Some people would say that Bear Grylls is possessed. He fords alligator-infested waters in the Everglades, is marooned on a glacier in Alaska and copes with the arid canyons of Mexico. In his spare time, Grylls manages to climb Mount Everest.

	Bear Grylls has a wild time hosting his Discovery Channel series. Click photo for larger image.

And he does all this after surviving a parachute crash that broke his back in three places.

"I'm completely unemployable in any other kind of job, but I'm OK with this one," says Grylls over lunch in a decidedly civilized restaurant here.

"This one" is his series on the Discovery Channel, "Man vs. Wild" (9 p.m. Friday). where Grylls undergoes the most treacherous of survival situations accompanied only by his trusty cameraman, Simon Reay.

It all started when Grylls was a kid growing up on the Isle of Wight. "I was brought up doing this sort of stuff with my dad -- not only the climbing -- but he was really into the survival stuff and the outdoors. I think as a really young kid it was my way of being close to him more than climbing and learning how to make shelters and stuff. That's the world I was brought up in, and when I joined the army I joined the Special Forces in the U.K. and my specialty there was not only the climbing and parachuting but also combat survival. So it's always been a big part of my life."

He was serving with the Special Forces when his parachute malfunctioned in a nighttime jump in Zambia. The fractures landed him trussed up in the hospital for 18 months, with his dream of climbing Mount Everest a distant memory.

"I think when I started to get strong again the dream was to climb again, and Everest became the whole focus of that recovery. I look back now and I feel so grateful every day just to be able to do all these things."

He did climb Mount Everest and wrote a book, "The Kid Who Climbed Everest," about the experience. That took him to England's telly and an assignment to do a series on the French Foreign Legion.

Grylls found that assignment much more rigorous than combat survival, he says. "That was hell on Earth, one of the worst few months I've ever spent.

"The SAS was building specialist soldiers. It's very intense to get into but once you're there you're trusted with the world. And you're very much given self-responsibility. You need to, for some of the jobs you're doing, handling millions of dollars to bribe Arabs to carry ridiculous amounts of explosives around all day. You're trusted with the world. I think the Legion is the opposite," he shakes his head.

"It's a very hard lifestyle, but you're trusted with nothing. You're not told what time of day it is. You're told when to eat, when to sleep, when to do everything. Your whole life is controlled, and they're teaching you to obey orders. They keep 150 nationalities -- a lot of these guys are running from the law -- the only way they keep them together is through a regime of brutality where you do as you're told or you're kicked in the mouth and thrown out."

The Foreign Legion show led to "Man vs. Wild," in which Grylls can indulge his derring-do with little more than a ball of string and a mirror. He admits he's often frightened.

"I'm scared almost every day on the series. Just yesterday I had to swim across an alligator-infested river to show how you'd do it if you had to do this. I could see the alligators, they were 10 meters away. I'm scared the whole time. But I think what I've also learned is that that's OK. What matters is you stay and keep giving your all for what you're doing and say your prayers and keep smiling and go for it. It becomes the mental side of it," he says.

For that he was well-trained. "My specialty with the SAS was combat survival. And I spent months and months and months doing that. We'd get dropped in the middle of the Alps with nothing. We'd have boots with no laces in them, completely naked in the middle of winter with a trench coat and that's it, with 150 soldiers with helicopters looking for us. We had to evade capture, stay alive and cross the mountains undetected. It was a big part of my life in the army learning how to stay alive, how to live off the land. It's everything I love -- all of that."

But that's not the hard part, says Grylls, 32. The difficult part is being away from his wife, Shara, and his two boys Jesse, 4, and Marmeduke, 1.

"I come alive on a mountain or getting bitten alive by mosquitoes. But I'm used to those things. What I find hard is being away from my two little boys. And I've been away so much this year," he sighs.

Grylls does admit that, besides assiduous training, he has another source of strength. "My Christian faith has been a really big part of these adventures. I'm no longer afraid to say I really need that and it takes a proud man to say he needs nothing," he says.

And what is bravery? "Bravery is being aware of your humanity and acknowledging you're scared and still getting on and making decisions to do things. I've seen first-hand extreme bravery from people from the army and high mountains, and we're all like grapes. If you squeeze us you'll see what we're really made of."