by Jason Fox
Over the coming weeks, my downers intensified. I second-guessed every decision in every aspect of my life, even down to what I was going to eat, and then I second-guessed again. The dark moods that had weighed me down previously became heavier and more prolonged, and nothing could shake me from the darkness. When I later travelled to the Lake District for a short holiday, I drove from Carlisle to the west coast. I dropped an antidepressant after settling in and it knocked me out for three days. I felt drunk. I couldn’t string a sentence together. I was exhausted, able to open my eyes – but only just, my eyelids felt lead-heavy – and I was miserable for the entire trip. The drugs had become a numbing agent. Sometimes they helped to shut out the emotions that had unsettled me in the first place, but they did little to push me towards a healthy resolution. The chemicals might have worked for some people, but not me. Instead they acted like sticking plaster covering up a chest-sucking bullet wound when I really needed surgery and stitches. I was falling deeper and deeper into a mental black hole.
I kept on jabbing at the self-destruct button when I was at home with my new girlfriend, as I had done in previous relationships. There were occasions when I would be spaced out on the sofa, the pair of us relaxing with her kid, enjoying a night of domesticity in front of the TV. She was laughing and having a good time, but I would flip out. I couldn’t handle the comfort and security smothering me, I found it annoying, and often looked to escape. I tried to screw up moments of calm by starting an argument, or I’d react badly to something, exploding into a rage and then sulking for hours afterwards.
I think deep down I knew that my future was being controlled by a psychiatrist’s professional diagnosis, not by me, and that ten years of military service had taken a heavy toll on my mental health – I was retreating from being a part of the elite. The realization had caused me to become a nightmare to live with – I was retreating from contact at home. I became unable to face my family and friends because I was losing everything I’d once stood for – I was retreating from the basics of life, caught in a cyclone of misery. The effect was crippling. It didn’t help that I was driving along the motorway for three hours every week to visit psych nurses who seemed unable to locate the root cause of my problems. I was tired of the experience, the drab, cold and clinical rooms I had to sit in while my thoughts were dissected by an expert, by someone seemingly all out of ideas.
And then I was offered a permanent escape route into civilian life.
‘The only thing that’s going to fix you now is to leave the military,’ said the psych nurse after months of frustration and dead-end questioning, him waving his finger around, me repeating myself in yet another unproductive session. ‘Leave the uniform. Take away everything that makes you depressed. It’ll be a huge weight off your shoulders.’
The idea wound me up. I was yet to falter at any stage in my military career and quitting felt like a cop-out. ‘No. No way. That’s not an option – I’m not doing that.’
The suggestion was enough to tip me off-balance, and during that period the idea of leaving The Brotherhood caused me to spiral down even harder, the darkest thought striking me for the first time.
Without any purpose, what’s the use?
A psychiatrist had worked out what I was bringing to the party, and the answer chilled me.
I had nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
So what’s the point to any of it?
After endless sessions of therapy, killing time became a priority. I figured it was as good an opportunity as any to holiday somewhere hot and sunny, with plenty of beach-facing bars to lose myself in. I needed a little rest and recuperation, hoping it might settle my head in some way, and besides, there was nothing better to do. Senior officers on the base had entrusted me with some minor tasks to keep me busy at home, paperwork to complete on the side, but it was a token gesture, and when I booked a fortnight in Tulum, the Mexican town which was bordered with a picture-postcard Mayan wall and a coastline that dipped down into the Caribbean, I felt vaguely excited by the prospect of creating some space between my issues and the grey and damp atmosphere dogging me in England. But not too excited. The pills had blunted my endorphins to a point where not being moody or vacant was the closest I ever got to real happiness.
For the first few days away I definitely felt different. Somewhere approaching OK. I rested and became comfortably spaced-out, a mood located between the pills and my mental fuzziness, the lethargy unnoticed by everybody around me as they rested and became comfortably spaced-out too, but due to booze, sunshine and adventure. From the security of a sunlounger, everybody was escaping the personal stresses and fatigue of home. Then a mental fracture proved to me that there was no fleeing the problems crushing my spirit in Poole.
I had decided to go for a morning run along the beach. It was early, the sun had barely crept above the ocean but I’d wanted to exercise, believing that if I maintained my fitness there might be a shot at re-joining The Brotherhood somewhere in the future. Plus it made me feel better about myself. Smashing out a few miles in a jog while sweating away the beers from the night before seemed like a good way to start the day. The scenery was beautiful too. An inky-black ocean stretched away into the distance, the sunrise burning at its edges. Waves lapped at the coastline and the crunch of the beach under my feet felt almost therapeutic. But having only gone a mile or so, the sight of the sand stretching ahead triggered some strange mental episode – not a flashback as such because I didn’t really have flashbacks, not in the trippy sense, but a memory that created a tsunami of heavy emotions. It was the shadows, my dark silhouette shimmering on the beach in front of me. I felt the hot wind on my face, the sun in my eyes.
Like I was sitting at the back of a helicopter again.
In the moments of calm once a mission had been completed, while the troops were making for base, I sometimes sat at the rear of a Chinook, my gun trained on the desert. The chopper’s shadow speckled the ground hundreds of feet below. My skin was buffeted by scorching air, my eyes squinting at the high sun. During those minutes I was often in an emotional state of purpose and meaning. We were about to land. I’d done my job. Mission complete. I was looking forward to showering and eating my breakfast.
Now I was on a beach in Mexico, my shadow flickering on the dunes beneath me, sweat in my eyes, the sun on my face, dreaming of a fancy meal in the hotel restaurant. And the war had caught up with me again.
Riding around in helicopters – I’m not doing that any more.
I used to love doing that.
Negative thought was back. PTSD had grabbed at me again and with it, the self-inflicted abuse.
Why am I not doing that any more?
Why don’t I love it any more?
I felt hunted, tracked down to a place where I’d believed I really might be able to hide from my troubles. I should have been OK, I’d been hunted before – in war, but also in training. Back then, when I was hoping to make it into elite service, myself and several potential candidates were released into the Welsh countryside and stalked by dog trackers, on our scent for up to seven days. It was a test. The sole job of the ‘Hunter Force’ was to find the soldiers running around in the darkness before bringing them back for tactical questioning where their alibis would be stripped bare over a period of intense mental and physical beastings. At that time, I had found my development in the military – and all the specialist courses that went with it – a fun challenge. The evasion training felt like just another adventure, a small group scarpering from the enemy and, like most aspects of military life, it mainly comprised lengthy episodes of tedium interjected with rushes of excitement. I remember walking through the Welsh countryside as a group, feeling tired, hungry and bored, fed up with the cold, when suddenly the Hunter Force moved into view for the first of several skirmishes. We’d seen them; they had seen us, and a chase kicked off, our gang darting into the woods and making our escape.
We managed to avoid capture for several days and while w
e were allowed to live on our wits during that time, the one rule in place was that we couldn’t cheat by engaging with members of the public. But nobody paid any attention to that. We had heard from other soldiers that the trick was to break those rules without getting caught. One night, after five days of living off food scraps, a pensioner spotted us as we crossed her farmland. The flashlights from the Hunter Force sweeping the skyline and their dogs barking aggressively in the distance must have alerted her to the pursuit. When she noticed us crouching by a perimeter wall we were ushered over.
‘Get in here, boys,’ she whispered conspiratorially, showing us inside. Nobody thought twice about taking up her offer. Through the windows her home looked warm and cosy.
‘Have you eaten?’ she asked, opening up her fridge and setting out a banquet of sarnies, chocolate biscuits and cans of Coke. I think cold and starving soldiers must have been regular visitors to her property because she understood exactly who we were and what we were doing. Greedily, we shovelled in stacks of food as she looked on and smiled, like the unlikeliest leader of some imaginary group of freedom fighters. But when we later left her place, fattened and happy, the show of generosity attacked us with a vengeance; our expanded stomachs, starved for nearly a week, bucked and lurched as we raced towards the woods, all of us projectile-vomiting fizzy drinks and half-digested crisps into the darkness.
When we were eventually caught, the fun and games really began. Our interrogators instilled fear in us by forcing us towards a state of shock, first by screaming into our faces and manoeuvring our bodies into agonizing stress positions, then by exposing us to a series of psychological pressures, each one designed to crack the most stubborn of personalities. Physical resistance resulted in payback. Not taking the onslaught seriously was just as risky and when I laughed at having two men in balaclavas yelling at me from point-blank range I was stripped naked and tied outside in the wintry air. Then somebody soaked me down with icy water from a hose. I was left there for what felt like hours.
Bloody hell, I thought, shivering, my bones and muscles bucking and wrenching with the cold. I wish I’d kept my mouth shut.
Now in the warmth and comfort of Mexico, with cocktails on tap and an all-you-can-eat buffet within reach, I realized my problems had trailed me like the Hunter Force in Wales, though the consequences of being caught were far scarier than any interrogation. This time the shadowy forces dogging me were the aftershocks of war; the interrogators a crushing sense of self-doubt working in my own head. They had crept up on me in the most inconspicuous way, the tremors caused by a morning run through the sand.
Why am I not doing that any more?
Why don’t I love it any more?
I got back to my hotel room, showered and ate breakfast. I then shut myself away from the world for three days and acted like a miserable bastard, knowing that I was done, believing that the doctors had been right all along and that I needed to quit the military. Preparing to make the worst decision of my life in a period of never-ending screw-ups.
19
This is not good.
This is really not good.
As I bunkered down in a luxury hotel room, unable to push away my bed covers, unwilling to face the sunshine outside, I came to an understanding that riding the emotional roller-coaster of a gun battle was pretty similar to wrestling the fallout to PTSD. Both shared the same mental push and pull. There were moments of intense stress. Often my heart seemed to be bursting through my rib cage as I became weighed down by the never-ending questions of What next? and What if? My worst-case scenarios were replayed over and over. But then faint slivers of hope would arrive, and then fade, those painfully brief interludes usually trailed by flashes of anarchy as everything around me spiralled out of control.
During that period I believed there was nothing in my power to stop a bad incident from taking place – it was inevitable. I found myself living in epic chaos where surreal, almost slow-motion episodes of drama unfolded, such as a hellish argument at home. Moments of calm collided with moments of combustion. Life felt dangerously unpredictable, 24/7. There were so many false endings. On countless occasions I sensed some fresh breakthrough or an escape route that might lead to recovery. It might have been a thread of a new idea in my therapy sessions, or a combination of pills that temporarily lifted my mood, and for those brief periods claiming resolution seemed possible. The reward I wanted so badly in those snapshots of optimism was my military mojo, fully restored and in better shape than ever before, there for me to utilize once more.
But I couldn’t.
Given my experience with epic and awful battles, it would have been understandable had anyone outside the mental health profession assumed that I could carry my issues like a slightly-heavier-than-usual piece of kit. Elite fighters like myself were perceived as having been psychologically toughened; my working attitude was finely tuned to functioning within seemingly impossible scenarios. In the past I had been able to push past my breakpoint in elite training and operate in conditions so awful that only a tiny percentage of soldiers made it through. Suffering had become my speciality and no warzone had proved too tough. I once remember emerging unscathed from a seemingly never-ending battle that had lasted for over twenty-four hours – though its intensity was nowhere near as exhausting as my conflict with PTSD.
The details of that scrap still felt vivid. We had been ordered to attack a fortified position which was pitched on one side of a deep valley. We’d been informed that the place was heavily guarded with machine guns. Intelligence had warned us that a lot of senior bad dudes were camped there and the place was considered to be something of a hornets’ nest. It was decided we should open fire at night. During the crazy battle that followed, the valley was bombarded for six hours, the enemy firing all sorts of artillery at us; our own troops returning machine-gun fire across the rocky expanse with no real idea of our targets’ exact location as the hostiles constantly shifted position behind a wall of trees and vegetation. The shooting would go on for an hour at a time before dying down temporarily. Then a chatter of bullets would kick up out of nowhere, unexpectedly, usually at the exact moment that we’d believed our fighting was done with. The noisy encounter would rumble on until the next brief respite.
When the sun came up the shooting seemed to calm down, that’s when the real struggle began, the heat scorching our skin at fifty degrees. As a body of men we made a nerve-shredding dash across the exposed land at the bottom of the valley, waiting for the gunfire to open up again, only to discover the enemy had abandoned their positions. Everyone had disappeared into the nearby mountains where we knew they would find it quite easy to vanish without a trace. Frustrated, we turned over their village, which was located nearby, rampaging through a series of tiny huts and shelters, rummaging through discarded boxes and bags for any scraps of intelligence. I kicked my way through a door and spotted the entrance to a disguised underground bunker in the corner of a small shack. Peering down into the darkness with my flashlight, I noticed a storage space was located at the end of the narrow tunnel and dozens of wooden crates had been packed inside. Accompanied by another soldier, I crawled on my hands and knees into the tight, claustrophobic space, checking for booby-traps as we investigated what might be stashed down there. When we reached the first stack of wooden crates, I prised a lid off to reveal an unexpected treasure trove of artillery shells – hundreds and hundreds of them.
‘Bloody hell, mate,’ I whispered to the bloke next to me. ‘We’re going to have to blow this lot up.’
He nodded grimly, and we set about rigging a series of explosive charges, lighting the fuse on our way out and legging it to cover as the electrical spark ignited some way down in the darkness. WHUMP! The ground trembled, puffing smoke and dust around us, but something wasn’t quite right. Our pyrotechnics show should have been bigger, louder, wilder. The charge hadn’t gone off properly!
Oh shit, I thought. Now muggins here is going to have to crawl back in and redo the bloody th
ing.
Like the organizers of a village fireworks display, we knew that returning too soon to an unlit rocket was asking for trouble, so we sat it out in the blistering heat for thirty minutes before crawling down into the bunker again to reset the fuses. But when we reached the explosives, my senses prickled. Something wasn’t right. I raised a hand, signalling for the other bloke to hold as I assessed the situation in the gloom, flashing my torch towards the ammo stash. In the spotlight I could see that our detonation hadn’t caused too much surface damage to the contents of the bunker, but the shells inside must have been unsettled or cracked open. They were now leaking a fine, yellow mist. It seeped from the slits in the wooden crates. Could it be mustard gas? We pulled on our respirators, the black rubber edges squelching to my skin with the sweat and heat before quickly finishing off the rewiring job, this time the bunker caving in on itself with a huge bang, burying whatever was hidden inside.
Our job had been done. But it hadn’t.
Our operations that day had been played out against a backdrop of paranoia. At one point, intel alerted us that the enemy was returning – but they never came. Our air support later had to return to base because it was running low on fuel, which made us vulnerable. Every moment had been fraught with the nerve-shredding anticipation of more attacks and more gun battles, and once we had finally been extracted from the valley, over twenty-four hours later, all of us were frazzled. False ending after false ending had taken its toll. All day we had been on the verge of leaving the area, only to discover another stash of weapons. At times bullets had rained down on us, just as we’d thought the day had been decided. The action had gone on and on.