Alek Skarlatos: ‘I saw this guy with an AK-47, tapped my friend on the shoulder and said: Let’s go’

In mid-August, Alek Skarlatos, a specialist with the Oregon army national guard, was on a Thalys train travelling from Amsterdam to Paris, part of a European vacation he’d planned with his friends Spencer Stone and Anthony Sadler to celebrate the end of his tour of duty in Afghanistan. Three hours into the journey, a 25-year-old Moroccan man with Isis connections, Ayoub El-Khazzani, began rampaging through the carriages armed with a pistol, a Kalashnikov, 270 rounds of ammunition and half a litre of petrol, eventually shooting and grievously wounding a Franco-American man, Mark Moogalian, who tried to stop him. What El-Khazzani wasn’t bargaining for was the trio of peppy Americans, who, together with 62-year-old Brit Chris Norman, overcame the attacker, Skarlatos using the butt of El-Khazzani’s own gun to beat him into submission. On the telephone from LA, Skarlatos reveals what he remembers about the attack. “Honestly, it’s really strange. The adrenaline messes with your memory. I do remember certain moments very sharply and very clearly. When I first saw the guy with the AK, that part is burned in my mind. Then I tapped Spencer on the shoulder and said, ‘Let’s go!’ and from that moment to pretty much when I grabbed the handgun was totally blank. I remember the end of the struggle very clearly and then when he was on the ground and tied up. It was 35 minutes between him beginning the attack and when we got to the station.”The all World news The Observer's faces of 2015 Alek Skarlatos: ‘I saw this guy with an AK-47, tapped my friend on the shoulder and said: Let’s go’ The off-duty soldier was one of five passengers who foiled a terrorist attack on a Paris-bound train in August • See the Observer’s faces of 2015 in full here • Nujeen Mustafa: ‘Sometimes it’s good to be unaware. Maybe I was too young to realise the danger’ Alek Skarlatos, Los Angeles ‘The adrenaline messes with your memory’: Alek Skarlatos in Los Angeles. Photograph: Steve Schofield for the Observer Alex Preston Sunday 20 December 2015 09.00 GMT Share Share Share Shares 0 Comments 0 Save for later In mid-August, Alek Skarlatos, a specialist with the Oregon army national guard, was on a Thalys train travelling from Amsterdam to Paris, part of a European vacation he’d planned with his friends Spencer Stone and Anthony Sadler to celebrate the end of his tour of duty in Afghanistan. Three hours into the journey, a 25-year-old Moroccan man with Isis connections, Ayoub El-Khazzani, began rampaging through the carriages armed with a pistol, a Kalashnikov, 270 rounds of ammunition and half a litre of petrol, eventually shooting and grievously wounding a Franco-American man, Mark Moogalian, who tried to stop him. What El-Khazzani wasn’t bargaining for was the trio of peppy Americans, who, together with 62-year-old Brit Chris Norman, overcame the attacker, Skarlatos using the butt of El-Khazzani’s own gun to beat him into submission. On the telephone from LA, Skarlatos reveals what he remembers about the attack. “Honestly, it’s really strange. The adrenaline messes with your memory. I do remember certain moments very sharply and very clearly. When I first saw the guy with the AK, that part is burned in my mind. Then I tapped Spencer on the shoulder and said, ‘Let’s go!’ and from that moment to pretty much when I grabbed the handgun was totally blank. I remember the end of the struggle very clearly and then when he was on the ground and tied up. It was 35 minutes between him beginning the attack and when we got to the station.” France train attack: Americans overpower gunman on Paris express Read more Since then, life has altered unrecognisably for Skarlatos. He found himself an overnight celebrity, on the cover of newspapers and magazines worldwide, the recipient of the French Légion d’honneur and the US Soldier’s Medal, the highest award for actions not taken in combat. Back home in Oregon, he was asked to join Dancing With the Stars, an American reality show similar to Strictly Come Dancing. Advertisement Skarlatos and his dance partner, Lindsay Arnold, came third in the show’s 21st season, their high point a heartfelt and patriotic waltz to America the Beautiful. So how did Skarlatos move from have-a-go-heroism to dancing off against the likes of Chaka Khan and the Backstreet Boys’ Nick Carter? “When they asked me to do it, it wasn’t even a week after the attack and I was just a bit ignorant about the whole thing,” he says. “There was so much stuff going on... For me it was like, what else was I going to do? But I just had to make sure that Spencer [Stone] and Anthony [Sadler] were OK with it. They did take a bit of convincing – they had no idea what Dancing With the Stars was; I didn’t really either.” Skarlatos’s companions on the train have been noticeably less eager to embrace their new-found fame. He remains close to his boyhood friend Stone, who was wounded in the attack and then, shockingly, two months after his return to the US, was stabbed four times outside a Sacramento nightclub, seemingly while trying to protect a young woman. Skarlatos’s voice drops at this point, reflecting on his friend’s misfortune and another attack he was unable to prevent. “While I was busy celebrating stopping a terrorist attack, there was a shooting at my college that I would have been at that day, and then a week later Spencer gets stabbed and I wasn’t there to help him either,” he says. “I felt guilty not being at my college that day and, who knows, maybe if I hadn’t been doing Dancing With the Stars, I would have been at that bar with him and maybe I would have been able to do something.” I ask Skarlatos if being so centrally involved in a terrorist attack gives him a different perspective on the atrocities in Paris and California; if he believes that the war on terror will ever be won. “Anybody who is a terrorist we should just kill,” he says. “I would rather it not be put up for debate.” Now Skarlatos is about to embark on a stadium tour as part of Dancing With the Stars live. After that, his plans are a little hazy. “I have some things in development right now but nothing certain,” he says. “It’s not quite back to square one, but I’m going to go back to Oregon and if I have other opportunities I’ll probably do them, but I’m trying to scale things down a little bit.”

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