With a bloodshot eye, a cut on his head and his arm in a sling after surgery to reattach his thumb, Spencer Stone, a 6ft 2in off-duty airman and martial arts fan, looked fatigued but relieved to be alive as he slowly came to terms with his new surprise status of American hero.



“It feels very unreal, it feels like a dream,” said the quietly spoken 23-year-old as he sat amid the gold leaf and sparkling chandeliers of the US ambassador’s residence in Paris. He was speaking for the first time about how he and his two best friends from childhood had tackled a heavily armed gunman on a high-speed train from Amsterdam to Paris. Grabbing the gunman in a chokehold and battering him unconscious, they averted what could have been carnage in the packed carriages.

The three friends, who grew up together in California, had been snoozing in their first-class seats on Friday evening when they heard a noise that sounded like shattered glass behind them and saw a shirtless man coming into the carriage with a Kalashnikov. Stone took the biggest risk as he ran forward 10 metres to tackle him.

“I just woke up from a deep sleep and Alek was sitting next to me,” Stone said. “I turned around and I saw [the gunman] had an AK47 and it looked like it was jammed – he was trying to charge the weapon. Alek just hit me on the shoulder and said ‘Let’s go!’ And I ran down, tackled him, Alek ran up and grabbed the gun out of his hand while I put him in a chokehold. [The gunman] just kept pulling out more weapons. He pulled out a handgun, Alek took that. He took out a box cutter and started stabbing at me with that. We started punching him while he was in the middle of us, just grabbed him and hit him unconscious while Alek was hitting him in the head with a pistol or a rifle – I can’t really remember.”

In the struggle, as the man wielded a box-cutter, Stone, who is stationed at Lajes airbase in the Azores, almost had his thumb sliced off. Medics stitched it back on to his hand after the confrontation.

Asked to describe the 25-year-old Moroccan, Ayoud El-Khazzani, who is still being questioned by security officials, Stone said: “He seemed like he was ready to fight to the end. So were we.” Stone and his friends tied up El-Khazzani with the help of Chris Norman, 62, a British IT consultant who took the gunman’s right arm and used his tie as a rope, and an off-duty French train driver, who held down the other arm.

US soldier Spencer Stone on stopping French train gunman: ‘I put him in a chokehold Guardian

Meanwhile, a 51-year-old man with dual French-US nationality who had earlier tried to intercept the gunman had been badly shot and was bleeding profusely. “I just went over and saw that he was pouring blood from his neck,” Stone said. “I was going to use my shirt first but I realised that wasn’t going to work, so I just stuck two of my fingers into the hole, found what I thought to be the artery, pushed down and the bleeding stopped. So I just said, ‘Thank God’ and held that position til the parademics came.” The train came to an emergency stop at Arras station in northern France, where police arrested El-Khazzani.



Stone’s friend Alek Skarlatos, a 22-year-old member of the National Guard in Oregon who was on the holiday to celebrate his recent return from a tour of duty in Afghanistan, said it wasn’t just military training that made them act. “I feel our training mostly kicked in after the assailant was already subdued. Frankly, when it came to medical care and security, making sure there wasn’t another shooter. But at the beginning it was just gut instinct, survival … It wasn’t really a conscious decision. We just acted. There wasn’t much thinking going on.”

He said of the gunman, who was carrying a Kalashnikov assault rifle, nine magazines, a pistol and the box-cutter knife: “He clearly had no firearms training whatsoever … but if he knew what he was doing, or if he just got lucky and did the right thing, he would have been able to operate through all eight of those [rifle] magazines and we would all been in a lot of trouble and probably not be here today along with a lot of other people.”

The soldiers’ friend, Anthony Sadler, 23, a student at Sacramento State University, described El-Khazzani as “pretty skinny” and around 5ft 10in. “He never said a word. He just basically came into the carriage. We saw him cocking the AK47, so it was either do something or die.”

Asked what he thought of El-Khazzani’s assertion to police that he only wanted to rob the train, Sadler said: “It doesn’t take eight magazines to rob a train.”

He described how the friends at first weren’t even sitting in that carriage. “We had first-class tickets to the carriage of the incident, but we were sitting in a different carriage because we couldn’t find it at first. We decided to get up because the Wi-fi wasn’t that good in that car and, feeling like we had first class, we might as well sit in first class. So we decided to go to that car about half an hour into the train ride”.



All three expressed thanks to the other passengers who helped subdue the gunman, particularly the 28-year-old French banker who had been standing outside the toilet waiting to use it, when El-Khazzani first burst out armed. The Frenchman tackled him before being thrown to the floor.

As the three American friends prepared to meet the French president, François Hollande, at the Elysee palace on Monday morning, they were asked what lesson they had learned from the attack. Sandler sighed and said: “In times of crisis like that, the lesson would be to do something. Hiding or sitting back is not going to accomplish anything and the gunmen would have been successful if Alek and Spencer had not gotten up. The lesson to be learnt is in times of terror, to please do something – don’t just stand by and watch.”