Battle Scars

by Jason Fox

  ‘Shit, yeah, mate. I do …’ It had been a heavy revelation, something that movie directors would probably call ‘foreshadowing’.

  ‘I said that if it happened to me and I’d lost an arm or a leg, I’d want the life support machine turned off, didn’t I?’ he said, wearily. ‘But when I came around and figured out what had happened, that was the last thing I wanted. Then I remembered the chat in the TV room and I freaked out, thinking a message might have been passed down the line, you know, about what we’d talked about – that I’d want them to turn the machine off. At first I couldn’t talk. I could only move my eyes. And every time I saw a nurse walking towards me, I went into a flat spin, because I couldn’t communicate. I was terrified they might switch me off for good.’

  It’s impossible to gather together all the personal emotions that would have taken place in my head during a frantic incident like the one that wrecked Danny’s life. It had only lasted for a split second. As always, I’d experienced a rush of adrenaline at the sound of gunfire, but there wasn’t enough time to register the emotional surge; the noise dominated my thinking. Was there a sense of relief at eventually getting the target we had been sent there for? Probably, but there was no backslapping that night, we didn’t have the luxury of time and our gunfire had stirred the rest of the village; wall snipers began laying rounds down on to our position, and with two men required to drag Danny’s lifeless body from the scene, we were suddenly stretched. I could hear it kicking off in another building on the other side of the outpost, too. Really, there was only one brutally honest assessment of how I would have felt in that situation, where someone alongside me had been shot: it was a rush of excitement, in a very short, concentrated burst.

  That reaction wasn’t a freak occurrence. In the past, whenever a teammate had been hit, dropped to the floor, shouting and screaming for help, I would think, Bloody hell, this is real – but it’s a buzz. Then the reality of my situation always kicked in, my training too, and I would turn off any surplus emotion. Distracting thoughts were extinguished, such as whether the injured were OK, and if they were going to live or die. Even when friends were killed in action, any feelings of loss were sidelined; the grieving always came much later and never really for long. I often brushed the heaviness of death aside by thinking, Right, that’s shite – let’s crack on now. Bottling it up was yet another coping mechanism for a human mind caught in horrific circumstances, but during that chaotic minute or so, walking away from Danny’s crumpled form, our job done, something else had welled up, a feeling I had forgotten. It was coming back to me now.

  For a moment there, I had been frightened, really frightened.

  That was another moment of vulnerability. Even after that freak-out in the ditch …

  As I sat with Danny, telling him about the remainder of that day, I seemed to be reliving the emotions of those mental few minutes. I had later crawled behind a wall for cover. The gunfight had been dialled down a notch, our battle simmering to a few small pockets of contact, the gunshots ringing out from the other side of the village, but despite my relative safety I felt a strong urge to become even safer. I wanted to be in a position where I could see everything going on around me – the movements of any approaching enemy soldiers; where my teammates were; all the exit points – without being spotted by anyone else. I was scared, really scared and I had an overwhelming belief that I was about to get shot. It was the wrong thought, for sure, one that could have brought up all kinds of issues of self-doubt when I really needed to be calm and controlled, where my decision-making had to be tight, but I couldn’t stop the weird tide of vulnerability from washing over me, wave after wave of it. Even though I’d been surrounded by The Brotherhood – a crew of expert fighters, each one kitted up with all manner of shock-and-awe weaponry – it hadn’t been enough to reassure me.

  Later that morning, as we were flown to camp, I had tumbled into a deep sleep, my Bergen rucksack propped up on the helicopter floor as a makeshift pillow. After what felt like only a few seconds of rest, I was woken by a couple of the blokes shaking me violently. In a dazed state, my first reaction was to assume that another gunfight had kicked off and that somebody had attacked us, so I lurched upright, but the chopper was still, silent apart from the sound of footsteps clanging down the landing ramp. We were back at the base, the boys were packing up. I was half asleep, my eyes barely open, but the two lads looming over me seemed freaked out.

  ‘What?’ I snapped.

  ‘Mate, we’ve been trying to wake you up for the past five minutes,’ said one of them, laughing nervously. ‘We thought you might have been dead! You looked pretty out of it …’

  I pushed them both away as I stood up and collected my kit together, murmuring a thank you. I figured I was OK; a headstrong, indestructible individual. A little bit beaten up by the latest operation but not exhausted or broken down by a gun battle.

  While sitting alongside Danny’s hospital bed, the first suspicion of my current mental state had kicked in. Was the sensation, the fuzziness that I had been carrying around with me all these weeks, actually terror, after all? Fear had never clung to me before, I was able to shake it off and move on ordinarily. But this time, was that weakness staying with me? I tried to forget the idea. I told Danny about the rest of the mission, a two-kilometre walk to another supposed enemy compound just as the sun had come up, the entire unit running through the heat thinking, What the bloody hell are we chasing here? And once our target, a large, ramshackle building, was identified, the team kicked in a door, only to find it had been a farmer’s barn. It was full of cows and sheep. After calming down some fairly humpy locals, we were picked up and flown back to base.

  The pair of us laughed at the story, but I was unsettled. With hindsight I should have seen the hazard lights flashing. I was wiped out. I was on the edge. And what I’d experienced was an unnerving sense of fragility played out amid the backdrop of war. My subconscious was warning me that I was in trouble and now the self-doubt was huge. Why him and not me? And When will my turn come? The Russian roulette nature of our work had messed with my subconscious.

  As I sat there in the hospital ward, chatting with a man who would never walk again, I was struck with the strange sensation that Danny would probably have quite liked the idea of going back to war. But I couldn’t have imagined anything worse.

  10

  I understood that The Brotherhood was a pretty big deal in our line of work. It wasn’t a union, or members’ club, but a feeling, and a weird thing to explain to anyone unfamiliar with the rhythm of war and warriors. Whenever I tried to describe it to someone outside of the job I often compared it to a life jacket, something that had kept me safe during moments of turbulence, but I also remembered it as being a warm feeling, as if I had been wrapped up in a safety blanket. It represented a sense of security, and that understanding of stability came mainly from my position in war. I was surrounded by some of the best soldiers in the world, a group of people considered as being the elite in what they did, and I could rely on them whatever was going on, in any situation. And the fact that I was considered part of that elite group, and the idea that other people could rely on me, too, felt life-affirming. In those moments of self-doubt that can strike even the most confident of soldiers, I told myself, Mate, you’re good at a job where you have to work in some of the hardest situations any person could face, and you’re considered capable of performing to the highest level. Love it. That always gave me a boost.

  Bonds of that nature could be found in all walks of military life, but nowhere else was there a group that had become as intensely linked as The Brotherhood that surrounded me. I had started out in the Marines, in around 1993, as a rough-around-the-edges teenager, and back then I thought it was an awesome unit to be a part of. And it was. Everybody was tight and there were a lot of friendships to be made, but it was a big organization and not everyone was expert – only a small minority were considered to be in that category and they often went on to bigger and
better things. With hindsight, everything in the Marines was a little loose, but later, as I advanced and was introduced to the rigours of combat with the military elite, my role became more senior and there was kudos and there was camaraderie. My new teammates were better, faster, and stronger. We were harder to kill. I had some worries about going on to the ground for the first time. I knew I’d taken on a dangerous job but in those frantic opening seconds of my first gunfight, I wouldn’t have wanted anyone else alongside me but the other guys in The Brotherhood. It was a close-knit weave and I was happy to be enmeshed within it.

  Once a Royal Marine joined the elite ranks, he was made to feel welcome almost immediately. There was some grief dished out to newcomers, of course; a little joking but nothing too serious. As long as he was able to execute the job then he would find himself ensconced in the group pretty quickly.

  There was no leniency for new faces, though. I had considered myself to be the bollocks for a while, but that was knocked out of me very quickly, my euphoria quashed by a wave of responsibility. The pressure to get up to speed was immense. Endless amounts of kit were thrown at me and I had to learn the intricacies of every part, like how to manage my assault vest and where I wanted to attach various pieces of equipment. How I wanted to fill each pouch was a constantly evolving task.

  Amid the early chaos, I was given the role of optics rep, one of many important jobs, where I was to look after the military night-vision goggles, while making sure we were abreast with the latest advancements in optical gadgetry. If I’d missed the latest update in technology, people soon wanted to know why. If somebody borrowed a set of binoculars for a mission and didn’t sign them back in to the inventory, it was my neck on the block. The equipment in storage was so expensive it was hard to get my head around.

  The responsibility unsettled me at first. When I met with the former optics rep during our handover, we exchanged notes on the working practices. There was an aide-memoire – basically some laminated sheets of paper stuffed into a binder – detailing how everything worked, and I was filled in on the intricacies of the job. I had wanted to progress through the military ranks for the adventure and the action, but one of my many roles was clerical, dull as crap and ultimately stressful. In fact every bloke had a job to do that was administrative. It helped to ready us for promotion where our roles might become more logistics-based, but I wasn’t the most methodical person at that time and I realized my attitude would need to change pretty quickly. Disorganization would prove costly, both for the group (when we were working – in or out of combat) and for my reputation among the lads, so I gave myself a psychological kick up the arse. You’ve been given this job because they trust you to do it properly. Mate, you proved yourself in the training. Get on with it.

  And then I heard the dreaded words from our Officer Commanding.

  ‘Right everybody, we’re travelling tomorrow. Make sure your dive kit is ready.’

  My bloody dive kit? Already?

  One of the training sessions often bestowed upon the best Royal Marines Commandos in the British military was the boarding of mocked-up enemy boats on the move, and clambering on to them was a highly skilled task. Those sessions were demanding as they involved working with a small team, each of us swimming for a few kilometres at a time in icy temperatures while carrying heavy pieces of kit. The hardest part, however, was climbing on to the target. Scaling a ladder in churning, tidal waters with a heavy load strapped to your back was bloody hard work, and once we’d climbed aboard we were to fire live rounds at mocked-up enemy figures – it was warfare, after all. On the morning of my first week of dive training, it was snowing heavily. The flakes seemed to ping off the water, pooling into small, icy islands, and there was a sense of impending doom amongst the lads. Everybody understood how awful the coming days were going to be as we placed layers of warm kit under our dry bags (the military term for a dry suit), which we knew would weigh us down even more. Nobody said a word. The mood was bleak.

  Once we had made it into the water I was battered by the waves, and after reaching the destination it took me ages to climb the ladder. I was hyperventilating even before I’d hooked on to the side of the boat, and once I had climbed the first few rungs, a huge wave swept me to the side, twisting me at forty-five degrees, the ladder spinning and turning me this way and that. I tried to straighten my position but the tide kept pulling and churning, yanking me in circles. At one point I was hanging on to the underside of the ladder while trying to hook my legs around the rungs. I thought I was going to peel off; my arms were in agony. And then I saw the other divers working alongside me. They were scaling the ascent like it was no big deal, a pair of ninjas moving at rapid speed. When I’d finally made it to the top, one of my teammates hissed a not-so-subtle warning at me.

  ‘You need to sort yourself out, Foxy,’ he said darkly, advancing across the deck of the boat, though I couldn’t see who it was through the facemask.

  The comment jabbed at my insecurities a little bit. I decided to square myself away on the ladder over the coming weeks and I eventually became a good climber, but my issues ran deeper than a physical challenge. Back then I was aware that one of my weaknesses was a real fear of failure. I hated the idea of blowing it, and there were moments when I wondered if I was capable of keeping up with the velocity of elite training. Not long after our dive week had finished, another incident proved equally humbling, though I’m still convinced I’d been set up by the group as part of some weird induction prank. We were working on a live firing exercise on an old ship, moving from room to room, blowing stuff up and clearing cabins. At one point, forty blokes had squeezed into a room, all of us heavily armed. We were due to blast through a door before moving into the next area, firing as we went, but just as we’d set ourselves for the explosion, my shotgun jammed. I tried to re-bomb it, kneeling down and raising a fist to buy myself some time.

  ‘Hold,’ I whispered. ‘Hold.’

  I tried to force the ammo back into the tubing, but it wouldn’t fix. The bloody thing had stuck! Thirty-nine highly trained Commandos were waiting behind me, poised for action, and yet I was struggling with the basics of reloading my weapon. I could hear the whispers of frustration. They were growing louder.

  ‘Hurry up, mate …’

  ‘Dude, what’s going on? We want to move …’

  There was a shout. Everybody froze. The senior officer running the training exercise strode over and grabbed my gun angrily.

  ‘Let’s have a look at this,’ he snapped.

  I heard him cracking open the barrel and popping the cartridge shells. There was groaning and griping around me.

  ‘There’s something wrong with the shotgun,’ I said, defiantly. I was convinced it was faulty.

  The instructor pulled out his flashlight and shone it into the rifle, sighing loudly. My heart sunk. He figured I had been in the wrong.

  ‘Oh really? Maybe it would help if you’d put the rounds in the right way,’ he said sarcastically, as the other lads shouted angrily.

  ‘Who is it?’ yelled one voice.

  ‘Come on, which one?’

  The instructor leant down. ‘Who is it?’ he whispered.

  It’s Foxy.

  The abuse started immediately.

  ‘Foxy? You knob!’

  ‘Muppet! Bombing a shotgun back to front?’

  Then I heard Chris, a mate from the Royal Marines, laughing loudly, pounding at the side of the ship with his fists, but I understood he was ripping into me more out of relief than anything else. I knew that because had the roles been reversed I would have done the same. We had been friends for ages and I was the dude who had screwed up in front of the other elite soldiers, big time, and not him; I was the unlucky one, though I’m still unsure whether the balls-up had really been my fault. (It was as if my instructor had decided, for a laugh, to make out the blame was with me, a new face, rather than the weapon.) Every now and then I tried to re-bomb a shotgun with the ammo pushed in back to front, j
ust to check, but it was impossible. The cartridges wouldn’t fit.

  I had been stitched up good and proper.

  11

  I left Danny in his hospital bed, and I knew I’d been fearful, that my confidence had been rocked. But how? And why? I was so confused. Those sensations were new for me, in and out of war. I’d always revelled in combat and the heightened emotions that pulsed through a scrap or operation, and I was comfortable taking risks in my everyday life; I was rarely stressed out over issues away from battle. Meanwhile, the belief I was about to be killed had never struck me before, not even during my early gunfights, when everything had seemed so very unfamiliar.

  My first full-on scrap had taken place seven years previously. Back then, I had been eager for it to happen. There was adrenaline and a moment of shock as the bullets roared around me, but nothing in the way of terror. I remembered that the shooting had come seemingly out of nowhere, which was probably how it went for most soldiers. Enemy fighters rarely allowed British forces the courtesy of a fair warning, or time, in the minutes leading towards a dust-up, and my introduction to fighting took place in a middle-of-nowhere town in a middle-of-nowhere wasteland as my unit made a routine patrol. We were working with a bunch of local soldiers, coaching them through the military basics in the hope that they might take care of their own business eventually, but there was a strange mood about the place. The area had been described as ‘lawless’ by senior officers; the Brits had never worked there before and in the days leading up to our arrival we’d received intel that local guerrilla gangs had been alerted to our activity and were unhappy. There had even been a propaganda campaign warning us that if we were ever to show up, we could expect to ‘have the hell spanked out of us’ (or words to that effect). I was always excited by threats – usually it meant something rowdy was coming.