by Jason Fox
The only person who bothered me was somebody whose smug face I can still see smirking at me as we hauled him on to a helicopter. He had been a big player in our attempt to suppress a guerrilla militia as they wrecked shop and planned suicide attacks on the local army. My team had first engaged in contact with him when several gunmen took aim at us from a car as our forces came in to land at a village, and as we swooped down the fighters abandoned their vehicle and ran off into a nearby field of tall grass. We gave chase, the rounds whistling around us as the fleeing enemy opened fire in a vain attempt to scare us off. In the chase, two enemy targets were shot dead, and once we’d searched the bodies, discovering radios and weaponry, there was the confirmation that we’d actually collared some senior bad dudes rather than a group of angry locals shooting at us for giggles. A cordon was set up and the unit searched the area for more intelligence when, suddenly, a shout went up from a nearby clump of reeds. One of the local police officers we were working with had found a ‘person of interest’ cowering in a ditch. I walked over, my gun raised. The guy was dressed in red robes; his hair was long and lank underneath a headdress and he was waving his arms in the air as if to prove he had been unarmed, just another innocent bystander caught up in the madness. I kept my weapon trained on him nonetheless, and when we shortly discovered a gun and radio that had been thrown into a nearby bush, we made the call to take him in for processing.
When moving in warzones, the British military only engaged with enemy fighters if they posed a serious threat, either to us or to others. Every captured but unarmed target had to be detained and questioned before moving into the country’s judicial system, which we all knew to be flaky. Corruption was rife and detainees probably spent only a week or so in their cells before being released shortly afterwards, usually due to a lack of evidence. From there they were free to pick up an AK-47 and take more pot-shots at any passing helicopters, over and over, until their next capture, when the sorry story was replayed. Working through the legal processes in anarchic countries was infuriating to us all, a real waste of time, but the same realization dawned on our prisoner as he was being tagged and plasti-cuffed. The scumbag knew he’d be let off the hook shortly after his capture and there was a visible change in his demeanour. Knowing he was safe from lengthy imprisonment, the captive became arrogant as the helicopter lifted him away, which was irritating as hell. I sensed he was a serious player in the conflict and felt the sudden urge to grab him by the shoulders, launching him from the back of the chopper to his end, but I calmed the rushing blood. Weeks later, after his disappearance into the legal chaos, I learned that he was a leader in the war we were fighting. It turned out the cocky bastard had been responsible for killing a number of local soldiers, but even after our dossier of evidence had been expanded, it wasn’t enough. We were told he’d been set free, an announcement that bothered me for a long time afterwards. I reassured myself that I had done the right thing at the time, that the situation had dictated my behaviour, and that I’d acted correctly. After all, what else could I have done? But any random attacks that took place across his turf in the months afterwards often made me wonder.
Why did he have to be the one that got away?
The grim realities of war fighting were something I had to deal with all too regularly, but the sight of the seriously wounded or dead never really bothered me until that final tour, not emotionally, anyway. I was able to compartmentalize it as an unpleasant but everyday occurrence in my line of work, mainly because I didn’t have the time to process the horror of it all, a bit like a detective working through a murder scene. Whenever we stumbled across a dead body in a car or house, it often seemed like an almost surreal discovery. An incongruous snapshot of death set against the day-to-day happenings of everyday life. I’d notice weird details about the deceased’s appearance – His trousers don’t even fit properly. Or struggle to grasp the realities of their mortality – Is that a homeless person and he’s actually asleep? Maybe it was a defence mechanism, my brain raising a partition of plausible alternatives to soften a very grim experience.
I remember that during one patrol a gunship ahead of us attacked a fighter who was strafing our unit with mortar fire. I watched as the bullets chopped through a field of high grass and trees, splintering branches and burning at the vegetation. When our gunner announced that the target was down, it was our job to head into the undergrowth to find him, creeping in like Children of the Corn, understanding that our target might still be alive and in possession of a weapon. My heart pounded as we moved into an area where the grass tips had been scorched with gunfire. In the middle of a small circle of hacked-to-bits vegetation was a body, or what was left of it, the fighter’s face caved in by shrapnel, and as one of the unit wiped his empty eye sockets with DNA swabs, I realized that what theoretically should have been a disturbing sight hadn’t bothered me at all. Whenever I’d looked at the dead, their bodies didn’t seem real, as if I’d been watching them in a film, or on TV, instead.
The only death I remember as being really unsettling was a suicide bomber who had clacked himself in a partial detonation. Thankfully, nobody else died, but the explosive vest he’d been wearing had delivered enough damage to burn its wearer alive. As we cautiously approached the smouldering figure, the general consensus on comms was that he’d probably been killed in the blast and there was no saving him, though we weren’t entirely sure. Suddenly, the body’s top half heaved violently, sending the cadaver into an upright position as the remaining air from his lungs escaped loudly with a whistling sigh. Everybody freaked out, jumping back with the shock before the corpse slumped back to the dirt. It didn’t so much as twitch again.
Kids were my kryptonite, though. I hated seeing families in distress, which was something the military had to deal with all the time, and this fallout from war was always heart-breaking. I later felt remorseful at upsetting the innocent. Enemy bombs obliterated houses; our forces attacked back. And while the aim was to avoid all civilian injuries, homes were sometimes destroyed and communities became fractured. Occasionally, hunted enemy fighters hid behind their families or walked among people who were totally oblivious to their intentions. Our job was to extract those significant targets and the efforts sometimes became unpleasant. Having my own family at home meant that the emotions caused by a screaming child or terrified family caught up in a battle resonated with me far more deeply than it did with some of the other lads, even though I’d become quite a hard-hearted parent. If ever one of my girls started crying or grizzling, I had very little patience for it; I’d tell them to stop moaning, though I still wanted to protect their innocence for as long as possible. And so the sight of kids in war broke me up. I knew their childish naivety had been ripped away forever. It became another price to pay in conflicts played out during close combat and within built-up civilian areas. Once I’d returned to a peaceful, British life and the pace of my day-to-day slowed considerably, I couldn’t shake off the sense of despair. Some of the horrors that war had inflicted upon good people were just too awful to ignore. That kid and his dark eyes on that impactful mission, clinging to his teddy. A mouth shaped into a blackened scream in my NVGs.
As I drove across Hampshire and Surrey, moving from meeting to meeting for Sodexo, my thoughts became shadowed by his distorted, screaming face, all grainy green-and-black through my optics. In those intense moments I always wondered about his whereabouts. I felt pangs of remorse whenever I imagined what he might have experienced that night, the sounds of gunfire and the people around him dying, bombs and bullets ripping through the air. Had he got to safety? Was his life wrecked for good? I understood I’d only been doing my job, but the worry for a vulnerable young life in the midst of war tweaked at my thinking. All of the victims caught in our crossfire did, and sadly there were too many of them to remember. We were always interacting with locals, wherever we were, so the chances that bystanders might experience psychological damage as we worked were high. Families might witness extreme violen
ce. Kids understandably became terrified at the sight of a raised weapon. As I spent more and more time driving around from Sodexo client to Sodexo client, my thoughts seemed to be invaded by every single face over my ten years of violence, a collection of demons chattering away in the passenger seat, a running commentary on the terrifying job I now wanted back.
I’d also noticed how those experiences of conflict were changing me politically. During my time away from the war life I became more liberal, my perspective shaped by the impacts of Britain’s combat record. When I was younger, working through training and embarking on the early phases of my intense, battle-filled career, I probably would have been marked down by mates as having a slightly right-wing attitude. I certainly hadn’t been able to get my head around the former Liberal Democrat leader, Paddy Ashdown, a one-time member of the SBS. Why is he sitting on the fence about our military choices? I thought. That’s weird. But having gone through war myself and then witnessed the resulting carnage, I realized a lot of our efforts had been for very little. What had we actually achieved? Was the world really a much safer place afterwards? It was hard to tell.
Ultimately, the two sides in any war carried radically different opinions, both halves engaging in hardcore violence, regardless of how or where the dispute had started. I realized that I didn’t want to see people killing each other in battle any more, and definitely not over a set of ideological beliefs or political agendas; it seemed ludicrous. War had taught me to be more tolerant of others; I began to think differently towards narrow-minded people and I wanted to listen to varying opinions and viewpoints so I could reach a balanced conclusion for myself when debating the rights and wrongs of a particular issue. Of course, I was still very much of the opinion that if a foreign power had acted like an arsehole by oppressing, threatening or killing innocent people then they needed a slap from the military. I was all for that; it went back to my long-held feeling that bullies needed to be taken down. But my attitude became more considered: we shouldn’t send our troops into dangerous conditions simply to further the selfish, personal gains of people in power. I hadn’t become involved in the military for those reasons anyway; I wasn’t there for somebody’s political plans. If I were to distil my motive it would be this: I was in the job to do good work and to stop good people from being crushed by aggression.
This rationale couldn’t hold back the growing tide of remorse that seemed to be dragging me under during those awful months at Sodexo. The images and emotions rushed at me when I least expected them and my guilt was amplified when I remembered how much I’d once enjoyed being in the thick of a gunfight, shooting at enemy targets while forgetting the innocent lives that were being ruined for ever in the fallout. My mourning for a loss of adventure and purpose was now in conflict with the ghosts of war. How could I miss it and hate it at the same time? And how could I resent the military for letting me leave and yet yearn to be back in their embrace? To my mind, those things seemed mutually exclusive and the contradictions inevitably caused me to crack.
On a Monday morning as I made it to the office, I noticed that Debbie was walking towards my desk. She looked ashen and was staring at me fearfully. As she beckoned me over, I knew that something was seriously wrong. Had I screwed up at work, big-time?
‘Foxy, how are you doing?’
I felt confused. Was she asking about my weekend, my workload, or something else? I didn’t get it.
‘Yeah, fine,’ I said, shrugging my shoulders.
‘Really? I was so worried after all those phone calls.’
The sentence seemed to slap me across the jaw. Paranoia prickled at my flesh. Phone calls? What phone calls?
‘Debbie, I don’t know what you’re banging on about …’
She looked confused. ‘Foxy – Friday night, we spoke on the phone for ages. You were in such a state. I was so worried.’
I was rocked at the blanks in my memory as Debbie relived several lost hours, me calling her at ten thirty p.m. from a motorway layby in tears, sobbing uncontrollably as I told her how my misery had become too much to handle. There was the worthlessness, my burden to others, a crushing guilt, and the frustration. All of it was swirling around, an overwhelming weight of despair I couldn’t carry any longer. The confusion of wanting to go back to a life that had broken me was even more destructive.
‘Debbie, I’m looking for a tree to hang myself from,’ I’d said.
She had freaked out. ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m somewhere in Devon.’
And when she’d offered to drive from her home in Woking to get me, I had drawn back. I’d not wanted her to help. I’d not wanted her to find me. I wanted to die. Somehow she kept me talking on the phone, bringing me round, calming me down, calling me every couple of hours throughout the night to ensure I’d not done something stupid on the drive home. I’d been at the emotional extreme, on the verge of suicide, a moment in life that most people would have been scarred by. And yet I couldn’t remember any of it.
24
Six minutes earlier
What would it be like to fall?
The thought first flashed across my radar as I approached the clifftop car park, another day of crawling the motorways and A-roads done, dark thoughts strapped to my chest like body armour. I knew the trails there led to a coastal pathway. Popular with hikers and dog walkers, the route that topped the cliffs was peppered with flimsy perimeter fences and local authority signs that warned of an awful fate if anyone strayed too close to the edge. But I’ll take that. I stepped out of my car into the drizzle, and headed towards the precipice with purpose. There was no one around in the crappy weather and so I was going to fall, unnoticed, ending it all with a running leap into the dark sea and heavy clouds, a scene so similar to the psychological sensations that had trailed me since that first day back in Poole – me staring into nothingness at a pedestrian crossing, the world rushing around me at a million miles an hour. Today the water could take me. If life wanted really to swallow me whole then it was welcome – if it’ll only end the fucking misery. As far as what might happen to my rag-doll corpse on the rocks, I couldn’t have cared less. Once my body eventually washed up on a beach somewhere, I figured nobody would really mind. I told myself that the misery and mood swings of the last couple of years had been a burden to the very few people still in contact with me. Suicide would probably be as much a relief for them as it would for me.
There was a second or two for contemplation. I’d wanted so badly to get shot of the negative thoughts and confusion, but what was coming next? The stomach-lurching plummet for sure, a flash of pain probably, but only if I hadn’t passed out on the way down, and then … Blackness. But as I looked out to the English Channel, the unknown suddenly scared me even more than the unpleasantness of living through another day. Death was going to numb my anguish for sure, but what about afterwards? I wasn’t a religious bloke so I didn’t fear the afterlife or some judgement by an all-seeing power, but imagining the finality of nothingness suddenly seemed to unnerve me. Did I really think that death was going to suck me in and spit me out again a happier, well-rounded, box-fresh bloke, gagging for another shot at a fulfilling life? Because finality didn’t come with a money-back guarantee and there was no returning from whatever lay in wait.
I sobbed, crumbling with fear once again in an existential meltdown. Even the thought of escaping from a depression that had brought me to the edge of this cliff, the ejector seat button, had filled me with terror and indecision. But wasn’t it supposed to be the easy way out?
I laughed darkly.
I’d even become a failure at suicide. How does that happen?
Could it get any more shit?
I peered down at the rocky teeth and frothing tide beneath me. The drop seemed greater now, longer, even more terrifying, as slowly I came to realize that going through with suicide was beyond me, for now at least. Instead I stood there for who-knows-how-long, staring into nothingness before trudging back to my company car, the s
tatus symbol for a job that hung around my neck like a dead weight. I dried my eyes and got on with my shitty day before driving home, where I sat on the sofa and swigged my way through another bottle of wine, alone, trying desperately to push away what had happened on that cliff edge, while fearfully thinking about what might come next.
Had the person who eventually pulled me away from the brink of self-destruction not turned around my way of thinking, I might have found myself writing these pages from prison. The anger bubbling away inside would have finally overflowed into something more terrible than my earlier flashpoints, such as a simple dispute with some colleagues at work, or an explosion of road rage on the A38. More likely, an early death was the finishing post for me back then; it was only a matter of time before I summoned the guts to pull the trigger on myself. The cliff edge had been a test run, a warm-up for my final act of desperation. But I was about to be turned around by an outsider who would help me to help myself while reshaping my thinking, reattaching me to a way of life that I’d eventually come to find fulfilling.
Alex Lagaisse was a clinical psychologist working from a practice in Devon. After weeks of nagging from Andy and Debbie, my moodiness having taken a noticeable dip in the office, I’d eventually relented and a session was booked for me by one of Andy’s colleagues. Once it was set, Andy assured me that if it didn’t work out with Dr Lagaisse, we’d try another therapist. Then another. And then another. In order to get me fixed he was willing to play the long game. It was just about the best tactic for a bloke in my state of mind.
‘Foxy, we just want to get you right,’ he said one night in the pub. ‘It’ll take as long as it takes.’