Drumchapel and Glasgow

Billy MacLeod MBE grew up first in the tenements of Partick and then on the council estate of Drumchapel, Glasgow, the son of a Protestant father and a Catholic mother in a city often divided by religion, class and identity. From an early age, he was taught to see people as individuals rather than labels. That lesson stayed with him and shaped much of what followed.

The Royal Engineers

Billy joined the Junior Leaders Regiment, Royal Engineers, at Dover aged 16 years and 5 days, the youngest Junior Sapper at the time. His first posting took him to Hameln, Germany, where he trained as an Amphibious Engineer and shortly after his 18th birthday, he served a tour of Northern Ireland.
A posting to Chatham, Kent, followed, where he trained as a bricklayer and concretor. It was here that he suffered the first of the knee injuries that would shadow the rest of his career. Several more postings and tours around the world came and went, along with further operations, until injury finally brought his army service to an end, leaving him wholly unprepared for what came next.
Through it all, it was the people who shaped him: friends from every corner of the country, many of whom he still counts on today and a good few of whom have found their way onto the pages of A Sapper’s Story.

The years between

Billy left the Army with a serious knee injury and no clear route into civilian life. The years that followed were difficult. He was angry, unsettled and unable to explain who he had been in a world that didn’t seem to understand where he had come from. In 1993, he founded a taxi company in Andover and ran it for fifteen years.
In 2005, a car accident brought buried trauma to the surface. He saw a psychologist once, said what he thought she needed to hear and left with the question he couldn’t answer: what do I do now?
Billy has never received a formal PTSD diagnosis. After nearly two decades working with more than 2,000 veterans who carry that label, he believes he experienced it and found his own way through it, through purpose, activity and helping others. He neither overclaims nor dismisses that experience. That honesty is one reason veterans trust him.

"I was a veteran from a council estate in Glasgow who could not
find what he needed. So I built it myself."

Billy MacLeod MBE

Founding Veterans in Action

In 2008 Billy sat in his garden shed with his mate George from the Army. They had both just watched the docu-series The Long Way Round with Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman, and George turned to Billy and said, 'How come it's always rich people that get to do this?' Billy replied in his usual way. 'Well, let's go and do it.'
That was when the idea for Veterans In Action took shape. In January 2009, three months after applying for charity status, VIA was a charity.
Since then Billy has run ten long-distance walks with over 500 veterans suffering from PTSD taking part, covering a distance of 13,500 miles. In addition to the walking expeditions, Billy has run several overland expeditions covering a distance of over 25,000 miles, using the Land Rovers built in the VIA workshop.

Post-Traumatic Growth

In 2016, while seriously ill in hospital with chronic pancreatitis and not expected to survive, Billy spent five months reading academic research on Post-Traumatic Growth by Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun. He recognised that Veterans In Action had been delivering the principles of post-traumatic growth since its founding, even though he had never heard the term before. He had reached the same place through lived experience, practical work and years alongside veterans.

The MBE

In 2020, Billy was awarded the MBE. The citation recognised his COVID community response, including care packages delivered to 6,000 people, 200 individual veteran walks and his wider work supporting veterans since 2008.
He received the email while attending a friend's funeral. The honour and the loss arrived together.

A Sapper's Story

Billy's writing is shaped by the same forces that shaped his life: military service, divided communities, trauma, loyalty, moral complexity and the ordinary people caught inside extraordinary events.

His Second World War series, A Sapper's Story, draws on his own Royal Engineers background and gives voice to the men who are often present in history yet rarely placed at the centre of it. The series follows Sapper Donald 'Donnie' MacIver from the shipyards of Glasgow through the full sweep of the war, from the retreat to Dunkirk, North Africa, Italy, Normandy and the final advance into Germany. It is not a story of generals and map tables. It is the war seen through the hands of the men who built bridges, cleared mines, destroyed roads, opened routes and kept armies moving.

Billy is not a clinician. He is not an academic. He is a veteran from a council estate in Glasgow who could not find what he needed, so built it himself. His novels come from that same place: lived experience, hard-won understanding and a belief that the human story matters most.

Step into the story Billy has spent his life preparing to tell.

MILITARY FICTION - HISTORICAL NOVELS