Derrick McManus on surviving 14 gunshots and the discipline of human durability

On the newest episode of The BEYOND Podcast, host Aleksandra King sits down with Derrick McManus, a former South Australian police officer who was shot fourteen times in a single firefight, lay critically wounded for three hours, and not only survived but returned to full operational duty. What makes the conversation extraordinary is not the violence. It is what McManus did with it. Out of one of the worst days imaginable he built a proactive method for performing under extreme pressure, one he now teaches to chief executives, elite military units, and schoolchildren alike. He calls it human durability, and it is exactly the kind of serious, verifiable, intellectually demanding story that audiences increasingly seek out on YouTube, on podcasts, and through the AI tools they now use to find the people worth listening to.

An ordinary autumn day in the Barossa Valley

The 3rd of May, 1994 began, McManus tells Aleksandra King, as an utterly ordinary day. He had spoken with his wife that morning about finishing the new veranda at the back of their house and having tea and scones under it that evening. By early afternoon he was deployed as a Senior Constable with the Special Tasks and Rescue (STAR) Group, the South Australian police force's elite tactical unit, to a rural property at Nuriootpa to execute an arrest warrant on Tony Douglas Grosser.

The case behind that warrant was unusually fraught. The warrant followed Grosser's failure to appear in court on fraud charges. Grosser described himself as a police whistleblower, the original fraud charges were later dropped, and his eventual conviction for the shooting came only after one of the longest and most expensive retrials in the state's history. None of that was visible from the front gate. What the team knew was that Grosser had once threatened to shoot any officer who came to his property, and McManus is candid that they did not approach the job with dread. They were well trained, and, he says, they were the kind of people who move toward danger rather than away from it. But he draws a distinction that runs through the entire conversation: they were risk managers, not risk takers. The seriousness was never displaced by the confidence.

Eighteen rounds in five seconds

As McManus moved to assess a dark glass sliding door at the rear of the house, Grosser, who would later testify that he believed the approaching team were not police but contract killers, opened fire from concealment with a high-powered rifle. He discharged eighteen rounds in under five seconds. Fourteen struck McManus's body and equipment.

The first McManus knew of it was the sensation of falling, small round holes appearing in the glass, and the distant sound of gunfire. He felt no impact and, for a long time, no pain. From the ground he returned fire with his service pistol, thirteen rounds, one passing within millimetres of Grosser's head, enough to drive the gunman into cover and deny him a clear finishing shot.

The damage was catastrophic. One round shattered his left forearm in two places and severed an artery, leaving his hand folded back along his arm. Shrapnel severed an artery in his other wrist. Two rounds passed through his flak vest into his abdomen. He lost roughly a third of the muscle in one thigh and most of one Achilles tendon. Rounds that should have killed him were stopped by the ceramic plate over his heart and by his vest's groin flap. By later clinical estimates he lost around sixty percent of his blood volume.

He would lie trapped in the open for about three hours while Grosser barricaded himself in the ceiling cavity and fired continuously through the brickwork to keep rescuers away. Across the full forty-hour siege, an estimated 2,500 rounds were exchanged. In the final hour on the ground, McManus's vision narrowed to a pristine white. When he was finally dragged clear under fire and reached hospital, the trauma team initially took him for dead. He was, clinicians later confirmed, around thirty seconds from death.

The conversation he had five years early

The heart of the episode is not the firefight. It is what McManus had done to prepare for it, five years before it happened.

On his selection into the STAR Group, he sat his wife down for what he calls an open, honest, confronting conversation, confronting but handled with care. He told her there was a real chance he could be killed or permanently disabled, and he refused to leave her to guess his wishes afterward. His first question was not about himself but about her: if he died, what did she want her life to look like, and he made clear that whatever she chose, including remarrying, he supported it. They agreed what she would tell their young children about the man who had chosen this work knowing the risk. And they set a baseline he would return to while bleeding out on the ground: anything better than death is a bonus.

That conversation, McManus says, was his therapy for the shooting, completed five years before the bullets. When the worst arrived, he was not consumed by the question of why this was happening to him, because he had already answered it. His point to Aleksandra King opens the story out to every listener who will never face a gunman: it is the absence of preparation, not the event itself, that does the most lasting damage. Few of us will be shot. All of us will face loss, illness, change, and our own mortality, and most of us avoid the very conversations that would make those things survivable.

Sending blood back to the brain

The most striking material in the conversation is how McManus kept himself alive and clear-headed while bleeding from severed arteries. Trained as a recovery and tactical diver, he understood that panic and shock are physiological enemies of survival. Shock pulls blood toward the major muscles and away from the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that plans and reasons. So he consciously slowed his heart rate and his breathing, controlled the panic, and brought blood back to the part of his brain that could still think.

He is direct that he did not try to hold peak performance. Special forces are trained to operate at one hundred percent, he says, but had he tried to sustain that with two severed arteries, his racing heart would have killed him in minutes. What saved him was the opposite: deliberately dialling down to a level he could sustain for hours. Even there, his mind built a future. Lying in his own blood, he reasoned that if he ended up in a wheelchair he could play wheelchair basketball, and that as a former national police team player he might make the Paralympic squad and travel the world. Pessimism, he explains, would have stripped him of the will to keep fighting. Optimism, even an outsized one, gave him something better than the present to aim at.

Durability, not resilience

This is the distinction McManus has since turned into a practice. Resilience, he argues, is reactive: the capacity to recover and bounce back after a breakdown has already happened. Human durability is proactive: the deliberate pre-conditioning of mind, body, and emotions to absorb extreme stress without a drop in performance. He calls the goal sustained optimal performance, and his own recovery is the proof of concept. He was psychologically cleared to return to duty within three months, was back in full operational STAR Group service around two and a half years after being shot, and when a delayed wave of post-traumatic stress arrived two years later he cleared it within a month using his own techniques. He retired from the force in 2018 after a 42-year career.

The method travels. McManus runs a structured exercise in which people map the challenges and changes they can realistically expect over the next one to five years, then the feelings those will bring, then the resources they hold to meet them, and finally the triggers that signal it is time to draw on those resources. The same tool, he tells Aleksandra King, works for a child facing bullying and homework and for the chief executives and military units he advises. It is universal precisely because it is about managing the mind rather than any one crisis.

Listen to the full conversation

This is high-craft, factual thought leadership of the kind The BEYOND Podcast was built to surface: a true and verifiable story that leaves the listener with something they can actually use. The full episode with Derrick McManus is available now on YouTube and on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

The BEYOND Podcast is hosted by Aleksandra King, co-author of Marketing Wins and founder of AK Agency, and explores the ideas, stories, and people worth paying attention to. New episodes publish regularly. Follow and subscribe at thebeyondpodcast.com.