One Man in: The Explosive Firsthand Account of the Lone Special-Ops Commando Who Fought Off a Major Terrorist Attack in Kenya

This thrilling memoir by a heroic special forces soldier reads like a real-life version of an action movie.

It was midafternoon on January 15, 2019, and Christian Craighead was stepping out of the shower. The forty-three-year-old British special-ops soldier was at home in Kenya’s bustling capital city of Nairobi, having recently arrived in the country to train units of the Kenyan army.

Then a local friend called, saying the upscale hotel and office complex he was at was under a terrorist attack. Within minutes, Craighead was in his pickup truck with his weapons case beside him. He floored the accelerator, steering to the wrong side of the highway to dodge oncoming vehicles and pedestrians.

For the next twenty-two hours, Craighead relied on every bit of his twenty-eight years of elite military training to win a deadly game of hide-and-seek with a unit of ethnic Somali terrorists who had already carried out one suicide bomb attack and were intent on gunning down as many other innocent people as possible. At first on his own, then as the adopted leader of a small group of Kenyan police, Craighead moved through the complex, where more than a thousand hotel staff, guests, and office workers normally spent their days. He shepherded scores of terrified people to safety. And after he and his men located and engaged the terrorists, a battle of guns, grenades, and tactics ensued. Suffice it to say that Craighead and his men made it out. The terrorists did not.

Told in gripping, minute-by-minute detail, One Man In is a story of uncommon heroism, from a man who happened to be in the right place at the right time—and decided to act.

Christian Craighead joined the British Army at sixteen, going on to spend the next twenty-eight years serving in the UK’s most elite units—the Parachute Regiment, Pathfinder Platoon, and ultimately 22 SAS. Renowned for covert reconnaissance, counterterrorism, direct action, and hostage rescue, 22 SAS became the setting for nearly fifteen years of Craighead’s career, during which he took part in more than a thousand high-risk missions across multiple theaters, including Iraq and Afghanistan. After a remarkable career, he retired from active service on September 7, 2020, highly decorated for gallantry, receiving multiple honors, including Britain’s second-highest military award, the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross. He now lives in the United States.