn’t plagued by these sorts of thoughts. I’m proud of [not going home]. I’m proud of my decisions.’

The mission started like any other. The plan was to drop the unit a distance from the Taliban target, so that the soldiers could weave silently through the surrounding villages and buildings on foot and arrive with maximum surprise. ‘Most nights ended in enemy contact,’ he explains. His kit included cable ties, a medical pack, radio, pistol, spare magazines, knife, two types of grenade – flash and regular. 

The men had been briefed about the terrain and where the helicopter would drop them. Air support was confirmed. Emergency procedures were in place. He can still recall the smell of the helicopter fuel as he sat in his night goggles, flying towards the Taliban, listening to Linkin Park, Metallica and AC/DC, the combat playlist that he used to get him into the zone mentally. 

At first everything went to plan. He remembers moving with the three other men in the lead team, into the first compound, a mud-walled maze. It was pitch black and tree foliage made vision through their night goggles difficult but he could make out that it was a cluttered place, with living quarters off to one side. A group of insurgents moved out of a back door into another compound with a courtyard. There was a chained, locked door.

Suddenly there was a round of gunfire. An insurgent had stepped out of the shadow of the trees and opened fire with an AK-47. It is the last thing that Gutteridge remembers.

‘I fell like a sack of spuds.’

It is a sunny day in July when we meet at Gutteridge’s home near Poole in Dorset. He sits in his bright, open-plan living room in a wheelchair, breathing through a ventilator, which makes a loud swishing noise, in and out. It keeps him alive. His carer brings me a coffee, and Gutteridge a drink, which she helps him sip using a straw. He is paralysed from the neck down. Bodily functions, including those of the bladder and bowel, are controlled by medical intervention. 

Thirteen years have passed since that day in Afghanistan, and Gutteridge, now 37, remains handsome, with bright- blue eyes and thick hair drawn into a ponytail. He has a tattoo of a lion on the left side of his chest, with the words just visible under his T-shirt: Never Will I Die.

He has written a book about his life, named after the tattoo, which will be published next month. It is, in turn, motivational and powerful but also deeply distressing. And yet in some ways, life is good: he now runs his own business, Bravery, selling extreme sports apparel, and he supports charities through it. In November, he got engaged to his girlfriend, Savannah. But then he tries to move his finger, a sign that the force of will that made him such an incredible soldier is still present. The finger never moves, and never will – a fact he has accepted, but can never stop wanting to not accept.

‘I have good days and bad days,’ he says, his speech slower than it once was. ‘It’s a journey. I don’t think it will ever end or that I will come to a place where I am completely happy and content. You just learn to live with it.

‘I don’t blame anyone for what happened. It’s just how war plays out. There are casualties on both sides. It’s horrible. But I don’t harbour thoughts about who is to blame or hatred for the life I have now.’ 

When he thinks back to that night in 2009, he mainly feels confusion. Sometimes he gets flashbacks. ‘I also suffer from PTSD, although all the missions are similar so it is hard to know which bit I’m remembering.’ 

What happened after he was hit was recounted to him by the soldier in front and the three soldiers behind him who grabbed him and dragged him out of the compound. As they waited for a helicopter, they found a pulse and the bullet wound, and stuck their fingers into it to stem the blood loss.

The bullet had entered on the side of his neck and exited on the other, shattering within his body. The back of his neck was a mass of shredded nerves, muscles, arteries, veins, ligaments and lymph glands. It was almost a foregone conclusion that he would not survive. 

As he was airlifted out, the soldiers pushed air into his lungs using a bag. Flown to the UK, he was taken to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, where surgeons worked on him in three separate eight-hour operations. One of the surgeons, who had handed over to other medics, was driving home after his shift when he suddenly had a new idea for how they might save Gutteridge’s life. He turned his car round and returned to the operating theatre.

In the end, 5.5cm of Gutteridge’s spinal column was removed. His head was kept on his body by 51 staples, inserted from ear to ear. The damage was close to his brain and he had stopped breathing in the helicopter, putting him at risk of brain damage, so he was put into an induced coma.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the medical advice to Gutteridge’s brother, Ben, was to turn off his life support. Ben refused. ‘Let’s wake him,’ he told the doctors. ‘Let’s give him a chance.’

‘I’ve never been a religious person,’ Gutteridge says today, ‘but the effect of survival on me was profound. It made me question everything, without worshipping anything other than the power of the human spirit.’ 

Gutteridge remembers clearly the day he woke up in ICU. He was told that he would never walk again, that he was completely paralysed. ‘But it doesn’t sink in until you come back to a sort of reality. [And] even though they told me that, I thought “I’ve got to try!” 

‘On the one hand, I remember thinking, “Thank God I’m alive,” and on the other, “What am I going to do?”’

Yet this was only the start of Gutteridge’s challenges. The journey afterwards, as he pieced together a new life, almost killed him again. Never Will I Die lays out how his paralysis was followed by a descent into alcoholism and recreational drug use as a means of mental escape. This was accompanied by acute self-sabotage – hanging around nightclubs in his wheelchair with the ventilator battery running down, mental isolation and physical pain (which is still ongoing). 

For a mega fit, self-identified ‘control freak’, his fate – his seeming helplessness – almost broke him, he explains in the book, leading him to contemplate suicide.

His darkest time came after moving into adapted quarters on an Army base in Poole in 2011, after spending 12 months at a spinal centre in Salisbury. He would stay at the base for three years, tormented daily by the proximity of all he had once known. Often when he closed his eyes, he thought he wouldn’t wake up. ‘And part of me wanted that,’ he admits.

‘For years, I stared out of a window, sometimes for eight hours a day. I was chronically depressed. I couldn’t sleep. Everything about my life was gone. All gone. And I thought, “The only thing I have control over is my own death.” 

‘But there was that small part of me that still didn’t want to die. No one wants to die, it’s just at times you can’t see an exit [from your pain].’

He found help when he finally opened up to his welfare officer. The Army has, he says, been a strong support.

In 2014, he spent three months at the Priory Hospital in Southampton, where a therapist helped save him mentally, telling him that although he appeared different on the outside, he was that same person inside.

‘I had a lot of time to think “Why me?” But I came to understand, with a lot of help from my therapist, that bad things can happen to good people.’ 

He channelled the perfectionism that had made him an elite soldier into a new start. ‘It was finding a different side of myself,’ he explains. ‘I had to take all the leadership skills and determination of being a soldier and adapt them and use them to overcome what had happened to me.’

First, he went back to college, with the help of an assistant, and achieved four A* A levels and a business degree, then began to slowly build his business. ‘At school nobody encouraged me. I never thought I was going to end up living this type of life. I had never wanted to get married. I thought I would live this young and free life for ever. It’s funny how life can completely pivot you on the spot.’

Gutteridge was born and grew up in South Africa, with an elder brother and two younger sisters. His parents, both British, split up and when Gutteridge was 12, his mother took him and his siblings back to the UK, resettling on a housing estate in Bournemouth. It was not a happy time. 

‘I had a very difficult childhood,’ he says. ‘I never belonged anywhere. But when I made it as a marine and then an SBS soldier, [I knew] I’d finally found my groove. I was incredibly happy and it was something I was good at. Finally, I had a family, I had people who had my back and I had found my place in life.’

Today the soldiers who fought alongside him remain firm friends. ‘They include me in everything,’ he tells me. Some are still serving. Many have left. But their banter is just as it was.

He looks anguished when we discuss the West’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. All for nothing, I ask? ‘I don’t want to get too political,’ he says gently. 

As for his condition, it will not improve. ‘I am deteriorating,’ he says matter-of-factly. ‘I have all sorts of ongoing medical issues because I am ventilated.’ He suffers nerve pain and his sleep is disrupted every two hours because his carers need to turn him to protect him from pressure sores. 

In 2015 he bought his home in Poole using the £570,000 compensation he received. It is a striking space with double-height ceilings in places, lots of driftwood and surfboards hanging from the ceiling. The garden is landscaped with a ramp-like pathway, and behind the bi-fold doors of the sitting room is a beach bar on a decking area. Gutteridge’s old surfboards poke out from behind, an aspect of his life – along with being a soldier – that defined him back then. ‘I didn’t dream of having a family or settling down,’ he says. ‘It was just all about travelling, surfing and working.’

Today, life is about getting up early and sticking to a routine: physio, then running his business. He relies on 24-hour care, as he cannot move or breathe unassisted. He struggles with anxiety and the effects of trauma.

He has, however, found love with Savannah, 32, whom he met five years ago when she was briefly one of his carers. ‘To learn how to live being paralysed in a relationship is a big thing,’ says Gutteridge. ‘It certainly isn’t a “normal” relationship by any means. There are a lot of circumstances we have had to learn to live with but we understand it and we know the difficulties and we make it work. We’ve talked about parenthood a lot and we both never wanted kids anyway.’

He still travels, but with difficulty and at great expense. He proposed to Savannah in Dubai last year, and they recently returned from a trip to Portugal. ‘But travelling is so hard,’ he says. ‘And it is so undignified, being lowered into a seat with a hoist as people are jostling to try to sit down.’

In his dreams, Gutteridge tells me, he is the fit man he once was: ‘My physical strength defined a lot of my character. I was a proud person. I am a proud person. So when I dream, I’m always running, surfing, jumping – and then I wake up. Sometimes, in the dream I can’t move an arm and I’ll be thinking in the dream “that’s odd”.

‘I have a lot of support now. I still see my therapist, who has been instrumental in rebuilding my life, in rebuilding me, I guess. By that I mean helping me find me. I was always there, I just needed finding again. I am very lucky.’ 

With a smile, he adds, ‘But it was ultimately my choice. I decided to save myself.’ 

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Never Will I Die, by Toby Gutteridge, is out on Thursday (Bantam Press, £20); pre-order at books.telegraph.co.uk