Battle Scars

by Jason Fox

  More often than not, our work took place at night. I’d be awake for twenty hours a day, every day, for six months, save for the occasional hour in which I’d find a cool spot in the shade under one of the Chinooks. When I first arrived for combat, the pace of war was fairly mellow – if you could call it that. Later, as the scale and velocity of combat intensified, more and more tiers of command were installed; there were more official procedures in place and lots more missions – and paperwork. I was soon ordered on to raids every night, even when our assistance wasn’t entirely necessary. I remember feeling irked when it first happened, a commander asking me about the leads we’d been working on and what my team was preparing for.

  ‘Not much,’ I said. ‘We’ve got nothing relevant just yet. If we go out on anything tonight, it’s going to screw us up. It’ll burn up aircraft hours and we’ll expose our tactics to the enemy fighters on the ground, people who don’t really need to know about how we work – and they’ve been learning quickly.’

  The value of allowing some operations to bubble away for longer than others wasn’t lost on us. Waiting a day or two for a little extra intelligence to arrive was sometimes the difference between success and failure, but every now and then the higher-ups became impatient. They wanted faster results.

  The Commander shook his head. ‘No, you’re going on it at 22:00 hours,’ he said.

  ‘Bloody hell, if we go out tonight we’ll get into a scrap with a bunch of fighters with AK-47s,’ I said. ‘Everyone in the country is poor, they’re bored, and they’ve got a coalition force working here that they see as an invading army. If they have a chance to have a pop, they’ll have a pop, because they’ve got nothing better to do. They’re all smacked off their faces on gear anyway …’

  I wasn’t kidding. Kids had been throwing rocks at us for weeks, mainly out of sheer boredom. There were drugs everywhere and violence was often viewed as an entertaining accompaniment to a home-grown high. The British forces became easy targets, but I couldn’t blame the dudes lobbing bricks about. I’d have probably done the same if I was a kid living in a warzone, watching as mobs of heavily armed soldiers walked past my house every day, people I believed to be hostile invaders, a conviction that had been indoctrinated into me by radicals. I, too, would have thrown a Molotov cocktail in the hope of starting a tear-up. It’s what young blokes sometimes do in hopeless situations. They reach for the self-destruct button. Those were the very real dynamics of the war we were fighting and the Brits had been taking a bloody nose or two. But at least it was exciting.

  The military meetings back then had been engaging. The buzz about the office, even the base gym, running on three hours’ kip, had been purposeful. But at Sodexo I was project-managing a team where very few people gave a crap about anything other than their pay cheques or the next fag break. Tea spillages at my workstation were the closest I’d ever get to a Molotov cocktail going off, and that saddened me.

  One afternoon in the Sodexo office I was called upon to help settle an ugly dispute that had kicked off during work hours. Given that I was experienced in conflict, I figured myself to be fairly handy in de-escalating confrontation, but the banality of the clash blew my mind. Two blokes were standing toe-to-toe at their workstations, screaming abuse at one another, their dispute over sloppy timekeeping coming to a head. Profanities ricocheted across the office as everybody gawped at a row that had been apparently brewing for days. But I couldn’t get my head around it. As I stepped between the quarrelling colleagues, ordering both blokes to simmer down quickly, a hush descended upon the Sodexo floor. Then a smiling face popped up from behind my computer terminal. It was Mike, one of the staff members I’d grown friendly with.

  ‘Oi, Foxy,’ he whispered conspiratorially. ‘What was it you used to do again?’

  I’d laughed off his wisecrack, the ludicrous tiff, my role as a peacekeeping force, and the jarring contrast to my old job, where conflicts usually turned noisy, the gunfire and explosions overshadowing any personal disputes or slanging matches between colleagues. But the office flare-up was more disorientating than any military engagement and the long-term implications were certainly scarier. For the very first time, I decided that I wanted to return to my life in the military. The sense of nostalgia for the old days had been lurking around for months, and I had experienced several pangs of regret where I felt desperate to go back. The problem was that my return now seemed impossible, because of my mental health issues, and that made me miserable. So bloody miserable.

  My days at work were a monotonous nightmare where I’d attempt to convince myself that everything was working out OK – it’s all cool. I often drove along the motorways and arteries feeding into military towns, such as Aldershot, for hours on end, living inside my own head with only the occasional speakerphone argument with my other half for company. But it’s fine, this will all get better. I was wrong, and working for hours in a solitary, soulless environment meant there was too much time to relive the horrors of my life in war, the stuff I couldn’t unsee, and yet I was craving to be back there, which confused me even more. I kept thinking that, given the opportunity to serve on one more tour – even just a short one, say, three months – there might be a way of bringing a closure to my life in The Brotherhood. But I also feared that returning to war would plunge me even deeper into the hole I’d been living in. I became anxious again. Deep sleep was increasingly rare, my evenings spent fidgeting on the sofa, and I’d quit the antidepressants, figuring their side effects to be more troublesome than any of the medical symptoms I’d been experiencing. Worse, I felt like a failure on all levels. My relationships with partners, friends and work were in turmoil, my masculinity shattered. Everything seemed diabolical. Hopeless.

  Nobody around me guessed what was going on and it’s unlikely they would have even cared, had they known. I was able to function easily enough, cruising through the day without exerting any real effort. Besides, my colleagues were too wrapped up in their own work to worry about my issues. (Andy was paying attention, though: he would eventually place a tracker on my car after one or two speeding incidents and this later revealed I’d spent hours in the gym on company time – not that he was too bothered.) I was even unable to ask for help from those closest to me – my family. I didn’t want to burden them with my problems. My brother Mat was in the Marines having his own dramas within the various scraps going on across the Middle East; Jamie was nine years younger than me and, though I loved him, we had a completely different dynamic and operated in two totally different headspaces at that time. Meanwhile, Mum was a worrier, and I couldn’t even find it in myself to broach the subject with my dad, even though he was cool and would have been able to advise me. Dad was an approachable bloke and fair (he still is) and yet the thought of opening up to him, admitting that I’d been medically discharged from my job with PTSD, was embarrassing. The thought of laying a heavy form of stress on any of them was awful and racked me with guilt. Besides, I was the oldest son, I was supposed to handle the big stuff. I decided to keep my family out of it, hoping nobody would pick up on my weird moods.

  Luckily, Andy Leach had.

  Whenever the pair of us went to the pub after office hours, blowing off steam with a few beers, our work conversations were always relaxed. Andy had come to understand why I was so intolerant of people who couldn’t work as effectively as me, and at times he shared the same frustrations. He also knew I was under pressure in my personal life. Elsewhere, our chats occasionally drifted across the emotions I’d experienced during my time in the military, until eventually all the horrors seemed to tumble over one another, pouring out of me as if I had been going through therapy again. During one late-night session, I even told him how much I missed fighting in war.

  ‘I liked being in the middle of a scrap,’ I said.

  I hadn’t meant that in regards to killing people, it was more my reflection of the thrill of having a superhuman purpose under high-risk circumstances. I missed fighting on dangerous opera
tions. I missed being in the thick of military action, knowing that I was protecting people back home, and I missed the risks we had to take on a daily basis, the life-or-death decisions that often happened in the blink of an eye. But my nostalgia came with symmetry and its balancing point was rage. I was angry with myself for having pretended to want a job that was a million miles away from exciting. I was angry with the psych nurses who had forced me through a rehabilitation process that, with hindsight, seemed unsuited to my personality. Most of all I was angry at the Navy for accepting my resignation so quickly when I had been in the wrong frame of mind to make such a life-changing decision for myself. I believed they could have easily encouraged me to take more time over such a big decision, with or without their help. But there was confusion to unsettle my thinking even further. How could I miss my job when I was angry at the military? I was so disorientated. Nothing made sense any more.

  Andy looked at me with concern. ‘We need to do more for you, Foxy,’ he said. ‘I mean, much more than me just giving you this job. Have you considered going through therapy outside the Navy?’

  I shook my head. ‘I dunno, mate. Haven’t I gone through all that crap already? It’ll just be the same as before, probably.’

  But Andy wouldn’t have any of my excuses, and explained how he’d had his own issues with mental health following a stressful divorce. He then detailed how to seek out an expert that best suited me, rather than one employed by the military, which had been my previous, hellish experience. I was still unsure. My experience of a psychiatric care programme had left me more suspicious than when I’d gone in, and I’d been pretty sceptical in the first place. But I also knew that talking to someone, to an expert, was becoming imperative, with one incident in particular alerting me that I was stuck in an increasingly precarious spot.

  During my early weeks at Sodexo I’d befriended a company account manager, a woman called Debbie Smith. We’d shared several mutual acquaintances from the military and I often turned to her for help or advice regarding the job. But as I slowly disintegrated further over the following months, my troubles seemed to stretch beyond any immediate support. Debbie often remarked that I looked sad. She sometimes took me away from the office for a coffee so we could discuss whatever it was that had brought me down that day, the issues dogging my life, such as a lack of sleep, or the stresses and anxieties at home. Whenever we spoke on the phone, which occasionally happened after I’d come through an argument with my other half or endured a lonely day in the car, I often found myself sobbing by the side of the road as she tried to instil a sense of peace in me. My situation troubled her; Debbie became a shoulder to cry on, though she often found herself out of her depth as I slipped further into depression. Whenever we discussed my feelings, Debbie often described me as looking ‘troubled’ or ‘haunted’.

  One afternoon she was called out to the Navy barracks in Plymouth to talk me down from a potentially explosive situation. I had been asked to conduct a Sodexo meeting earlier in the day, but my head was a mess and my whole personality seemed to be on edge. Somebody had spoken in a way that had annoyed me and my reaction was volatile, not that I’m able to recall what happened exactly – that’s how disorientated I was back then. The words would only have been throwaway, a glib comment or something dismissive, an attitude that would have grated against everyone in the unit had it happened within a Royal Marines setting – but I wasn’t in a Royal Marines setting and my hands were tied. I couldn’t shut the annoying comments down, and releasing my frustration on the problem would have probably seen me charged with assault. Instead I followed protocol and procedure to the letter, and it angered me. For a project manager there was so much red tape to get through just to make the smallest of changes that, at times, it seemed to work against everything I’d been used to when operating in conflict. There, the aim was to execute a job as quickly and as effectively as possible, no matter what. When Debbie eventually found me, I was pacing the corridors, wearing out the laminated flooring with my heavy footfalls, unable to talk. My frustration had been sealed in tight, and when I finally found the words to speak it poured out of me in a raging torrent. She listened patiently as I raved about the mess I’d got myself into at home, the experiences screwing with my head at work and the awful things I’d seen in war. At times it must have sounded like gibberish.

  My eyes brimmed with tears. ‘I’m pretending to be someone I’m not, Debbie. I’ve been lying to myself, making out that I’ve been happy all this time at Sodexo, which is bollocks. Now nothing’s working …’

  I became angry. ‘I gave my whole life to the military,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t they care about me more? Did they have to let me go so quickly?’

  Then I sucked in a deep breath, blurting out an idea to Debbie that I’d previously kept tightly locked away.

  ‘I’ve seen some terrible things,’ I sighed, looking down at my feet in shame.

  And then came the words that suggested my thinking had become more distressed than ever before.

  ‘I don’t deserve to be happy,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t deserve to live.’

  23

  Six days earlier

  The sound of angry AK-47s and their muzzle flashes were now distant memories tinted in rose. I drove around the Home Counties, visiting offices in provincial outposts such as Aldershot, Farnborough and Plymouth, checking on stationery orders and lorry deliveries. With only the radio for company, my long hours on the road became even more tortuous as the dark episodes of my career were replayed over and over. The good times were mourned as well. By that stage in my depression I sometimes missed the dice games on tour that decided whichever poor sod had to get the drinks for the whole mess, or our chats under the helicopters away from the baking sun. I even reminisced about the sound of the coffee machine that crushed the super-strong beans at breakfast, everyone piling in after a night raid to grab a freshly brewed cup. The opposing forces of nostalgia and fear pulled me this way and that.

  Most of all I missed the action. I felt alive in a gun battle and my endorphins charged up. Excitement grabbed me; I became adrenalized, my heart pounding hard, the hair on my skin prickling. Like any adrenaline rush, where dopamine flooded the brain, a massive comedown followed soon after, but the high of engaging the enemy in contact always dropped off especially quickly, sometimes before I’d even returned to base, the downer landing as I gathered my thoughts during the helicopter ride home. I found that in the hours after a battle I often looked to discuss the action with other blokes in The Brotherhood, not because I wanted to brag about any moments of heroism but because I wanted to be back there, in the thick of it, reliving a life played out at the extreme ends of emotion. Some soldiers I knew compared the sensation to taking drugs, once they’d left. Maybe the rush of snorting a line of gear might have come close to being shot at, and shooting back, but for me there were more similarities with a one-night stand. Yeah, the sex had been great at the time, but afterwards, once the high and the comedown had passed, I’d think, What was that all about? And like the Monday morning after a weekend of heavy partying, I sensed a grubbiness in the fallout from a battle where lives had been lost and my adrenaline had been sky high in the thick of it all. My entire life in war had seemed like a succession of brief peaks and sobering lows.

  It had been the same as a young lad in the Marines. Having started my career at the age of sixteen, when I finished my training I was elated, as if I’d already made it. To some degree I had, I guess: I’d proved Dad wrong, after all – I did have the guts to follow in his footsteps. The next morning, as I buttoned up my uniform for the first time, the mood was weirdly underwhelming and I felt just a little bit deflated. I looked in the mirror at my immaculately pressed kit, my boots shining with polish, and thought, ‘So … is that it? What about those feelings I’d had yesterday when I was marching about the place believing I was the dog’s bollocks?’ There were identical roller-coaster moods after making it through some of the toughest tests th
e British military hierarchy could throw at me, and having received congratulations in the immediate aftermath, I was soon yanked back down to earth by my colleagues just twenty-four hours later. Right, Foxy, get off your high horse and let’s get shit done. The changing moods sometimes became disorientating.

  The experience of killing enemy fighters could be just as unsettling because I felt so detached from the process. Did it make me sad? No. Did it make me happy? Not at all. But the lack of emotion around it seemed strange, even though it was part of the job. I had a mission to complete for the British government and I needed to protect the people around me. Whenever I was caught up in a firefight I found it was the risk that excited me the most; the fact that I could have died, but hadn’t, in a dangerous situation, rather than the specific act of dropping someone – I wasn’t a psychopath. Sometimes the kills didn’t feel real, and there were times where I wasn’t even sure whether we’d hit anybody in the chaos of battle, or if any of the rounds I’d fired had suppressed the movements of an enemy target. On other occasions I was distanced from the absoluteness of war, especially while working from the base. Then, an enemy target might have been hit by an air asset from hundreds of miles away and the experience was always surreal, almost fictional, the monitor, which showed the filmed footage, acting like a filter between me and the black and white explosions blossoming on the ground, my emotions disconnected from a stranger’s life ended in battle.