by Jason Fox
‘We should definitely talk again, Jason, but I’m deployable and I’m needed elsewhere,’ he said, putting down his pad and pen. ‘I have to go away for a few weeks.’
‘You can’t go away,’ I said, panic rising.
‘It’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘I want you to see another psychiatrist while I’m gone: a Dr Beckelmann. He’s based down in Portsmouth and he’s great. He’s used to working with people like you, but I also want to talk to some people here because we need to take the next tour away from you. And to do that we should make these chats a little more official …’
My tour was gone? As the words landed, the news of a reprieve from war began to spin me out, but I seemed instantly lighter in mood too, as if the cloud, that dark mood weighing on my shoulders for months, was rapidly retreating from view, temporarily at least. A little stunned, I nodded, agreeing to a meeting with this Dr Beckelmann, but as I walked across the wet grass of the Navy’s sports fields to my two-bedroom house, I began to feel guilty, as if I was letting the other blokes down by not fighting alongside them. Fear followed shortly afterwards as I was struck by a less reassuring outcome of my cancelled commitment to the British military.
What if that’s it?
What if my work is over, for ever?
I was obviously put on the planet to be a soldier. It’s what I’m good at – or at least I was, once. But if the treatment doesn’t work, and I can’t even do that …
Where’s my purpose?
What’s my encore?
As I relaxed at home and processed the day’s developments, I realized there would be no quick fix for my problems. I learned that Dr Beckelmann was a civilian doctor working on the MOD payroll and was based at the Department of Community Mental Health (DCMH). There was no way out of it, either, though I later settled myself with a reminder that the first session may have been only a small step forward, but it was a step forward all the same.
A week later, having arrived at the Department of Community Mental Health, I remember thinking Dr Beckelmann must have been on a good pay packet because he looked considerably better dressed than the nurse on base. He was a big, portly bloke, thick-set, like an ox, but he wasn’t fat – I could tell he was a bit of a unit under his suit. He was well presented, too. A neatly ironed pink shirt with white trim was offset by an expensive looking set of Bentley cufflinks. A trainee Naval psychiatrist sat next to him. Dr Beckelmann informed me the trainee was there to observe our session as part of her training, and I noticed that every now and then she would scribble something down on a pad. But I’d been assured that she was only in place to watch the working processes of Dr Beckelmann rather than making any notes specific to me or my case.
‘So, Mr Fox,’ started the psychiatrist. ‘Tell me about what’s been going on.’
It poured out of me – again. How many times would I have to retell this story? But there was a new aspect because the weirdest thing had just started happening: whenever I tried to recall the various tours abroad with the military, they had all became one massive, sprawling chapter in my life. Everything had blurred, each period, or year, indistinguishable from the next.
‘When did you begin to become more involved in action?’ he asked.
In 2002, I explained. I had been happy in the Marines, I’d progressed to the rank of sergeant, but I was bored. I had made it through the months of training without too many problems, but beyond that nothing had really happened. The British Army experienced a lengthy period of peace. Even Ireland had calmed down a fair bit (though it could still be a little tense) and the closest I came to combat was when I played for the Navy’s hockey team.
Frustration was creeping in by then. I did a signals course, and I listened, annoyed, as the older blokes in my unit told me about their times in Bosnia or the Falkland Islands. Another lad had a story about how he’d once been shot at in Ireland and everyone around him had gone into a panic, but it was hardly dramatic. At the time I remember thinking that I’d wanted to experience responsibility and control in my job rather than blindly following orders, as I had done with the Marines; I wanted to experience combat at a senior level. Given that I was considered to be good at soldiering, I applied to join the military’s most elite group. I was also comfortable shooting from the hip when making life-changing decisions; I liked taking risks, though it had previously dropped me into trouble.
Examples? Well, in 1997, a week before Tony Blair won the General Election, a mate and fellow Marine called Steve and I booked a holiday on a whim. We walked into a travel agent, scooped up a cheapo trip to Cancún in Mexico and after ten days of all-inclusive boozing, we’d both gone down with alcohol poisoning, I’d hooked up with an American girl called Barbie and on the flight home Steve and I were sucked into a massive brawl.
At first the pair of us had been innocent bystanders. The flight was fairly empty and everybody commandeered a row each, stretching out and building makeshift beds before falling asleep. We couldn’t have been in the air for long when I was woken up by a commotion going on at the front of the plane. Four Scousers, all of them in their mid-thirties, had helped themselves to the duty-free and were throwing a lot of abuse around. Their shouting was aimed at a pair of pensioners sitting nearby, which seemed a bit off. Wanting to avoid any trouble, the older couple had moved to the back of the plane but were trailed by one of the drunks. That’s when I heard some shouting and a lady screaming. One of the Scousers had taken a swing, splitting the old bloke’s head open. The air-stewarding team stepped back in shock and locked themselves in a toilet, which was when Steve and I decided to pile in. We rained blows down on the guy’s head, sending him back to his mates (the pensioner even joined us to put the boot in for a little revenge) and once the situation had been calmed down by another passenger, the plane’s captain made an announcement.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, because of the disturbance we will be landing at Shannon Airport, where police will board the plane to sort out the issue.’
Steve and I looked at each other. We can’t go to Ireland! We’re Marines and there’s still a conflict on – we might disappear for ever!
By then, one of the stewardesses had reappeared from the toilet and I called her over, explaining our situation.
‘Oh, don’t worry, we’re not going to drop you off in Ireland,’ she said, pointing to the lashed-up Scousers at the front of the plane, one of them now nursing a few nasty cuts and bruises. ‘It’s for that lot down there. You helped us out.’
Talk about a relief. In Ireland the Garda arrived and dragged away the guilty party, one of the girls screaming dog’s abuse at me as she was hauled off the gangway, and when we later arrived in Manchester, miles away from our original destination, the cabin crew applauded Steve and me as we left the plane. The media were less impressed, however. By the morning our (thankfully anonymous) scrap had been plastered all over the papers, with one headline raging about a ‘Brawl At 36,000 Feet’.
Barbie and I stayed in contact, and a few years later, when I’d got bored in the UK, I decided to visit her in New York on a whim, even though she had a boyfriend at the time. That relationship didn’t last for much longer, however: on my first night in town I got absolutely trolleyed and woke up in her bed the next day, stark-bollock naked. Barbie was on the sofa and looked furious. ‘Don’t even think about acting like that when my boyfriend’s around,’ she snapped, and when I met him the following night he seemed like a nice dude, though he must have thought, ‘What’s the score with this bloke?’ Barbie later introduced me to her family, who had a big fat house in Connecticut; the two of us went to Broadway shows and got drunk; and when we hooked up again she decided the time had come for her to bin the boyfriend, and would I move in with her?
I didn’t think twice. ‘Yeah, sure,’ I said. ‘But what will I do for a career if I quit the Marines?’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Barbie. ‘Dad will give you plenty of work.’
Within four days I was back in England and handing in my not
ice at the base. ‘I’m going to America. I’ve met someone,’ I told my senior officers when they asked me what I was planning to do instead. The blokes in my unit laughed when I later told them my idea. You’ll be back in five minutes, Foxy! But I was determined to prove them wrong, and shortly after resigning I packed up and left for Fort Lee, a suburb in New Jersey positioned just across the George Washington Bridge.
For a while everything was cool, I was happy in the States, but Barbie soon turned out to be a control freak and her fussing did my head in. Before long I had pressed the self-destruct button, as always.
‘You know what, you can poke this relationship,’ I shouted after one particularly rowdy blow-up. ‘I’m leaving.’
‘You can’t leave!’ said Barbie, dramatically. ‘I’m the best thing that’s happened to you!’
That raised my hackles. ‘Oh really? Well, for your information, every time we’ve had sex I’ve had to think of someone else.’ It hadn’t been true, but I’d chosen to lash out. Barbie flipped.
‘Right, give me half an hour,’ I said, once she’d stopped screaming the place down. ‘You won’t ever see me again.’
I scrambled around the apartment, gathering my stuff. It was 4 July, Independence Day (the irony), and because of the national holiday finding a hotel proved impossible. I ended up sleeping rough in Grand Central Station before heading back to England, my tail between my legs. I begged the Marines to let me back in and my mates had a field day, rinsing me for falling flat on my face. But at least I’d taken the gamble; I’d tried to make a massive change in my life.
The Marines were later sent to California so we could perform a series of training exercises in the desert that would ready us for the Allied Forces’ conflicts in Afghanistan, and later Iraq. Though nothing had been announced officially, we could all tell that a war was coming. My final few months in the regular military had taken place in late 2001, when a bunch of blokes flew two passenger jets into the World Trade Center in New York and life seemed to change for ever, for everybody. The attitude of a lot of the senior commanders appeared to intensify. Everybody became even more serious, even more focused than usual, and when we arrived in 29 Palms, a US Marine Corps base near Palm Springs, we completed four weeks of live firing featuring eight hundred blokes from 40 Commando working alongside the Americans. I knew everybody was thinking, ‘We’re going to war; this is the build-up.’
The training exercises had been topped and tailed with two periods of rest and recuperation, and after 29 Palms we were let loose in Las Vegas (What could possibly go wrong?) and everywhere was carnage.
Ten coaches drove us there, and as we were dropped off our instructions were issued: ‘Right, piss off. Be back at Caesar’s Palace car park for collection on Monday at 11 a.m.’ Eight hundred men disappeared into the city and I barely saw anyone apart from my immediate circle of mates. It was messy. One night we got so drunk that we couldn’t escape the Mandalay Bay resort. It was so disorientating that every time we made to leave we’d stumble into another nightclub, and when I eventually checked out of my room at 10.30 a.m. on Monday morning, the door opposite opened and there was my brother, Mat, who had also been on the training exercise. He had been staying nearby me all weekend, but neither of us had known, we’d been in such a state the whole time. I hadn’t slept for the entire weekend, and when I checked my bank account, I’d blown a month’s wages in three days.
With a little leave on our hands afterwards, a few of us decided to hire a car and drove to San Francisco for nine days of drinking. It turned out to be one of the best cities I’d ever been to and on the first night a few of us ended up in a club called The Bamboo Hut. As we danced stupidly to 1980s music, the girls around us loved it, but their boyfriends weren’t so keen and a massive brawl soon kicked off. We were heavily outgunned and beat a hasty retreat, moving across the dance floor as a body of men (like well-trained Marines), copping punches and swinging back wildly. Outside in the fresh air we legged it across the road, but I was hammered and unable to see properly in the dark and as we crossed the central reservation dividing a dual carriageway I didn’t notice it had been protected with a low chain-link fence. I ran into it, the collision sending me flying to the tarmac. Luckily our pursuers had given up chase by that point, but I was battered and bruised all the same.
As I recalled those incidents during my one session with Dr Beckelmann, I realized I’d have been happy to take risks back then – but now? Not so much. At the age of 36, I wouldn’t have gambled on my military career as I had when I joined up with Barbie in New York. Instead I would have turned the idea over and over in my head, fearful of making a mistake. Leaving the Marines for more exciting work? Had I been in my present state of mind back then, there wasn’t a chance; even the thought of heading into conflict was now weighed down with a sense of serious consequence. I didn’t want to go back and I had become riddled with self-doubt, which was maybe partly down to age. The feeling of being bulletproof was something that everybody lost as they got older, but I’d sussed out that my trepidation was stronger than the fallout to approaching midlife. Instead it was a scar that I’d picked up in war.
My nerve had vanished.
Where had that bloke gone?
16
Forty Commando were in the thick of it – but I wasn’t. News of their involvement in Afghanistan had filtered through to me as I’d made it on to jungle training, one of the precursors to elite service. The intel annoyed me a little. By the sounds of things, they were heavily involved in the War on Terror and had been dragged into all sorts of scraps. I remember thinking regretfully, I knew I should have waited! I’d longed to get into action with the Marines – not to kill people, but to test the skills I’d learned in training and push my adrenaline to the limits. I went into the military for combat. When it had finally broken out, I’d been stuck on the sidelines. Even when I eventually made it to elite service during the war in Afghanistan, there was an element of missing the boat because the Coalition forces had walked in without too much resistance and the Taliban quickly went to ground, hiding in the mountains of Pakistan. There wasn’t a lot for my group to do at first, apart from working on support operations. All of that would change later on.
While I was eager to see action, without war I wasn’t really a violent person. I didn’t look for conflict like some people did. Sure, I had been in a couple of tear-ups outside the job, though only when somebody had pushed me way too far. One of these flashpoints later left me in a community service programme after I was arrested during a night out in Portsmouth. A bunch of us had been drinking at a mate’s leaving do – he was quitting the Marines. We partied at a club called Joanna’s, which in those days was a real dump and renowned for being a brawling hotspot. While we were there, a couple of Dutch sailors had decided to give us grief for no other reason than it must have seemed like a fun thing to do. At first they began by barging into the group, which seemed more like foreplay than anything else, but one of them, a fat bloke, was taking it too far. So, as he leaned on the bar, having ordered a round of beers, one of my mates grabbed at his legs, tipping him forward. His wobbly body nearly upended into the optics with a force, and he was hauled over with a crash. It was hilarious. But once the sailor had regained his composure, he was quickly up on his feet, in my grill, snarling and threatening to thump me. I wasn’t interested, though. The bouncers soon got involved, which was when I decided that enough was enough and announced to everybody that I was going home.
That’s when the trouble began.
The two sailors followed me out as I walked along the street looking for a taxi. Before I knew it, both of them were in my face again; they were shouting, goading me. One of them shoved me in the chest, which I wasn’t going to take lightly, and I immediately headbutted him, sending him to the floor with a couple of follow-up punches before decking his mate. Just to ensure the job was done, I went back to the first one – the fat lad, who was now rolling around the floor clutching a bloody nose �
� and gave him a hefty boot to the head. But everything had been caught on CCTV. I was lifted.
This incident marked the beginning of a horrendous episode in my life. I needed to hire a solicitor and had to pay for the legal fees with a chunk of inheritance money left to me by my nan. I then had to fight charges of GBH, ABH and affray, a claim I really resented because it suggested that I’d incited a riot or created a situation where people feared for their lives. I was told to expect no less than an eighteen-month custodial sentence, which freaked me out along with my girlfriend of the time, who then binned me. But I got lucky. The judge was impressed by a series of character references presented to the court, and despite having made claims for financial compensation the prosecution failed to show up for my sentencing. I was given three hundred hours of community service, which, while teaching me a lesson about keeping my fists down, proved to be something of a joke. I spent one day wrapping elastic bands round plastic bags for the cancer trust Marie Curie, before working for a few days as a gardener on a roundabout in Somerset, me wearing a hi-viz vest and surrounded by a number of other wallies wearing hi-viz vests. One morning a bloke showed up because he had been caught knocking through a wall in his council house without permission. He caught everybody’s attention when he arrived, firstly with the grimy, broken-tooth smile plastered across his chops, but also because somebody had shaved the word ‘C**T’ into the back of his head.
‘Mate, what the hell happened there?’ I asked.
‘It was my children,’ he laughed, his smile a moss-covered graveyard. ‘They’re thirteen and fifteen. Always up to no good …’
I laughed, but the admission shocked me. I couldn’t believe someone would crumble to their teenage kids like that. It showed a massive lack of discipline and self-respect, two qualities that would later become the cornerstones of my military career.