by Jason Fox
So I wasn’t going to start crying now, not after a little wobble, something that was probably nothing in the grand scheme of things. Besides, reaching out for help wasn’t something we did in the British military. If one of us had a personal problem we were expected to shut up and deal with it alone, which was a good attitude to have during the middle of a battle when there was no room for moping about. But that wasn’t going to help me now, and I knew that even thinking about asking for advice would be a hurdle I’d find difficult to overcome. There was another worrying reality: I didn’t want to experience a moment where I couldn’t look the other lads in the eye because of my shame, or a perceived sense of inferiority. So I was going to man up and get over it. I was going to get some balls about me and forget about the dark shape forming on the horizon, the blackness growing ever closer, a nagging sense of dread, the treacle and the slime oozing into my body and mind.
That cloud. A darkness formed a violent and bloody world away.
7
My days back at the base in Poole became weeks, and with them the nagging, unanswerable and ever-amplifying worry, Where had the buzz gone? Nothing I could tell myself was ever enough to deliver a satisfactory resolution. I couldn’t explain why my purpose in life suddenly seemed so uninspiring, or why my future felt so threatened. And I daren’t ask for advice from anyone around me. I was alone, drifting in a vacuum where the thought of operating on tour with the military caused me to shut down. I became vacant and hollow. I felt detached, as if I were looking down at myself as I stumbled through my life at home, or during my working shifts on the base, training and drinking with the lads, while pretending to everybody that I was OK – even lying to myself if I really had to. I was a mess, not knowing what was wrong and certainly unwilling to consider the possibility that my mental health had been shot to shreds. Even saying those words out aloud back then was enough to rile me up. Mental health. Post-traumatic stress disorder. Those phrases really gave me the hump.
My environment was hardly conducive to moments of quiet reflection or self-discovery. Despite the fact that my missus and I had broken up a while earlier, I had kept the news quiet and was able to hold on to my place in what was called the ‘married quarters’, a two-bedroom terraced house on a crappy little estate positioned just outside the base. It was a perk ordinarily given to the hitched soldiers in the job, but I had the whole place to myself for only £100 a month, all in. It was a great way to save cash, but some of the other couples living in the street hadn’t taken too kindly to my being there. I was a newly divorced bloke and having fun. Always on the beers and up for mischief, I even left the front door unlocked so other single soldiers I knew could use my place if ever they needed to. One Sunday morning I came home from a heavy session to find a weird scene unfolding in the spare room. A mate had pulled that night and had brought the girl back to mine for some privacy, though he hadn’t bothered to tell me. When I walked in on them, bleary eyed, it was as if a little snapshot of domestic bliss had appeared in my house. She was wrapped up in a duvet, watching Hollyoaks on the telly, with a fresh cup of coffee on the go. He was hunched over the end of the bed, running through a series of reps with the dumb-bells I often dropped there, his face screwed up with the strain. And when his one-night stand eventually noticed me eyeballing their strange scene from the doorway, her look of shock quickly turned into one of despair, as if to say, ‘Yeah, mate, he really is doing that.’
Then there was the sex. Some of the lads had wives at home. Others were with long-term partners, and the rest of us were hooking up with local girls in Poole. Months away from intimate contact often proved a rough grind and some soldiers became grumpy while they were working under stress, a million miles away from Britain; or nervous, especially if they were worried about what their partners might be getting up to – it wasn’t uncommon for someone to return home only to discover that their significant other had done a runner.
Before flying out on that last tour, I’d met a nice girl called Sarah. A cute blonde with a posh accent, Sarah was a real social type who was forever planning nights out and organizing parties. Our early dates had crackled; she was exciting, and everything had gone so well, especially the sex. But our relationship was cut short by another episode of war, and as I packed my combat kit again, I remember feeling fed up that I had been dragged away so soon. Another few weeks together would have been cool and I fully expected our short-lived union to fall apart while I was away. Luckily, Sarah was even keener than I was, sending texts and flirty emails to read as I waited between missions on that long stretch away. Even though I was still a little heart-bruised over a painful break-up with my ex-wife, I’d become excited about where things might lead with Sarah, and once I’d landed home she was on my case, looking to pick up from where we’d left off.
Sarah said she wanted me to meet her friends. Shortly after returning home, we arranged to get together at a club called Aruba, on the pier in Bournemouth. But when we eventually met up, the crowd Sarah had agreed to hang around with were even posher than her – proper blue bloods with some serious cash. That was fine, I was usually comfortable mixing with anyone socially, but something had changed. I quickly became unsettled once I’d realized that the only thing they were interested in was the unfolding war. They wanted to know about the gunfights and body bags. They asked about the various scraps that had brought ‘Breaking News’ headlines to the TV on a daily basis. They dug for gossip. I became uncomfortable when ordinarily I’d have made a fun night out of it, humouring them without giving away any national secrets – discretion was key in my job. Instead I closed down every casual conversation almost as quickly as it had begun, and wouldn’t talk about my experiences. I wasn’t interested in the war chit-chat, not with people who hadn’t experienced it for themselves, and while trying to catch Sarah’s eye I spotted a couple of familiar faces at the bar, some lads from the base. They were laughing and joking, smashing the beers back, and I slowly gravitated towards them, hoping for some respite, however brief. But almost as soon as I’d introduced myself, Sarah had collared me, dragging me over to meet yet another stranger. She frowned, probably noticing that the toing and froing had annoyed me, and because my attitude came across as mega-stand-offish. I understood why: to Sarah it seemed like I only wanted to drink with people that were like me, and she must have thought that I wasn’t interested in her, or her mates, at all.
There is a cliché that’s spouted about the disparity between military and civilian life; the thought that the men and women who haven’t stepped foot on to a battlefield just don’t get it. Sure, I know some blokes who won’t mix with people who haven’t served in warfare, because they’re under the impression that they’ll be misunderstood, or judged for the work they did and the lives they led. I felt different. My attitude regarding civilians had often been more understanding: I was the one who didn’t get it. I looked around at Sarah’s friends and thought, ‘I don’t get them.’ It wasn’t that they hadn’t understood my life and circumstances – I didn’t expect them to. I just couldn’t tune in to the frequencies of a normal social occasion as I would have done ordinarily. For some reason, I felt awkward. Engaging with new faces on a normal level was a sudden hardship, a mission, and every conversation became weird and uncomfortable, as if it didn’t really mean anything beyond the surface level.
I needed to feel uninhibited and relaxed for a while. I wanted to be free from the social niceties needed when meeting a bunch of strangers for the first time. I usually buzzed off drinking with new people, but instead there was an urge to blow off steam with lads that were like me – the ones I really understood. Aruba was a place that my teammates had talked about longingly during our conversations about home life, usually as we dossed around the base. But when that rose-tinted fantasy had arrived, the reality of me drinking there with Sarah and her friends just couldn’t cut it. Instead, I wanted to unwind with the people I had been fighting alongside for six months. I needed to relive the feeling of super-hum
anity that had fuelled our work. I had to maintain the kudos of being an elite soldier. Perhaps I felt more secure in that environment, or protected. Certainly, the thought of going back to war had unsettled me during those first weeks in England, but for some reason I still wanted to revel in the battles I’d survived. I needed to see if I could enjoy the high of action again. I was also annoyed by the idea of being just another bod in a nightclub, drinking crappy lager. After several years of combat it had undeniably happened: I was institutionalized.
I wasn’t the only one. After only a couple of weeks at home, Christmas having been and gone, the common complaint at the base was that people were already bored of home life; they grumbled that their wives were driving them crazy or that they’d been in a massive argument with a girlfriend during the festive break. The men I knew sometimes found their escape by working in the equipment cages, squaring their kit away late into the night, not because they wanted to but because they couldn’t face returning home to the mind-numbing normality.
One night I spotted a younger lad working there when everyone else had finished for the day.
‘You packing it in soon?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, deffo, Foxy,’ he replied. ‘I’m just tinkering around for a bit, sorting my weapons out …’
Moments later I heard him chatting to his wife on the phone: ‘No, babe, it’s really busy at work. I’m going to be here for a couple of hours at least …’
I’d understood his behaviour only because I recognized it in myself. As a younger soldier working my way into the highly skilled units of the military, I had immersed myself fully into the culture and the job, and it quickly became all-consuming. Had I been a single man, that would have been OK, but I was newly married, and not long after I had successfully made it through some of the more advanced elements of training, my wife fell pregnant. I should have been supportive. Instead I was neglectful and disinterested in my domestic life, just hell-bent on being a success in the job. There were missions at home and abroad, increasing responsibilities and tactical or technical updates, and I was expected to be good at everything. Everyone around me had been good to work with but there was a competitive element within my group, and everybody wanted to move up the ladder and earn more money as quickly as possible. Neglecting my work in any way would have screwed up my career. I went on courses and stayed late at the base when I should have been helping out at home. Unsurprisingly, my wife became miserable, fed up with my bad attitude. I couldn’t blame her; she was having a shit time.
When our first daughter arrived it was discovered that she had a birth defect. At first everything had been cool. My wife had gone through a C-section, which went well. But my baby girl was small, really small, and at first she struggled to take in oxygen. The nurses panicked, moving her into an intensive care unit immediately, and she later spent several months moving between hospitals in Southampton and Poole as the doctors tried to help her. Despite the severity of our situation, I acted like an idiot. I saw family life as an inconvenience at a time when I really wanted to get my career on track. I was non-committal and nowhere near the family man I should have been. If I wasn’t at the base, or studying on a residential course, I was serving away or working on a mission within the UK. A lot of the time my missus didn’t know what the hell I was doing, which must have done her head in because it wasn’t as if I’d been pulling cats from trees or styling hair. I was working in dangerous conditions that easily could have got me killed. The work rate was unbelievable, too. Some people thought that soldiers in my line of duty swanned around all day, only moving into action during moments of intense conflict, but believe me, the job was draining, both mentally and physically. When it came to my family, I was a shadow, and the nurses in the hospital resented me for it. I didn’t like them very much either.
When my daughter was well enough to be at home, the troubles continued. My thinking was all wrong and I raged internally about having to help out with our new baby. Bloody hell, I’m just getting my teeth stuck in to the job I’ve always wanted to do and then this happens. I’m trying to bring money in for the family – why should I be at home? It was a selfish stance to have taken – I realized that much later – but the counterargument was that I’d had little room in which to strike a balance between the military and home. The career wanted every piece of me, as did my family, and I had trouble locating the middle ground. The arguments became intense. We both said things that we would later regret.
The war life never seemed to let up, either. In 2005 I completed my Junior Command course, a cycle that promoted me to the rank of corporal. Not long afterwards I was voluntarily flown out for a nine-month grind abroad where I trained local forces looking to contain a growing insurgency threat. With the British military involved, the training imparted upon those dudes was as good as anything I’d experienced in the UK. We conducted live firing drills as helicopters swooped overhead, eventually helping the troops to tear up a series of heroin labs while apprehending the big players in a flourishing narco trade, which eventually proved to be a lost cause.
I then extended the tour, which really upset my wife, but when I came back everything seemed to be cool for a while. Before long, though, I was away on duty again, getting into scraps with local guerrilla forces. Up to a point, the attitude among the locals towards us was fine. I remember a few rocks being thrown our way once, the missiles lobbed by a gang of bored kids. But the high jinks were short-lived and eventually the conflict intensified. The people living there began viewing us as an invading force; they believed we were looking to take over, and became angry. There were riots, ambushes and IED blasts. Those attacks changed the British Forces’ role for years to come. The scuffles seemed to increase in frequency and intensity. I remember one mission in 2007 when a simple job to destroy an anti-aircraft gun was ramped up into a six-hour shoot-out. A year later, we were scrapping all the time, our encounters were making the national news, and everybody at home understood the danger we were in – most of all my wife, who was thoroughly fed up with the stress of caring for a sick daughter along with the headlines that may or may not have directly involved me. My phone calls home began to feel empty. I scanned the last Valentine’s Day card I’d received from her to find some deeper meaning in the writing, but there was none. Before long, we had broken up.
The split put me in a bad place. For ages we tried to mend the destruction, but resolution seemed impossible and I realized my bad attitude during those first few months with a newborn baby had caused a lot of irreparable damage. Inevitably, one of us was bound to meet someone else, and the news she had started a new relationship came to me during the build-up to a mission. We had flown to base for some quick maintenance fixes on our helicopter, and with 45 minutes to spare, I commandeered one of the vehicles that were always on standby for us, driving past the camp’s precinct of Westernized junk-food outlets and into a welfare bank that was equipped with laptops. The emailed news that she was seeing someone had been delivered anonymously. I called her, a barney breaking out almost immediately, but our dispute was interrupted by a shout from outside the building: Foxy, we’re going! And I moved into the operation, fuming.
Relationships for soldiers like me – and their partners – often seemed like rough work, and it would be the same years later as, yet again, domestic happiness proved harder to navigate than warfare, and during that Christmas in Poole, the balancing act had seemed almost impossible. On the rare occasions that I’d agreed to some quiet time at home with Sarah, I became uncomfortable because I wasn’t very good at giving affection. I was terrible at it, in fact, and I wouldn’t tolerate any kind of grumbling – about her work, her issues with an annoying mate, her feeling tired – even though I was probably moaning a lot myself. I felt uncomfortable in very comfortable situations, such as a night in front of the telly with a bottle of wine, and I would find a way to escape or to screw it up somehow. When the rows inevitably followed, I closed down. I couldn’t be arsed to talk about the flare-up o
r to locate the catalyst for what was causing me to feel that way, but big arguments hadn’t been an uncommon occurrence in my past relationships, either. Whenever I was preparing to go away on tour, a simmering disagreement at home, when I was married, would often explode into something much larger. Whether I had started it, or my ex-wife had, it didn’t matter. The stress of an impending period of time apart caused tension, which led to arguments, and then to tears. I was also terrible at de-escalating those situations because they seemed so inconsequential compared to the conflicts I had to negotiate at work, and so I let them drift, unresolved, leaving the root cause to fester for months on end. Weirdly, when risks were amplified, when bullets flew around during missions, I switched on. Whether that mentality was a character trait that had made me ideally suited to a life in war, or if a life in war had made me that way, is still a mystery. I was trained to manage all sorts of nightmare scenarios in combat, but nobody had trained me how to react in a crisis at home.
I was the same whenever my parents became emotional – I shut down. Mum and Dad had been very understanding of my career choices. Mum had been in the Wrens, and despite the fact that she had a very worrying nature she was very pro-military, having served in the Royal Navy from the age of seventeen. Her dad had joined the Navy during World War Two as an engineer and retired as a lieutenant in 1977. Meanwhile, Dad had served in the Marines like me. His dad, my grandad, had been in the Royal Signals while my nan was in the Women’s Royal Air Force. She often told me about the terrifying occasions during the Battle of Britain when she was dive-bombed by German Stuka planes and had to run for cover. Despite those shared experiences, Mum got really upset whenever I went away on tour. Before one trip, word filtered through that one of my mates had been blown up and killed after stepping on an IED. My brother was also in the military and had been away at the same time. The culmination of all of that must have freaked her out and she started crying as I went to leave.