Veteran resilience · United Kingdom
5 and 20
Check yourself. Check your mates. Act before the crisis.
The members’ platform built around Steve Gaskell’s books, Last Parade and 5 and 20: Buddy Buddy. For veterans, serving personnel, emergency services and their families. If you’ve bought the book, this is where the work happens.
The parade ends. The responsibility does not.
Steve Gaskell served 28 years in the British Army, starting as a soldier, leaving as a captain. He knows what the last parade feels like from the inside, and what the silence feels like once it ends.
Last Parade is the transition workbook, 41 chapters that take a service person from the final parade to a civilian life built with purpose, standards and direction. 5 and 20: Buddy Buddy is the peer-support discipline at its heart: check yourself, check your buddies, act before the crisis arrives.
These books were written because the gap after service is real, and because the people best placed to catch a struggling mate are the ones who already know what normal looks like for them. This platform is where the books come to life.
The 5 and 20 Principle
An SOP that became a survival discipline. Five metres: check yourself. Twenty metres: check your buddies. Then act on what you find.
5 metres, Check yourself
A weekly, honest read of your physical, mental and relational state against your known baseline. The maintenance most veterans skip, and the one that catches the slow slide before it becomes a crisis.
20 metres, Check your buddies
The people closest to you. Ask the real question, listen to the answer, and act before the emergency. The person most likely to know your mate is in trouble is you.
Steve Gaskell
Steve served 28 years in the British Army, starting as a soldier, leaving as a captain. He became a Master Coach and Leadership Mentor, training soldiers and officers in team performance, leadership and resilience under real pressure. As a welfare officer, he sat with people on their worst days.
Today he coaches CEOs, founders and board-level teams as The Challenge Coach. His work is practical, principle-led and built on the standards he carried in uniform: discipline, accountability, ownership.
He wrote Last Parade and 5 and 20: Buddy Buddy for the ones coming after him , the moment the role stops, the rank goes, and a service person has to work out who they are without any of it.
Inside the members’ area
Everything the books point to, built into a private platform you carry on your phone.
5-Check (5m)
Weekly self-check across physical, mental and relational, with streaks, trends and recovery actions.
Buddy Check (20m)
Track your buddies, log check-ins, and act on the signs before they become a crisis.
Buddy Circle
Create a squad, invite your mates, and stay in contact with real-time group chat.
Last Parade Workbook
All 41 chapter exercises from the book, fillable, saved to your account, exportable to PDF.
Resources
Crisis lines, helplines and organisations, the numbers you need before you need them.
Frequently asked questions
Everything you need to know about 5 and 20
Start the work
Create your account to unlock the full workbook, self-checks, buddy tools and resources. Built for readers of Last Parade and Buddy Buddy.
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