Battle Scars

by Jason Fox

  I walked across the sports fields at the base, my shoes becoming wet in the damp grass, a finger hovering over the psych nurse’s number on my phone. I was torn. I needed advice, help, but I didn’t want to ask for it. The stress eventually outweighed my trepidation. I called the number.

  Someone picked up almost immediately.

  ‘Hello, this is the psychiatric department.’ It was a man on the other end of the line, and I recognized the voice. It was the same nurse that had taken the TRiM course.

  ‘Look, you don’t know me,’ I said. ‘My name’s Foxy, I’m a sergeant just about to go back on tour and I’d really like to see you. Are you in now?’

  ‘Yeah, of course,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you come over?’

  I think I was taken aback by the immediacy, even though I’d asked for an appointment. I assumed there would be more of a process, an introductory chat before meeting in person, but I agreed to walk over, calming myself as I traipsed through the rain in an attempt to gain some semblance of control on what felt like a chaotic situation.

  Mate, look: you’re in charge here. Just say it’s informal, that you don’t want anything documented. You can orchestrate the whole thing because no one else in The Brotherhood will really know and you can just sort out your problems with the psych nurse. He’s bound to be a genius with a toolkit of tricks and techniques.

  You’ll come out a different bloke.

  The walk took ages. I was on a mega-downer, fearful of asking for help from a complete stranger – a shrink. I stepped into a doctor’s reception room – with its beige walls, bland decor, a few chairs and a table sprinkled with books – like a normal dude getting his blood pressure checked. But I felt vulnerable. As I waited, I flicked idly through a magazine and landed on a story that explored the experiences of every man who had set foot on the moon.

  Buzz Aldrin and Charlie Duke were mentioned. The feature explained how some astronauts had retired at a relatively early age and had initially struggled with the next chapter in their lives; finding purpose beyond the extreme existence that once defined them had proven painful. There were plenty of demons for them to deal with, too. A few NASA explorers, it turned out, came back from space and went to religion, others to booze. It sounded a lot like the ending of a military career to me. I knew that a lot of the soldiers leaving The Brotherhood had gone the same way, and while the chances of me turning to God were less than zero, I’d heard of mates who had become born-again Christians overnight; blokes you’d never think could do it. I was probably more at risk from exit-strategy number two. I’d been boozing up, and I knew some seriously experienced mates who had got themselves into cocaine and downers after retiring from the military. The human condition was so weird. There’s not a lot of room for mediocrity, and when you’ve taken down a militia leader in a gunfight like I had, what do you do for an encore?

  I relived that moment in my head, to remind myself of my once superhuman status. I remember doing the bloke in a courtyard on one of the patrols. It had been a mess. There was fighting going on left, right and Chelsea. He had come around the corner, running towards me, his rifle up, ready to fire. But instinctively I’d shot him from the hip, catching him with a bullet straight to the head and he’d dropped instantly. It later turned out that the dude was a high-end commander in the forces we were fighting. Everyone said what a score it had been and the news was written on the noticeboard at base:

  ‘Good effort, Foxy – rinsed the bloke we were after.’

  And then after an hour, it was wiped off. Forgotten. No one really talked about it again …

  So, how do you recreate the buzz of that, Buzz?

  My thoughts were punctuated by a voice from the other side of the room.

  ‘Mr Fox?’

  I looked up and saw the psych nurse gesturing me into his office. He shook my hand warmly and sat down behind his computer.

  ‘Hi, I spoke to you a moment ago on the phone,’ I said, following him. ‘You don’t know who I am …’

  ‘Oh, I do,’ he said, smiling.

  The announcement took me by surprise. ‘Right … Really?’

  ‘Yeah, I know people about.’

  The possibilities flicked through my head. Could my name have come up in a previous conversation about what I was like? Or had he gone through a list of people that had recently returned from tour? I shrugged it off. I wanted to blurt my issues out quickly.

  ‘Look, there’s a tour coming up and I’m not feeling good about it,’ I said. ‘Something doesn’t feel right. With me. I want to get rid of the feeling, but I want to keep this informal. I don’t want our chat to go on my record.’

  He nodded. ‘I won’t take any notes …’

  I felt relieved.fn1 Of course, I was cool with him scribbling down a few things as a reminder for any future meetings because, essentially, I was one of his cases, but the thought of my emotions and mindset being formalized permanently on record felt potentially destructive.

  ‘Not for now,’ he continued. ‘But if we carry on then at some point we’ll have to.’

  ‘Yeah, of course, but for now …’

  The nurse nodded and explained his process. We would talk informally, he said, and then he’d assess my situation and any treatments I might require. I thought, Well, this is exciting. I can keep this quiet and there’s going to be a few things we can do to sort me out. My mood brightened. I was immediately optimistic that I might regain my military mojo.

  ‘Look, you need to make some time to come and see me for a proper chat,’ he said.

  I nodded, and once the formalities were over I arranged to visit him the following week.

  I felt as if I’d taken the first step towards fixing my head and that life would become a lot easier from here on in.

  And then a heaviness set in again soon afterwards.

  War was hell, but reliving it through the viewfinder of my own emotions felt even worse. The nurse was somebody I could work with, though. I liked him – he was approachable, understanding – and when I walked into my next session a week or so later I assumed he was about to wave a magic wand over my head and correct every emotional combat wound. We talked about the forthcoming sessions and he repeated how he intended to get to the bottom of what had caused my fearful state and would then recommend a course of treatment. That sounded fine to me. But first he wanted to know when I’d experienced that opening sense of uncontrollable terror, or any of the other symptoms that had bothered me since returning to Poole.

  ‘It was a night mission, on a helicopter,’ I said. ‘We’d been shot at by loads of enemy fighters as we landed, one of our lads was killed, and when I rolled into a ditch all I could think about was that I wanted to be a little kid again, curled up next to my mum on the sofa …’

  I offered it all up, him scribbling the occasional note on to a pad, me recounting everything that happened during that operation and then the days, weeks and months that had followed. The nurse asked me how I’d been generally since that final tour and I mentioned my moods, a general sense of fuzziness and an inability to sleep. ‘Essentially I’ve become nocturnal,’ I joked, but it was true. I had spent eight years of my life working at night then fighting fatigue for large chunks of the day, and it had dented me. I recalled how I often envied the senior American troops. They fought on shorter tours and were allowed to sleep during the day while the Brits worked on planning missions. In briefings, if somebody wanted to chat to one of the Americans for intel or assistance, they’d be told, Forget it, the Yanks are sleeping. And so we’d wait until five in the afternoon when their alarms would go off in unison.

  ‘And how was your childhood?’ asked the nurse. ‘Did anything bad happen?’

  Here we go, I thought. Time to drag the family into it …

  I shook my head. ‘No, it was fun growing up. I might have got whacked a few times for being out of order …’

  ‘Tell me about that.’

  Well, there was one time I had been a dick to my younger b
rother, Mathieu, I explained. I’d thrown him through a classroom window at school in a fit of anger. Mat had it coming, though. He had been winding me up for days, and during break-time he pushed me to the edge. I grabbed him by the blazer collars, lifted him off his feet and slung his body towards the school building. I hadn’t expected the window glass to crack under his weight, but it exploded everywhere upon impact and Mat crashed through it, skidding across a floor as he landed, somehow unscathed, laughing his head off.

  I was in trouble at school and at home, but that was nothing new. Apparently I was a worry from the second I was born, in 1976, landing prematurely with a collapsed lung and dying twice during the procedures to drain my chest in those first few days – I was ahead of the game before my war had even started. I think I went on to cause my old dear a lot of stress. I had two brothers: Mat, the window-smasher, who would go on to join the Marines, and Jamie, who was nine years younger than me. Having seen up close what his brothers had endured in the military, and suffering all the stories, Jamie ended up taking the safe route and moved into running nightclubs and bars in Marbella.

  That was a smart move, I thought as soon as I’d told the story, grimly observing the cold, clinical surroundings of a medical office. I understood where the nurse was heading with his line of enquiry and it only played into my suspicions of mental health care – everyone tries to pin it on the family. But my life as a kid hadn’t been bad, not in the slightest. I’d deserved that clip around the ear for throwing Mat through a window. Dad had been a bit heavy-handed when he’d cuffed me afterwards, but I was no different to any other lad from my generation – we got smacked every now and then. Mum was small, only five feet tall, and quite a timid character, but she used to whack the three of us when she had to as well. Once we’d got bigger, she wouldn’t have dared – not that we would have done anything to her. Overall, we were good-natured boys, and apart from the odd broken window, or those occasions when I’d thumped Mat for trying to beat up little Jamie, we were fairly harmless.

  I knew Dad had helped us to channel all our energies positively. His spell in the Marines meant he was able to teach us practical skills, such as map-reading, which I found really interesting, but I also really enjoyed it when he told me about his career in the military and showed me the photos from back then. And then there was the sport. When we lived in Luton he went on to establish very popular youth hockey competitions in Bedfordshire and I became pretty handy with a stick myself.

  As a younger kid I was skinny and got picked on a little, but it was nothing too bad and it probably helped to toughen me up. I had mates, I was fairly popular, and the boys that used to rough me up were often a lot older. None of that had left any scars, mentally or physically. I was over six feet tall by the time I’d moved into my teens and because of my height I could handle myself if anybody ever took the mickey.

  I carried on …

  After leaving the Marines, Dad moved around from job to job and had a sketchy time. He worked at Rentokil for a while and we lived in Basingstoke. We then moved to Yorkshire, where he joined a car company set up by his mate who then did a runner with the cash. We were in financial trouble for a while after that. The family had been living in a big house in Skipton but we had to move to Keighley. It wasn’t the best of times, because Dad was so broke he had to work on a farm for food while Mum struggled with Mat and me. The farm owners couldn’t afford to pay him in cash, so he’d work for slaughtered chickens and pigs instead, until he eventually landed a security job in Luton. I must have been around three years old at the time and we relocated to a nearby village called Houghton Regis, which was a bit of a sprawling mess of nothing and Mum and Dad weren’t happy. As I got older I could tell, though they did their best to keep it together in front of the kids and as a family unit we were pretty tight. They took us on camping holidays to Cornwall or Scotland, which I loved because we could do lots of outdoor activities. Years later, once all the sons had moved away from home, Dad left.

  As I got into my teens I realized I wanted a job that was big on adventure (apart from a brief period when I quite fancied being a graphic designer for some reason; I wasn’t cut out for it). I’d liked Dad’s stories and those old photographs, so maybe the Marines might be an option for me as well? The idea was only solidified when my exams didn’t go too well one year, and at the age of fifteen I decided to sign up with the military. I completed all the application forms at the careers office and my entrance was set up from there, though the process wasn’t entirely without its hitches. When I’d initially met with the recruitment officer from the Marines, he asked me to perform a series of pull-ups. I flunked the initial exam and was told to return in a few months, during which I eventually hauled myself into shape. Once I was on the recruitment course (the Potential Royal Marine Course, or PRMC), I steadied myself for a period of physical pressure, which was handy because we were thrashed for a few days in an initial selection process to prove we were up to what the Royal Navy described as ‘elite amphibious fighters’ where everybody involved was required to pass vigorous gym tests before running for hours through muddy fields. Only the recruits standing at the end were able to move into commando training in a couple of months, one of the toughest courses in the British military. I remember Dad being proud once I’d passed, but his joy was tinged with doubt. I think he questioned my persistence. Does he possess the minerals to follow in my footsteps? Dad sometimes doubted my commitment directly, which put my back up, and when it came to passing my basic training I used his criticism as a form of motivation. It became a battering ram to push me through to the end.

  Dad might have been right about one or two things, though. During those first few weeks, while I found the physical aspect of recruit life fairly manageable, when it came to the required personal admin, I was undoubtedly inexperienced. I was one of two sixteen-year-olds in the group and the blokes around us were in their mid-twenties. They had lived a little and were able to function for themselves. I’d only lived with my parents and had no idea how to polish a pair of boots to the required standard or prepare my uniform correctly. I was totally lost: ironing away the creases from my shirts took forever and because I was wasting so much time on general kit-maintenance I lost out on sleep. I became tired during the day. The physical challenges that had seemed doable during the early phases became much harder when I was hanging with fatigue. Even being on time or operating in a vaguely organized fashion seemed beyond me for a period, and in the early stages I was sometimes late for briefings, quickly discovering that, in the Marines, when a meeting was set for 15:00 hours, to arrive at 15:00 hours was to be late.

  There was one occasion when I even became visibly upset in front of the recruit troops’ drill sergeant. It had been our first kit inspection and as I struggled to pull on several layers of clothing, I sensed him standing there, glaring at me, my vision masked by a tangle of fabric and strapping. A sense of crushing embarrassment came over me as I gulped back the lump in my throat and yanked a jumper over my head like a right idiot. Psychologically I was a bit lost, and a lot of the time I felt like an embuggerance to the older recruits around me, eventually phoning Mum in tears, griping about how hard it had all become. A quick pep talk from her and one look at the photo of Dad pinned to my bedroom wall was enough to reset the focus I needed to pass.

  I’ll show you, I thought.

  I didn’t prove my genuine commitment to the senior lads until around ten weeks into the course, and it was a consistent show of dedication and skill on a daily basis that did it. Only then did I finally feel accepted into the group. Life seemed to click for me almost immediately afterwards and the role eventually instilled a sense of discipline and focus that meant I was never late for a military briefing again. I was given something to strive for, a purpose, and as a teenager life was full of potential.

  I had joined up at the end of 1993. The course had taken 32 weeks and at the time I completed it Britpop was huge – Blur and Oasis (I loved Liam and Noel) h
ad kick-started a massive party around the UK, but I was missing out on the action, moving into 40 Commando, a group which the Royal Navy described as ‘a battalion-sized Royal Marine unit’. I was also into Shed Seven, The Jam and The Waterboys, and whenever I hear the indie band Suede I’m always taken back to my training days, running around in the mud and wet, climbing rope ladders and crawling through pitch-black tunnels. Suede’s lead singer, the skinny, foppish Brett Anderson, would probably be mortified to learn that he’d once inspired a young lad on his route to fighting in some of the world’s bloodiest conflicts with one of the military’s most battle-hardened outfits. A lad who was now laying down his life-story to a psych nurse in a clinic on a military base.

  15

  In the psych nurse’s office, I pulled back from teenage nostalgia. I didn’t want to become distracted. My stresses were nothing to do with home, or Mum and Dad, or Suede. I was being taken further and further away from the root of my problems and I became frustrated. The nurse seemed a nice person and I was warming to him, but I quickly realized he wasn’t quite as tuned in to the military life as he should have been. I had to explain everything as we went along – what a Chinook was, what NVGs were, and so on. It was annoying. I also had the sense that he was looking for some other possible cause for my problems, as if he was concerned that my issues might be pinned solely on combat; it seemed he wanted to find evidence of me being screwed up before I joined the military, which I hadn’t been. War was the catalyst and I knew it. I’m sure there were other issues at play, such as those in my personal life, but nothing weighed on me as heavily as my last tour on the job.

  Overall, though, I hadn’t felt too annoyed as we concluded our first chat. I believed the nurse was formulating some bulletproof plan for me. Here it comes, I thought brightly, as he wound down the session. The magic wand. But instead I was delivered a nasty shock.