We Were Warriors

by Johnny Mercer

  With that I burst into tears and went to my bedroom. What the fuck was going on? David Beckham had made me cry? I was properly in tears this time. Sobbing my heart out, sat on the bed. I wasn’t crying for Mark; I wasn’t crying because of guilt; I wasn’t crying for myself. I think I was weeping for our generation. Nothing really prepares you for the reality of repeated visits to war.

  And I felt decimated. I felt totally destroyed inside. I felt that I had nothing else to give. I felt that I used to be a good man. Someone who cared so much for other people that I didn’t have time to care about myself and really address the scars from my childhood. Yes, growing up had been tough, but I had finally got there, and found a family and a home in the Army that I was content with. But now the ride was going too fast, and I wanted to get off. This Afghan stuff was getting out of control.

  And I only had myself to blame. It was all entirely self-inflicted. I did not have to join the Army. I did not have to be a Joint Fires Controller. I didn’t have to go on patrol twice a day, every day, for seven months. I did not have to laugh at the Taliban’s stupidity as I ended people who stood up in front of me in a contact.

  I had become totally brutalized; I was ashamed of what I had done, ashamed of what I had become and wondered how life would ever be the same again. My relationship with Felicity was suffering too. I kept taking Amalie off for walks on our own, or staring into space in the pub, alone, and she became convinced I was having an affair. I tried to explain that I was finding things tough, but she genuinely did not know how to treat me.

  If I was having a good day and feeling robust, I did not want her to sit me down and ask me softly how it was all going. If I was having a bad day, I just wanted the world to leave me alone – particularly her – lest she prise the lid off the jar and make it worse.

  Felicity slowly began to realize the negative impact she was having on my re-adjustment to normal life, and through sheer hard work and love, she sought to understand the experiences I had been through but was so reticent to talk about.

  And yet during these difficult winter months, as 2010 became 2011, I still considered myself deeply fortunate. My fiancée was committed and resilient – she was not going to cast me adrift to the darkness no matter what. My daughter was sublime – a gift – and one with whom I could always find a deep solace. I had some money – albeit not much – and I lived in a beautiful little cottage by the sea in Devon. I was acutely aware that some of my soldiers were not so fortunate.

  33

  Bing’s parents, Mike and Ann, were calling on an almost twice-weekly basis. Someone at the regiment had furnished them with an account of the day Bing died, and made out that I did something heroic and retrieved his body under fire from an advancing enemy. Extremely overblown. In their kindness, they kept telling me how proud they were of me, and how they did not blame me. They wanted to visit me and Felicity in Noss Mayo, and we had them down to stay.

  Mike drank for the first time since that knock on the door from the Army on 8 June. He drank the whisky like water, and before I knew it was demanding that we head down the road to the local pub. I ceded to his request and we made our way down the road. As we passed some steep steps that led down to the harbour side, he collapsed from the alcohol and fell down them, hitting his head badly on the stone and knocking himself unconscious.

  I flagged down a passing van and lifted him into the back of it, to transport him back up the hill to my house. When we got there he had come round, and wanted to go back to the pub. When I told him we hadn’t quite made it to the pub, he thought I was lying. Ann then got cross with him, and they went to bed.

  (The severity of this injury was not fully realized for some months. He actually suffered a very slow, very small bleed on his brain that resulted in him collapsing some months later, and nearly passing away in Gloucester hospital. He had an operation and was saved, but it still remains the most serious drunken injury I’ve seen!)

  Mike and Ann were suffering a deep loss. Back then, I did not see an immediate way out of it for them. They would sit endlessly in their sitting room, staring at the little cross made up of brass 30mm shell cases from an Apache helicopter’s gun in theatre, given to them by the Army. I accompanied them to anything they asked me to, including the dedication of the Armed Forces Memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum by the Queen. As a family, we were sat at the front, almost right next to the Queen. She kept looking over at us throughout the service. I wanted to talk to her. She looked as if she understood, as if she had seen it all before. I wanted her to come and speak to Bing’s parents and thank them personally for their sacrifice.

  Present that day were the mothers, fathers, wives and daughters of all those lost during the summer of 2010. We met some stoical fathers, some devastated mothers and some inconsolable wives and children. The scale of their loss was epic; it was raw, and it was painful to watch. We spoke to many that day, but one that stood out for me was a lady in a soldier’s ceremonial jacket.

  She was in her mid-forties, and was by herself. She had got her son’s No.1 Dress tailored into a jacket for herself, and she looked very smart. Felicity struck up a conversation with her and we discovered that her son had been caught in an explosion, and despite everybody’s best efforts he died on the stretcher as he was being evacuated. He knew he was going to die, and the last thing he said to those treating him was: ‘Tell my mum I love her so much.’

  There was an element to all the grief that day, an overwhelming feeling of ‘why?’, that I simply could not address.

  Mike Chandler repeatedly asked me if I had killed the man who killed Bing. I told him the truth – I had no idea. I fired the guns, I fired all six of my magazines containing twenty-eight rounds each, but I don’t know if I killed the individual who shot Bing. But Mike wanted that closure, he wanted vengeance, because he did not believe in the broader mission. He thought it was a waste of time; Afghanistan was a long way from Gloucester, and he could not make the link between our national domestic security, which Bing had joined the Army to protect, and the death he had suffered on a dusty track thousands of miles away in a conflict that understandably did not register with a lot of people going about their daily lives in the UK.

  It struck me that during those years that I was either training for or going to war, the military was almost a subculture in our country. The military community was acutely aware of the price of conducting a high-intensity war. People were dying every day, in truly horrific circumstances, to protect the freedoms that were enjoyed in mainstream society. Yet outside that community, life continued untouched. The music festivals, the sports tournaments; life ticked on regardless.

  Even within the military community, there were sub-groupings. A lot of us would be pleased to never hear the word Afghanistan again, whereas some wanted to volunteer to go there – to ‘do’ it and get the medal. The big regret I felt was that the Army did not discourage this, but almost commercialized the war. Those who ticked the ‘commanded on operations’ box were promoted, regardless of their performance, and so their peers wanted to keep up. What they had done in their command, and indeed how their soldiers coped with or perceived their time at the helm, was almost disregarded.

  Whenever I thought of this, I would remember a pre-deployment training serial at a base in Yorkshire, where an ambitious company commander regaled us with his exploits the previous summer in a way that actually made me feel quite ill. He was seemingly, albeit probably not intentionally, taking a sort of strange pride in the fact that nine of his soldiers had been killed the previous summer.

  The state honours system’s list after the summer of 2010 did not help this. Of course, honours do a vital job of recognizing our service men and women’s actions on operations. However, the difference in what was required to win an honour of any kind varied wildly from the early days of Iraq – when the Army had not seen any significant combat for a quarter of a century – to the height of the fighting in Afghanistan in 2010 and again to the end of the
conflict in Afghanistan for our Regular Forces, in December 2014. I saw men win awards in battle which, when I read about them afterwards, brought me great amusement. The official records didn’t quite tally with my recollections, but good for them.

  I also saw many more men and women conduct themselves with the highest degrees of bravery and self-sacrifice every single day, and simply return to base, clean their kit and get ready for the next day, never to be recognized.

  I remember passing through FOB Shawqat back in Afghanistan in September 2010 to be met by my then battery commander, who was talking about operational awards. He told me I was to be put forward for one. I was surprised and felt awkward. I simply could not in all conscience go home – without Bing – and be publicly commended for my work. What would I say to his parents? Besides which, my strong view was that during that tour I never did anything above and beyond what is required of a commando captain in combat, for which I was paid a fair wage. I asked that he take me off the list.

  34

  I started back in the Army on the Regimental Signals Officer’s Course at Bovington in Dorset in January 2011. It was another classic Army course – four weeks crammed into fourteen. The lack of interest in ‘normal’ Army life, which inevitably follows a tough tour, was a struggle to shake off. I took the time to get fit and indulge in the paltry nightlife of southern Dorset in the spring.

  I was struggling to settle and sleep in Noss Mayo, so we decided to move north of Plymouth into a small 300-year-old miner’s cottage on the edge of Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, where we could entirely get away from it all.

  It was perfect for what I needed at the time – the sort of place where no one would think you strange for getting up at 0430hrs and going for an eight-mile run across the moor. The sort of place that takes you a while to break into. The locals are suspicious of outsiders, but once your presence is proved not to be the standard ‘give Cornwall a go’ before returning to London, and you have shown you are committed to the moor life, it is very peaceful and soul-settling indeed.

  I took real satisfaction from simple physical tasks, such as deforesting my garden, cutting my acre of grass by hand (it took six hours a go) and the outdoors upkeep of the property in general.

  I could cross a stream and be up on top of the moor in five minutes, run for an hour and then swim in the river at the bottom of the Tor that loomed over our small valley. I could loosen off by walking up to the pub and drinking with some new local friends – the pub really was the centre of the community in the nearby village. From this account, it would seem that I was largely spending time by myself, and that is true, but eventually I began to feel my soul healing.

  I still thought of Bing two or three times a day. They were intrusive thoughts – the sort one cannot control. I could never shake the feeling of my cheek on his in the back of the Husky that drove us back to PB Khaamar for his extraction.

  I struggled with sleep – I would often wake in a sweat. When I dreamt of Bing I didn’t mind too much; I enjoyed the thought of being with him, albeit briefly. The tougher dreams were when I was left in the middle of that bloody field on my own. Then I really did wake in a panic. The dreams could be vivid, but I had a fervent desire to stave off the darkness, and countered them by immediately getting up and going downstairs, making a coffee and having a smoke by the back door as the wind and weather screamed in across the moor and battered my little house.

  The effects deepened when I was around my other Army comrades. Many spoke of a desire to return to Afghanistan, or go there for the first time to experience it. I found this very difficult. Equally, I did not really want to engage with some old Army friends who had been deployed on different tours and had some horrendous experiences themselves. I felt talking about it was feeding the beast, and it was best to do something else.

  This was a grave and selfish mistake.

  I had a very close friend who had returned from his tour when I was still on my second one in Kandahar. He came back a changed man. Selfishly focusing on my own return to the UK and my preparations for my third tour, I had not tried to find out what was really going on with him. When I got back from theatre in 2010, he sought me out for a pint.

  We went for a drink or three, and he told me about a horrific incident in Afghanistan in 2009, where women and children had been killed as a result of his actions. I had become so brutalized by my conflict that I did not understand why he was letting this affect him in this way. The deaths were clearly unintentional; how on earth could he have known they were there? But he did not see it that way. He kept telling me the story over and over again, in excruciating detail, and I failed to spot the symptoms of what this clearly was – PTSD.

  In the years that followed he became very distant indeed. We fought when we were drunk and I heard of his unhappiness in our relationship through others. At the time, I couldn’t work out why. Some years later, I was told that he had hoped that I might be able to help him with his problems, and was bitterly disappointed when I seemed to trivialize them.

  I was extremely ashamed – and remain so to this day – of my behaviour towards a man who was a brother to me in my formative years. My lack of awareness and understanding of how combat stress affected other people was abetted by an entirely selfish navel-gazing exercise; making sure I was winning my personal fight before taking care of others. I am not proud of it.

  I continued in my role with 29 Commando in Plymouth for a while, happily doing the minimum amount of work my career required. By autumn 2012, I realized I had sunk into some level of contentment for the first time since I returned from my last tour. We decided to have another baby, and Joey was born at home on the moor in June 2013. By now I realized I was unlikely to ever recover the military bug that had so dominated the last ten years of my life.

  My life’s priorities were changing, and I had to have a frank conversation with myself about the future. By now Felicity and I were unbreakably strong again, having forged our bonds through some dark times. I was at a crossroads. I could continue in the Army; my reports and promotion prospects were above average. I received an A– (top 10%) on my Officer’s Joint Appraisal Report – meaningless generally, but the only indication of what kind of esteem the chain of command held you in at the time.

  But inside I knew my time was up.

  I was never in the Army for anything other than the operations. I enjoyed leading blokes in combat – I found it the ultimate ‘man test’ and that was a major part of why I did it. Every human wants to test their limits; leading in combat was me testing mine. To do that you must be cognisant of the risks and yet prepared to take them. You must work out what is risky and what is not – what wins in a ‘risk vs reward’ scenario – and then lead men through dangerous times to ensure a successful outcome. Failure in combat operations involves dying a pretty nasty death. To accept this fact requires belief – in the mission, in oneself, in the men and women around you, and crucially that it is worth it.

  Now, with a little family of my own and roots on the moor, the scales had, after twelve years, finally tipped. No longer could I justify entering compounds not knowing what was there, with a partner and two children at home. No longer could I justify missing so much of my children’s lives. And no longer could I justify putting Felicity through another combat tour like that in 2010.

  A realization like this takes a couple of months to solidify in your mind (Am I being weak? Am I a coward?). It was during this time that I bumped into Cooper, the soldier I’d trained back in 2007. He had completely transformed himself from a problem character into a better soldier than me. More importantly, he had just returned from his first tour in Afghanistan, where his stock was held in extremely high regard.

  He made a point of telling me how important those early days in training had been; how somehow I had taught him humility, courage, discipline and resilience; how he often thought of me, and knew of plenty of others who felt the same way. He is now a successful special forces operator; happy and settled
. This meant more to me than almost anything else I might have achieved in my time in service. Of course, I didn’t tell him that.

  The Army has its shortcomings, like any other institution, but in terms of getting a rough bit of rock and turning it into a stable, strong, disciplined and committed diamond of an individual, in my view, it remains second to none.

  Seeing Cooper reminded me how rewarding it had been to help him, and many others like him, make something of themselves. I started to think about where I might be able to make a difference now, and considered my very personal insights into the rather desperate narrative of how we were looking after our men and women when they returned from a tour like I had done in 2010. In 2012, more British service personnel took their own lives than were killed in combat. Some of the tales were horrific; descents into substance abuse, homelessness and violence. For some, it was a short trip from the parade ground to the morgue.

  Lance Sergeant Dan Collins was one individual whose tale had a profound effect on me, because he reminded me of so many of my own men. Hailing from the proud Welsh Guards, he had found life so difficult upon his return from a terrible tour – during which two friends were killed – that he took his life on a wet, clouded hillside in Sennybridge. Before he did so he made a video on his mobile phone for his mum. In the grainy footage, he says: ‘I’m so sorry, Mum. I’ve tried everything, but nothing seems to work.’

  I did not know the guy, but he could have been any one of the thousands who use that training area every year before heading out to Afghanistan for yet another tour. He could have been any one of my soldiers, any one of my friends. It was the look in his eyes on the video – that look of total resignation and desperation – that I could not accept.

  Servicemen and women were fighting mental trauma everywhere. I thought of Baz, trying to deal with everything that had happened during our tour, and of a SBS operative I knew, distraught because he had killed a woman on target (she was wearing webbing and carrying an assault rifle). I remembered a female officer, who had identified a decapitated corpse with me when we were training young soldiers, scrubbing herself raw in her bedroom with a nail brush because she could ‘feel the death’. I remembered a senior NCO struggling with an alcohol problem.