My Air France flight was called shortly afterwards, and here my memory fails. I can recall the minutiae of the battles we survived, whole sections of the jungle route we tramped – but from the moment Nick and I stood up to say goodbye, my mind is perfectly blank. I cannot remember if I hugged or shook hands with the man who saved my life; I cannot remember a single parting word. I remember nothing at all of coming home until I woke up to the sounds of summer in Kent.
Mum came back into the dining room carrying hot toast and undisguised concern for her son.
‘I’ve made you an appointment to see the GP for next week – it’s the soonest they could fit you in.’
My mother stood awkwardly by the kitchen door, wondering if she’d done the right thing.
‘That’s great, thanks. I better get myself checked out. I’m off to London tomorrow – to record a From Our Own Correspondent for the BBC. I’ll be back for dinner. I’m going to take it easy today, though.’
I needed to decompress, to surface in peace, to let the images and memories of the last few weeks settle before I tried to make sense of them. Mum was thrilled that I was going to be on the radio; she looked proud and surprised at the same time, which lifted the frown she’d been wearing all morning. Like the rebels, the radio made it real for her.
‘What would you like tonight? I might make a stew.’
She didn’t need to add ‘to fatten you up’ – that much was inescapable. August heat notwithstanding, I needed all the calories I could get.
‘That would be great, anything at all except rice. Please, no rice, probably ever again.’
All bones and tangled hair, I stood up and hugged her, and realised I had hardly touched anyone for more than two months.
‘I’m afraid it’s nothing terribly exotic, Mr Brabazon.’ Taking his eye away from the giant magnifying glass that hovered above my hand, the doctor fixed me with a straight gaze. ‘You have a bad case of scabies. Here, have a look.’
I peered down, but couldn’t see the tiny mites he said were crawling in the open scabs that peppered my fingers.
‘We’ll get you some cream for that. It will burn – not very comfortable I’m afraid, especially down there.’
He gave a nod to my crotch. Before I’d slipped my shirt and trousers back on, the amiable professional had also told me I was, without doubt, malnourished. I was suffering severe muscle wastage and likely permanent damage to my knees. According to Nick’s GPS, we had clocked up 292 miles on foot.
‘You’ve been through – your body’s been through – a traumatic episode. It’s going to take you time to recover.’
We looked at each other across the side of his desk, strewn with happy family photos and notepaper headed with pharmaceutical company logos. I wondered how many GPs in Britain saw people just back from a war.
I lingered in my seat. I wasn’t ready to go.
‘In the week I’ve been home I’ve been feeling a bit rough,’ I mumbled. ‘I mean, I’m worried that the trip is going to affect me, you know, in other ways. It’s nothing specific, but it was pretty… extreme. I wonder if maybe I need to see a medical professional or something? I’m a bit disoriented.’
‘How do you feel?’
The doctor drummed the tips of his fingers on the barrel of a ballpoint pen. It was a question that had been nagging me since I’d witnessed the prisoner being butchered in Tubmanburg. Although I was not plagued by nightmares, or any tangible feeling of despair, I felt fragile, as if I was at times struggling to cling onto myself. I realised I was staring at my feet, and had not answered. I looked at him again, and shrugged.
He put down his Biro, and pushed my notes to one side and waited as I tried to gather my thoughts. I tried to slow down the revolving images of trees and blasts and bodies and faces that spun through my head when I thought about the trip. For some reason, the image that always stuck behind my eyes was of the green, gutted corpse straddling the jungle path on the way home. The memory of its dark, rotten intestines was so vivid I could, I swore, still smell them. I wanted to tell the doctor the truth, but perhaps half-truths were best here.
‘It’s hard to say. It’s – well, it’s not easy ... I mean the last two months – what happened, it doesn’t exactly make for polite conversation. There isn’t anyone I can really go into it with.’ Except for Nick, I thought. ‘Actually, it was pretty fucking awful. I feel lost. Yeah, that’s a good way to describe it. I think I’m a bit lost.’
After rummaging around on his desk without replying, and then thumbing through two boxes of loose files on the floor, the doctor wrote out a name and number on a slip of paper, which he passed to me with my prescription: The Priory, Ticehurst House.
‘They’re worth investigating. I don’t think you do need to see a medical professional, but a session with one of their counsellors may be of help to you.’ Smiling, he tucked the pen into his shirt pocket, just like Nick did. ‘They specialise in trauma counselling of all sorts – for soldiers and the media, as well as people who’ve been in accidents, that kind of thing.’
He shuffled my notes away, and we stood to face each other.
‘It’s entirely confidential.’
I walked uphill along the familiar road that had carried me between home and sixth-form college years before and folded the square of paper into my wallet. Confidential? Here we go, I thought. ‘Confidential’ implied shame, something to hide. Was the fact that I didn’t know how I felt in itself somehow shameful? If I couldn’t even describe how I felt, it seemed impossible that I would be able to make a coherent film about what I’d seen. I hadn’t been just an observer, either. It was dawning on me that I had been a witness, and witnessing meant something; the idea of it seemed to confer responsibility. I just didn’t know to whom or for what.
It had turned into a surprisingly hot day in Canterbury. House martins dipped and dived in the clear Kent sky, but I was too wrapped up in myself to enjoy it. In the week I’d been back I tried and failed to place a newspaper article about the war in any of the London papers: they didn’t know who I was, or that there was a war going on in Liberia. Apart from the five-minute piece for Kate Adie, no one seemed particularly interested. Even the investigator on the United Nations Security Council’s Panel of Experts on Liberia – who specialised in illegal weapons – seemed uninterested in my material, and behaved as if he thought he was doing me a favour by talking to me at all. I’d hung up bewildered, unprepared for this degree of isolation.
I got home from my doctor’s appointment, sat at the desk under the stairs, and apprehensively dialled the international code for South Africa.
‘Mr Brabazon, I presume?’
It was the first time I’d heard Nick’s voice since we’d gone our separate ways in Conakry. It took me straight to the balcony in Tubmanburg.
‘Hi, man, how’s it going? I’m still fucked, you know. How’re you doing?’
‘Ja, not so bad. I’ve been sleeping for a week, man. Marzaan agreed that I looked like Father Christmas with that beard, so it had to go. You?’
‘Nah, I kept mine. It’s like a little bit of Liberia right under my nose. Smells like it, too. Have you heard from the chairman?’
‘Ja, he’s still in Conakry, but he wants to move back to the other place next week. He says everything is going well, he’s getting some guys ready for that other thing we talked about.’
Nick’s voice was crystal clear, though our conversation was deliberately cryptic. Right from our first meeting in Johannesburg, he’d urged caution on the phone.
‘The place near where the main base is – where those guys from next door were busy – and the town next to that are giving them a lot of trouble. Once they can get them under control, they can think about a counter-attack.’
In other words, Voinjama was safe and Sekou Conneh planned to return there, but Foya (where Taylor was using RUF mercenaries from Sierra Leone) and the nearby town of Kolahun were in Government hands. From there they would be able to ambush LURD r
ebel supply lines, making any significant push south again impossible unless those Government troops were properly contained or destroyed.
Nick thought that these two towns, hard up against the Sierra Leone border, were now the main focus of the war. In Tubmanburg, Dragon Master had told me that Guinean soldiers serving as part of the UN contingent in Sierra Leone had left caches of ammunition for the rebels near to the border with Liberia. Dragon Master himself had been in charge of liaising with them, and collecting it. Given that UN peacekeeping operations there were ultimately paid for partly by British taxpayers, I could be certain that at least some of the money I paid the Inland Revenue was, one way or another, helping to keep the LURD in business. Nick, though, was interested in more direct means of financing them: ‘that other thing’ was his diamond-mining proposal. Conneh had approved it, at least in principle. Now both Conneh and Nick were desperate to get their hands on a helicopter.
‘I’m off to a wedding in Ireland in the next couple of days,’ I told him, trying to swing the conversation around to something legal. ‘I should have some news about selling the film when I get back.’
That was code for I should have some news about paying you. He let it pass.
‘Ja, well, good luck and keep out of trouble. Stay well.’
‘You too, man.’
The line clicked, dead.
No matter how hard I stared, it just didn’t look like me. Wild beard, dark eyes and bony body: the mirror in the bathroom of the Dublin hotel was as unforgiving as the one in Conakry. I had just watched Tara, a close friend from university, marry her American boyfriend in a wonderful, bohemian ceremony on an ancient Celtic mound just outside of Dublin. Tall, beautiful and achingly glamorous, Tara was someone I’d once harboured an impossible fantasy about marrying myself. On the way there I had imagined stopping the ceremony and proclaiming my undying love, like the hero of a feel-good romantic comedy. In the event, I’d folded my arms and stood at the back, scabies scabs itching furiously.
No one recognised me. Not my friends, not her family, whom I’d known for years – no one. When I introduced myself their eyes popped open like cartoon characters’. Afterwards, buried deep in the excited hubbub of the reception, I’d found myself standing in the bar of the hotel, trying – and failing – to catch the eye of people I’d shared another life with. I’d felt suddenly as if I was under pressure again, diving down to the trays of champagne and canapés, perfectly submerged. And then it felt as if something broke inside me – like my airline had been cut. The sounds of the wedding reception – the clink of champagne glasses, the babble of happy conversation – receded until all I was left with was the silent image of the gutted corpse on the trail home.
I broke for the door and gulped in a warm lungful of Dublin air. An English hen party staggered past; taxis and cars and tourists and lovers ambled and faltered and sped along. It was night time by the River Liffy – that was all. I was above ground, still. I’d watched the lights on the water and, feeling calmer at last, walked the short distance to my hotel room to try to find myself in the mirror. James, I said, as if speaking to a stranger, you’ll be okay. I washed, rubbed more ointment into my broken skin, and swallowed the little blue Valium pills from the supply my doctor had prescribed years before.
I’d thought I had made a good job of being normal at the wedding. But the truth was that any attempt to confess the horrors of the trip were met with embarrassed silence or apparently genuine concern for my mental welfare. Sitting next to me at dinner, an actor whose films I admired told me, very gently – after a brief resumé of my journey from the front line to the wedding – that I ‘should see someone’.
A week later I did just that, and drove to The Priory, near Tunbridge Wells. I couldn’t imagine who it was that I would talk to once I got there – no doubt a bored professional carer who had never been to war, a do-gooder who’d never heard a shot fired in anger, never mind seen a man’s heart ripped out of his chest. Nonetheless, I went with an open mind of sorts.
I had read about the psychological effects that combat had on soldiers after battle. In one study of American troops in the Second World War, it was shown that, of those men who experienced thirty-five days of uninterrupted combat, 98 per cent then went on to manifest varying degrees of psychiatric disturbance. In Liberia I had been exposed to combat, or the immediate threat of it, for thirty days straight. On the face of it, it seemed reasonable to be concerned about my mental health.
Steven was a stout, pleasant man in his mid-forties. His open face invited confidence, and his simple English, uncluttered with jargon or medical phrases, was easy to understand. Before we began, he explained PTSD – Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It was not, he emphasised, a psychosomatic illness generated by an overactive imagination, but a physical ailment as real as fracturing a leg. Chemical changes in the brain caused by the release of adrenaline could possibly have specific behavioural outcomes that were – to continue the analogy – as physical as limping on that broken leg.
‘You wouldn’t be ashamed of a broken leg,’ he rightly said, ‘and there is nothing to be ashamed of if it turns out there is something like that inside, that we can’t see, but is just as real.’
As well as vivid multi-sensory flashbacks, the onset of PTSD could be detected by a hyper-vigilant mindset that was always on the lookout for danger (and unable to relax as a result); and also by what he called ‘avoidance’ – patterns of behaviour, including alcohol and drug use, that strove to avoid the people, places or other triggers that could unleash memories of traumatic events.
One point he stressed above all others. It was believed that PTSD was triggered by a single event that either threatened my life, or made me feel (even if misguidedly) that my life was in danger.
‘Perhaps we could begin by you telling me where you’ve been, what kind of work you were doing in Africa.’
And so, in that featureless room, with only water to drink and a Biro for my fingers to play with (smoking was forbidden) I began to recount the war. Steven asked many questions, prompted many answers and clarifications, but there was one question he never asked, and that was Why? These were the questions I had feared most: Why didn’t you stop filming? Why didn’t you try to help? I had feared I would be judged: but this man was a conduit who turned the tap on and guided the flow of recollections and fears and regrets that spilled out of my mouth and helped to make sense of them.
‘And when they removed the man’s heart, what did that sound like? What noise did it make?’
And then:
‘What did you think when you realised the prisoner had been shot?’
And again:
‘When you saw the body on the path, what did it smell like?’
I answered his questions, and then I said to him, ‘You know, I never cried. Never once. Through all of that, it was as if their deaths were alien, so hard to understand, it was impossible to be upset about them. It was just happening, I was just there. And you know, that makes me feel like a monster, like a fucking monster. That’s not fucking normal, man. It’s not fucking normal to see that and not cry, to see kids dying of gangrene or burns, and to keep filming. I don’t feel fucking normal. It’s the absolute opposite of normal and it really hurts – it really hurts inside.’
And then the tears came and I thought they would not stop.
I left with red eyes, blowing snot into an over-used tissue, and somehow managed to drive to a quiet bed-and-breakfast in Dorset. I felt empty, physically drained, as if I’d been sick over and over. I looked at myself in the mirror again, and suddenly I wanted rid of my beard. I cut and shaved it until I found myself underneath.
Steven had thought I was suffering from acute stress reaction – PTSR. It was hard to disagree. I had certainly been under stress, and I was undeniably having a reaction. Another worry insinuated its way into my head, too. I began to wonder if this was the first step on a road to someone eventually telling me I was going mad. Steven said it would take up
to six weeks to see if I was able to process my emotions about the events in Liberia, and full-blown Post Traumatic Stress Disorder could take up to six months to manifest.
What did happen in the next six weeks knocked me completely off-balance. The BBC producer with whom I’d been talking from Liberia turned down the footage. BBC News and Channel 4 News likewise rejected it. I had stood with bated breath in an edit suite buried in a basement in the Channel 4 News building in Gray’s Inn Road. The director of the production company in Kenya had flown over to help cement a television sale. I watched the producer spool through a couple of my tapes from Tubmanburg, only to tell me that this kind of material had all been seen before, and that it was of limited interest because there was no British angle.
‘Well,’ I’d countered, holding onto the coat-tails of my temper, ‘there are no blonde, British nurses held captive there, but these are the only pictures of an entirely unreported war. It has massive implications for the security of the whole region, including our deployment in Sierra Leone.’
She was unmoved, and I left the boss of the production company to chat it through with her. On the same day the American broadcaster ABC said no, despite a strong US dimension to the story. A couple of days later Channel 4’s international current affairs department, which commissions the series Dispatches, also turned down the material, as would the BBC’s programme Correspondent a few days later.
What I had been entirely ignorant of was that having the footage itself – however great I thought it – was only a part of the equation of getting a television sale. These types of programmes were part of well-established series, or ‘strands’ as TV people call them, which follow set patterns and use familiar reporters according to tried and tested formulae. One-off documentary commissions for an unknown like me were rare, to the point of impossible. The lack of a news sale perplexed me, though. If this wasn’t good enough for them, what possibly could be? The thought that all that marching, malnourishment and violence could have been for nothing was hard to swallow.
My Friend The Mercenary Page 18