Battle Scars

by Jason Fox

  I brushed her off. ‘Mum, what are you crying for?’ I said. ‘Stop it!’

  I was out of order, but it did my head in whenever the family became emotional. Maybe it was a coping mechanism.

  With Sarah I’d been behaving in much the same way and we had broken up within a month or two of my being back at home. The fall was instant, and I quickly locked myself into a destructive cycle, using booze to blot out my psychological issues, to help me ignore the emotional trauma and temporarily escape that heavy, looming storm cloud that now seemed to trail me wherever I went. Working out intensely in the base’s gym during the day often helped, too, because it gave me enough of an endorphin-rush to reduce the depression. I was able to function at work, though on most mornings I got up at five thirty, hungover, a banging headache forming as I groggily attempted to grasp at the events from the previous evening, shying away from what might have happened, feeling terrible but craving the next opportunity for a boozy session, all the while moving through the day’s tasks with ease. I found it easy to go on benders in Poole because loads of young lads lived on the base and they were always up for having a heavy night. Escapism through alcohol was an all-too-easy exit route for me, and I leapt for it whenever I could.

  Masking my drinking was easy, too. I was in really good shape because of all the exercise I’d been doing; if I couldn’t work out in the gym for a solid three hours, I broke up my sessions throughout the day. That was easy because keeping up a supreme level of fitness was a major part of our job (no Officer Commanding wanted a porker on their team, someone who might become physically exhausted during a raid) and there was ample time to train. After the day was done, I returned home and ate a healthy meal, always making the same thing – some lean protein, like salmon or chicken, with some vegetables, something I could cook up really quickly. If I hadn’t planned to head out for the night, I would drink a bottle of wine on the sofa and go to bed, doing it all over again the next day. At those times I often spent way too much time alone, swamped in solitude and living in my own headspace, which probably wasn’t a great place to be. I was fast becoming an emotional mess, unhappy with my present, confused by the recent past, and nervous about what might be an unwelcoming future.

  The only things stopping me from falling deeper into a mentally dark place were the bonds between the lads in the job, the booze and the exercise, but ultimately those habits and routines were merely papering over the cracks. Deep down I was in turmoil. I rarely slept well, which I initially attributed to the rhythms of war and the work routines we’d operated under whenever we were on tour. Getting up in the middle of the night at the news of fresh intelligence, running a hectic night-op, then grabbing small chunks of rest on the helicopter back to the base, had screwed up my body clock. After those missions had finished, once we’d landed safely, I’d usually drop off my kit then go to breakfast with the lads in an attempt to unwind from the latest gunfight. We then showered and went to bed, grabbing three or four hours sleep before waking up to train, and to plan the next mission.

  My mind was too busy to relax and I believed those unsettling processes might have carried over into my home life. But I had also developed a really short fuse. It took very little for me to blow up in frustration, even at the smallest setback. Violence never surged to the surface, I was only ever irritable and angry, but before long I was nicknamed ‘Flashy Foxy’ because of my explosive temper. Every outburst gave me another excuse to hit the booze again as I was dragged, oblivious, into a spiral of self-destruction.

  8

  Remaining focused was important. I knew I couldn’t piss away my career and there was plenty to be getting on with back in Poole. The admin was overwhelming, new kit had to be picked up and integrated into our working practices, and there was a timetable of courses to be completed.

  Still, something wasn’t quite right. I usually enjoyed the work, for sure – I was doing cool stuff, as always – but this time my head felt fuzzy and my attitude was bad. The adrenaline wasn’t there like it had been before, and I knew it, too. I could see it in myself, and the understanding that my enthusiasm had slipped began to piss me off even more. I’d never struggled to motivate myself for work previously, but now I was forever whinging, which wasn’t a good look. I was a senior figure in the job; a lot of the younger lads looked to me as an example of how to work. But I didn’t care.

  I couldn’t give a crap about what I was saying during instruction sessions. I bitched and griped about some of the practices we had to execute as part of the preparation for our next tour. I questioned the logic behind some of the courses we had been asked to attend. Rather than putting on a show of maturity and dedication for the less experienced lads, I tore everything down. I declared the work to be ‘shit’, and I realized that I liked moaning more than ever before. It became a cathartic release for me, as it was for most soldiers. We’ve long been regarded a cynical bunch anyway, and there’s often something to complain about, though not all of it is warranted. But now I was complaining about everything, when the position I occupied required me to be inspirational. I also needed to stick up for the people above me, blokes who were making the decisions I might not have necessarily agreed with. My overwhelming feeling was that the joy had been sucked from the gig and I was unhappy with work as well as my personal life. But why? I had wanted to be a soldier and a member of the British military from the age of fourteen, and yet I was digging deep to find the happiness and satisfaction even when we did cool stuff. The feeling of excitement had gone from my life and the realization depressed the hell out of me. The thought of being depressed then destabilized me even more.

  Every course, every task, seemed to muddle into one whole, and I found it hard to concentrate on what I was doing, my thinking dulled by some unknown chemical reaction. My bad moods came to a head when I was tasked with leading some younger blokes on a counter-terrorist exercise in conjunction with the police. The lads were new to the job, excited to be part of the elite and raring to go. For some of them, this was their first opportunity to join a rapidly paced operation where people were fast-roping on to buildings and firing while wearing the scrapping kit – combat vests, respirators and balaclavas.

  Their adrenaline levels were up, and everyone talked excitedly as we blue-lighted our way up the M3 from Poole to London. Some of the newer faces were edgy, not because anyone was under the impression somebody might die during the day, but because it was the first time they’d worked under the highest levels of expectation. Executing was the key factor on that day and the biggest fear was screwing up in front of the other men during what was a very technical operation.

  In the firing session, we were called upon to move down corridors as a team of guys, taking out open and closed entry points, both as individuals and as a body of men. There were specialized moves for each task and they had to be nailed to perfection.

  When the action started, we kicked in doors, fired rounds and completed a fairly routine day without too many hitches. However, given this was the British forces, there was always something to be critical about, and anything less than perfection had to be deconstructed in detail. Afterwards, the group gathered in a big assembly room, everyone sitting on what looked like school chairs as a sergeant major walked around while giving the wagging-finger treatment to those soldiers who hadn’t quite performed to the expected level, or had made a minor mistake.

  ‘Listen, you’ve screwed up on a few things,’ he said. ‘In a real-life situation you can’t do that, there’s no room for error and life will get messy. I’m going to hand over to Foxy who will talk you through some of the stuff you need to improve upon …’

  The words hit me like shrapnel. I had been daydreaming and felt sluggish, as if I’d just been woken up from a deep sleep. What did he say? I had been wallowing in how bored I felt. I can’t be arsed with these operations any more. The monotony of familiarity and routine had kicked in. I’m just doing the same crap over and over again. And the excitement of jumping in a
nd out of action and dealing with a pretend terrorist attack was lost somewhere. This is a pain in the arse. The thrill had gone and the loss of enthusiasm had put me into a stupor, but the sergeant major’s introduction was a rude awakening and I was dazed by it. As I rose to my feet, I was unsure of where I was, or what we had been doing.

  I had lost my military mojo.

  I looked out at the faces staring back at me as I composed myself and ran through a mental checklist of everything we had worked through during the day: the car ride to the target site; the entry points to the building; the men descending on ropes above me, under the roar of the helicopter’s rotary blades; a blur of kicked-in doors and shouted instructions, gunfire and explosions over and over and over. I could see the emotional high of military action sketched across their faces as they watched me opening and closing my mouth, mumbling vague criticisms of their work. They were buzzed with the excitement I’d once felt on the job: revved up, high at the operation they had just completed, living the fantasy of it happening for real one day, them charging across a city and bringing down a gang of bad dudes before they had the chance to commit some atrocity, or major attack. All of the soldiers had arrived from conventional military backgrounds and completed advanced training, some of them more recently than others. I also knew that nearly all of them, had they been any cop, would have wanted my senior position if ever I decided to move on.

  My attitude?

  You can have it right now. Just take it …

  I was indifferent. I had suddenly lost the will to compete. And that was the most threatening wound to any soldier of my expertise.

  9

  There were others more roughed up than myself.

  Danny was in a bad way and there was nothing that could be done to emotionally turn him around, not by me and certainly not by anybody else we worked with. Once he’d emerged from his coma at the base hospital and been flown home for a period of intensive medical treatment, the doctors had delivered a crushing blow: he was paralyzed from the neck down, with no chance of ever walking again. He could forget a miraculous reprieve, or some stupidly expensive operation in the States. Danny’s spine had been wrecked by a bullet, and though the medics had somehow managed to work simultaneously on his vertebrae and his vital signs as they helicoptered him away to safety, his world had changed for ever. An impressive military career was done and Danny would never get to carve across an expanse of fresh powder on his skis or snowboard, which was the thing he’d loved the most away from his life in battle. The rest of Danny’s days must have seemed pretty horrendous to him back then. God knows what that must have done to his head.

  He was respected, though; which, while not being anywhere near a cure-all tablet in crisis situations, meant a lot to a soldier in Danny’s line of work. If a bloke was regarded as being good at his job and capable of working on the battlefield under the most extreme circumstances then it became a badge of honour. Often, it was enough to cover up a multitude of sins. Everybody knew that the lads were capable of doing bad stuff while they were away on tour, like neglecting their families at home; some men had short fuses and were forever getting into scrapes when they were on leave. All of us had character flaws – I know I did – and some of the blokes fighting alongside me were really horrible people – headcases I’d have hated bumping into away from work. Proper nightmares. (Small spoiler: not everyone in the job was on best-mate terms with one another – not like it’s portrayed on the telly. It’s quite the opposite in fact.) In war, though, short tempers, violent streaks and domestic issues didn’t matter as long as everybody worked for each other and we were able to implicitly trust the blokes alongside us during a gunfight. The worst crime was always to create suspicion or doubt. Inside the bubble of the military, there was no room for failures or for people who were prepared to pull the wool over a teammate’s eyes. There was no time for backstabbers.

  Some of the team I’d regarded most highly in the job were people I couldn’t stand personally. But Danny wasn’t a bad bloke, he had a good working reputation and at the relatively young age of twenty-five he was already an interesting character, in military terms. Danny had been able to operate both efficiently and ruthlessly on missions while somehow staying mates with everybody around him. The group had warmed to Danny almost as soon as he had passed out from training, and now he was attached to a tangle of tubes and drips on a hospital ward in Poole, his lungs expanding and collapsing through a machine, paralyzed from the neck down.

  Even though Danny was the one in pain, I sensed a weird anxiety in myself as I drove to the hospital to visit him one afternoon. There was something about talking to him again that unsettled me. As I walked towards his room, I knew he was going to be mega-happy to see me and I’d heard he’d been enjoying a craic with the other lads. But what would Danny be like, really? What state would his head be in? I felt confused, not sure of how to act, or whether to discuss his injury and the life he’d once had.

  What could I say to a bloke whose life had been ripped to pieces by a bullet?

  ‘Mate, how’s it going?’ I asked quietly, pushing open the door to his room and assessing his immediate situation: the hospital furniture, his surroundings, a stack of magazines and books on the nearby table. A clipboard with pages of undecipherable notes hung at the end of his bed.

  It didn’t look good. Danny was in a bad way. His skin was pale, bandaging covered his throat and his body was hooked up to a bank of beeping machines, drips and a ventilator. Unable to move for months, his buzz cut had grown past his ears. When I’d last spoken to Danny we had looked fairly similar: short hair, the whites of our eyes reddened and our stares sunken by battle fatigue, we were tanned from the desert sun and had beards of varying length. For a pair of blokes situated in the middle of a warzone, over weeks and months through the tour, we would have appeared in fairly standard shape – tired, ragged, but still up for it.

  Danny looked up. His eyes flickered with excitement, a broad smile breaking as he stifled a laugh, which must have yanked on the gruesome wound across his throat. The last time I had seen him was a grisly nightmare and the events seemed to rush back to me at once. The shot had dropped him to the floor like a sack of bricks, blood bubbling from the hole in his neck, a medic frantically trying to stem the flow of red as we instinctively looked for our target. I honestly thought Danny was dead; I certainly never expected to see him again, let alone talk to him or shake his hand – nobody had.

  A few days after Danny’s shooting, the Officer Commanding called our team together at the base to update everybody on his condition. The prognosis was troubling. By rights he should have been gone already.

  ‘It was bad,’ he said. ‘Really bad. We’re not sure if he’s going to pull through …’ Tears had welled up in the OC’s eyes, which none of us had ever seen in such a senior officer before, but it was testament to how highly regarded Danny was.

  As we talked through the attack, I couldn’t tell you how Danny might have felt about never having to experience war again, but I had a pretty good idea: he probably would have done anything to get back out in the fight, because blokes like him, and me, usually missed war when they were at home. There were good reasons for that desire, and it wasn’t the killing or the violence. A bond developed between men, and women, working together under extreme circumstances – like fast-roping ninety feet out of a helicopter on to the bridge wing of a targeted tanker, with another 200 foot drop below that, the wind yanking at the cord, bodies barely attached to the line as they shot down into the darkness. In war, every moment of conflict seemed scary, some more than others, and during those flashpoints unions were formed, connections between colleagues that were made all the more vibrant because of our intense surroundings. We often referred to that sense of union as ‘The Brotherhood’, and when we were away from it there was an unexplainable feeling of loss.

  But during war itself, The Brotherhood was almost unseen. It fed into the subconscious, but the day-to-day conflicts and skirmis
hes still became hellish after a prolonged period. When Danny had been shot, our group was near to the finish of a very long tour. The first half had been great – we were all keen. The following month or so had been challenging – but we were still good. By the end all of us had started counting down the days until leave and I was enviously watching the soldiers who were finishing their shifts and flying out of the war towards home, thinking, ‘the lucky bastards’.

  That’s where we were when Danny’s injury had happened, shortly after the helicopter mission, our boys approaching the end of one of the longest tours any of us had ever done, all of us having tempted fate with the amount of near misses we’d already experienced during a succession of conflicts and gunfights. Like the warning that 30 per cent of car crashes happen within a one-mile radius of the driver’s home, because of fatigue and a false sense of security, we were now vulnerable. Knackered. Maybe some of us became prone to switching off. After all, England was in sight; our guards were down so accidents happened, which was depressing. There were so many times during my career when, after learning of another fatality, I’d hear the words: ‘And he only had a couple of days left ’til leave …’

  ‘Do you remember what we talked about just before I was shot?’ said Danny, voice rasping, his vocal cords lacerated.

  I reached through the places and dates, where we were, what we might have been doing … The TV room! A daytime mission had just been aborted and a few of us were taking shelter from the sun. We were hanging about in the base, killing time, talking darkly about what we would do if one of us were unlucky enough to get blown up and lost in a coma.