by Jason Fox
It was only once I’d returned to The Real World that the frequencies of life wobbled at a different intensity. The rules were less defined, blurry, and the grey areas were difficult to deal with: an ex-wife that I still loved but knew I couldn’t be with; a daughter sick with a birth defect, her distress breaking me into pieces whenever I saw her; a girlfriend who wanted to be with me, but I wasn’t sure if my heart was in it. Then there were the texts, emails and bills to manage, and weeks and weeks of mind-crushing normality. Home life often felt destabilized and fraught with pitfalls, but this time my unease was different, an imperceptible nagging that something was off, a dark, unacknowledged shift – an ominous sensation. My dissatisfaction with the grey of The Real World had hit me much earlier than usual, and with a worrying twist, too.
Could it have been the tour?
The realities of my latest stint in war were brutal: a grim, lengthy shift that had rattled my unshakable self-belief and left me drained and nervous. That had everything to do with the nature of conflict back then. The British military were fighting in several locations where the War on Terror had evolved into a series of intensifying guerrilla conflicts on different continents. The group I fought alongside had been called in to operate across all territories. Our work was secretive, highly skilled and demanding, and the load was taking its toll on some of the soldiers. The tempo of operations was high – too high – and the mood in the desert camp was dark when our squad landed several months earlier. Just days before our arrival, the soldiers we’d relieved had been attacked by enemy fighters. Apparently one of their units had walked into a daisy-chain IED that had ripped them apart, killing one and injuring ten others, the medical list comprising lost limbs, eyes, even the last thing on earth a man would want to say goodbye to. It was a horrifying mess, and when we arrived bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, eager for some action, we saw that the surviving lads were in a bad way. It would be just as dark by the time we left.
‘We’ll take you out, but we’ve had a rough time,’ said the Officer Commanding as we worked through our handover details. That told me everything about their state of mind in the war we were fighting. He was a grumpy, bear-sized dude who looked like he would ordinarily have had little issue engaging with the enemy. Reticence was something that wouldn’t have come easily. ‘We’ve had one bad knock,’ he continued. ‘Fingers crossed we don’t have another …’
Apparently the scrapping had become even hairier than ever before. Skirmishes were more frequent now and as a result the unit had been decimated; they were exhausted, morale was low. Nobody could blame those boys for wanting to get home without an extra KIA statistic or one more life-changing injury to worry about. The incumbent men had been pushed through the mill and wanted to get away; we were eager to get started. But some time later I understood their heavy mood. We were the ones feeling low and it was we who didn’t want to tempt fate as our home date approached. By the end of that tour, we had experienced a serious casualty rate.
And some of the injuries had been horrific. A couple of blokes had been shot in the arms and legs, and there were life-saving procedures in the base’s surgery. Others hadn’t been so lucky. During one early-morning patrol, a small group of gunmen spotted us as daylight broke and took pot-shots from the top of a nearby hut. We ducked down into a slight dip in the terrain and set up an all-round defence, a small, tight circle of men covering every possible angle, but the bullets peppered the ground all about us, puffing up blasts of sand with the impact. There was a shout; one of the lads had been hit in the arm and was crawling towards a nearby derelict wall, the wound leaving a bloody trail in the dust and dirt. We gathered behind him, engaging the enemy as we moved, before crouching below a small pile of broken bricks. Almost as soon as we had found cover, the shooting died off. I took a second to make a headcount.
‘Danny, Mooro … Where’s Ben?’
And that’s when I saw him: he was face down on the floor, a weird gurgling noise coming from his mouth and throat. Before we could call out, Ben somehow pulled himself upright and I spotted the ugliness of his injury. Blood and gore was splattered over his body armour and gun.
‘Oh no.’
With two men down we had no option but to call in a ‘Pedro’, a CASEVAC helicopter worked by US forces, which was kitted out with all the drugs and anaesthetics needed to keep a seriously injured soldier alive. Surgeons were able to patch up the critically wounded on the fly, before getting them into a more stable environment. The Pedro pilots were fearless, too. They would happily swoop into a hot landing zone to scoop up the limbless. Often I would see them waiting at the base, radio on, whirring up their blades as the first sniff of enemy contact crackled over the comms. Some people thought they were reckless because their attitude was always ‘Let’s go,’ regardless of the risks, but they had a determination to retrieve injured lads, wherever they were. We loved them. Whenever we had to dial up the Pedro call sign, they would show up all guns blazing.
Ben made it out alive, somehow, though his career was well and truly done. Not long afterwards Danny, an extreme-sports freak only in his mid-twenties, followed him home, though his injuries were the result of a split-second decision rather than an ambush. In the middle of the night we had been flown way out to the back of beyond, miles from our base, to search a small village for enemy leaders. Our group was dropped off a few miles outside the settlement and we walked in under darkness. I was tired, really tired – we all were – and as we located the small house where we understood one target was hiding, confusion kicked in. We knew the route to the building would be chaos because they usually were – doors led to cubbyholes, alleyways led to blocked-up doorways – and once we got inside those places the crazy architecture was often disorientating. Sometimes a room that led to another room would then open out to another room, and all of them were positioned in a straight line with no other entry points to be found. While I liked the weird vibe of the areas we were scrapping in, the not knowing the flow of a building unnerved me sometimes – it was like the TV show Crystal Maze, but a more hellish version. Often a hunting party couldn’t get to the final room unless they had travelled through the three previous doors. That caused a lot of stress when planning how best to attack a compound safely. The general rule? Speed was key.
We needed to kick through the place quickly to maintain the element of shock. Our forces were gathered in a small courtyard. There was a door at one end and our hostile was somewhere behind it, perhaps surrounded by guards, perhaps sitting alone watching the telly or kipping – we sometimes got lucky and discovered very dangerous people in very mundane situations, but only if our footwork had got us in there quickly enough. We approached the home cautiously, quietly. Danny was point man – it was his job to kick the door in and to step forwards, which was always a hairy role because he would be the first person to cop a bullet if someone was waiting on the other side. A good point man had to be fearless, controlled, and, most of all, decisive. There was no room for hesitation or over-analysing. But as we gathered around the doorway, Danny paused. He was waiting, waiting, waiting. Maybe it was the fatigue. Maybe he was just having a bad night in the office.
One of the other lads hissed into his ear: ‘Dude, let’s go. Take the initiative.’
But it was too late. The upper hand we’d had before was lost and as Danny smashed the door down and stepped into the frame, his rifle pointing into the darkness, a loud burst of gunfire roared out. The shots rocked him to the floor like he was a heavy bag of shopping, and in that split second there was no doubt in my mind that he was dead. The poor fella could easily have taken three or four hits and the blood bubbling from his throat didn’t look, or sound, good. In what must have been a fraction of a second, everybody stepped over his body and engaged the gunman, killing him in a flurry of bullets as a medic dragged Danny out of the way and worked on what was left of his neck.
Somehow Danny made it, clinging on to life in the helicopter back to base, where he fell into a coma for
ages. For months afterwards the poor sod was stuck in a hospital at home, living through a machine that worked his lungs. One breath in, one breath out.
These were the peak moments of stress that happened during that tour, but our work had been relentless throughout. There were operations just about every night and the engagements were often long and intense. Meanwhile, our night-time rescue mission – the one that had caused me to wobble so severely – had gained notoriety among the men working alongside us and the wider coalition forces. News reports spread word about the raid and everybody wanted to claim that they were a part of it. Some of the American pilots who were flying the helicopters had been shocked at its intensity, and one of the crew later retrieved an empty gun casing from the job; they commemorated their survival by having it engraved. Another was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, while some of our lads were awarded Military Crosses for their efforts in the field. A few young blokes who went on that tour are still in the British military now, but some others packed in the job afterwards, all of them affected by the slow, painful grind of those months in the desert. I certainly became more cautious in the immediate weeks after that particular battle. I thought long and hard about approaching rooms and how I was going to burst into them; I was a lot more methodical than normal. My reluctance to take risks was a new sensation for me.
Normally I went on tour knowing I’d be returning home in far better shape than when I’d left, both mentally and physically. I’d eat well, train well and work bloody hard; we rarely drank booze while we were out there and I always came home satisfied that the job had been successful. But that short period in my military life was very different. Everybody lost serious amounts of weight. We were drained, emotionally crushed, which was why expert soldiers became so close. The intensity of our work was incredibly stressful on the body and brain, and we had nothing else to occupy ourselves with between missions other than talking and opening up. Usually we gossiped about the mundane stuff at home, the normal things we couldn’t wait to do, like an afternoon in front of the telly for a daytime marathon with Trisha, Jeremy Kyle and Deal or No Deal. From the sweat of a dusty bunk in a scorching hot tent, a bunch of men packed in together, even the idea of a stroll through the supermarket for a weekly shop felt restorative, like a sunny day on an idyllic Caribbean beach. From the desert, Britain sparkled in the distance, an oasis. Now, standing in the rain of Poole High Street, everything decorated in cheap fairy lights, home looked like hell.
And I had a bad feeling about everything.
Normally I would have been excited about my next assignment, itching to get back into battle almost from the minute I landed back in the UK. The fast turnover of war often required soldiers to go on tour every ninety days, but my next stint wasn’t for several months and there was a long list of tasks to be completed in the interim – training, insertion practice (where I would be leading teams that were diving on to mocked-up enemy boats), a bodyguarding course, counter-terrorism drills, a commanders course, and a lot of cool stuff where we played with boys’ toys. On paper, all of it should have been exciting, but for some reason I just wasn’t digging it. Part of that was to do with being at home – I missed the military life abroad. Despite the risks and stresses, the job gave me purpose and a sense of satisfaction knowing that I was keeping the people that I loved safe at home while working for my country in a role that carried kudos. I was an elite fighter – and everybody knew it, too. I was also an adventure junkie and the thought of action usually excited me. I had liked being scared; it made me feel alive. But now … Not so much. I was fed up at the thought of domestic training and I sensed a creeping mood of unease, some indeterminable worry that I couldn’t quite pinpoint.
What’s happening to me?
Where am I?
I was a zombie. I heard the chatter of town life blowing around me, the patter of rain hitting the pavement, laughter, and the bleep, bleep, bleep of a nearby pedestrian crossing, but I was rooted to the spot, unable to shift my focus from the future to the present. I was transfixed on my mood and the dark thoughts that seemed to envelop me. They felt like a looming black cloud out at sea, growing in size and advancing inland towards my position. I sensed panic rising and I wanted to run away, to escape, but to where? My body was heavy, as if my boots had been planted in quick-drying cement. It was as if any forward movement I might attempt would take me closer to the approaching cloud. I had to get out of its path, to hide, but I was trapped, boxed in by an idea I’d never really considered before.
I didn’t want to die.
6
The following morning I walked on to base wondering, Do the others feel the same as me? It was hard to tell. The deeper thoughts of a battle-ready soldier were necessarily shut away, closed to the rest of an alpha male group that was institutionalized to prey on weakness from the offset, rooting out those lads incapable of completing the gruelling training phases taking place across bleak mountain ranges and, later, in the jungle’s unforgiving humidity, where ticks, flesh-eating infections and foot rot were adversaries every bit as dangerous and demoralizing as an enemy attack. In those conditions, the soft-hearted fell away quickly. Only the mentally strongest qualified and joined the more expert section of the military where emotions had to be steadied. There was no room for moaning, anxiety or cowardice when things got really rough.
Man up, they said.
Get over it, they said.
Get some balls about you, they said.
Was the next tour my mortal P45? This thought had popped up briefly over the past day or so, but I could feel it pinned to my back now, like an unwieldy piece of combat kit. Maybe the idea was manageable, something I could push away. Besides, I knew the aftershocks would be far-reaching if I were to admit to the other lads that I felt a little banged up. I didn’t want anybody to think that I’d lost it, or that I was getting soft. I certainly didn’t want to be branded as such, or have my reputation tarnished, which is what would happen should rumours start flying around at the base. Were I to push for promotion in the coming years, I knew that any admission of mental stress would damage my chances of success, and even if I had thought something was wrong with my head, I wouldn’t have admitted it to a psych nurse for fear of it being marked on my record, a permanent chink in the armour. For fear of my Officer Commanding thinking, ‘Shit, Foxy’s seeing a shrink? He’s done then …’ For fear of being rejected by the other men. For fear of being binned off the job.
But was this normal? Was I supposed to be feeling this way?
I settled into work with the lads at the base’s equipment cage, squaring away my kit from the tour, trying to scratch off the mud and grime that had drifted into the grooves and edges of my radio, my gun sight and my sunglasses. I looked at the others sitting around me, wondering, Have they ever had the same worries? I knew that soldiers weren’t shut off entirely. Emotional intelligence was a key component of working with an elite military unit, but that was because we had to control our feelings. Aggression had to be turned on and off like a TV set. Hotheads were no good in a battle when a moment of crushed pride might result in the whole team getting killed. Meanwhile, moments of fear had to become an ally: the emotion was an indicator of stress and acknowledged as a very real and natural reaction, but ultimately I used it to sharpen my thinking and then it was compartmentalized and forgotten afterwards. I often noticed that whenever we soldiers talked together we usually went through the issues that were bothering us, maybe something about our wives or girlfriends, the kids, maybe money troubles, but it was done without feeling. The language was always fairly impersonal and the conversations never went too deep because to show sensitivity was to look weak.
A metal door clanged behind me. One of the new lads had stepped into the cage with us. I recognized his face but couldn’t pinpoint the name – I’d noticed towards the end of the tour that I was struggling to remember minor details like that, which was frustrating the hell out of me. He began retelling an awful story to nobody but
everybody about his ex and I recognized his harsh tone from the countless chats I’d had with teammates as we killed time between missions. The story described the collapse of a relationship, something that would have been a deeply emotional experience, except the words were cold and aggressive, as if he had been recalling another mission.
‘Yeah, so that was that done then, I binned it off,’ he concluded, like he was discussing his latest car breaking down, or the news of a boiler packing up. And as I sat there, laughing along with the other blokes at the awfulness of another grim, collapsing partnership, I contemplated what these same people might have thought about my moment of paralysis on the High Street.
But was I really different from any of them?
Throughout my military career, I never considered the idea that my mind might go before my body. I don’t think anyone does. I also never used to acknowledge mental health conditions as being real. I had long dismissed the symptoms of PTSD as being nonsensical excuses for cowardice or weak will, and I hadn’t believed in the issue of psychological problems within expertly trained soldiers, anyway. As a younger man, I even viewed the associated conditions of mental health as a cop-out, an excuse for any individual who wanted to cover up their failures, like those blokes who’d showed up at American draft offices dressed in women’s clothes in order to escape service in Vietnam – a cover-up. Nor did I trust the idea of psychiatric care. Could somebody really pinpoint a person’s problems by laying them down on a fancy sofa and asking them to open up about their mother-issues, to shift blame for their actions and mistakes on to a shaky upbringing? Whenever I had screwed up previously, in or out of the job, I’d raised my hand and admitted responsibility. That will be my attitude again. I only have to refocus the stress – it will be a fleeting emotion, anyway.