Battle Scars

by Jason Fox

  Please let me see my kid again …

  According to my comms, the enemy had closed in even tighter. I tried to think of an alternative route for escape, but there was no way we were sneaking past four hundred fighters to some unknown spot two kilometres into the distance. Some of the lads had been carrying a dead teammate around for the best part of five minutes, and under heavy fire, too. There was a swift change of plan: our Officer Commanding called in the choppers.

  ‘We can’t get to you, lads,’ he yelled. ‘Can you pick us up from where you dropped us?’

  The instructions sounded funny, like a punter dialling through to his Uber driver, but the reality was terrifying. We had already made a dramatic entrance, so I understood that our landing zone had been ‘burnt’, and the guerrilla force hunting us down knew the exact position of our previous drop-off point – this meant they could lay down all manner of misery and fire on the helicopters as we scrambled towards them for safety. Situations like that had been a problem for us in the past because our enemy were very quick at adapting. They had to be. It wasn’t as if they were a superpower or an established state; they were underdogs, a loyal force up against very powerful people with the very best resources available to them. Vast sums of money had been pumped into the research and development of the equipment and techniques used by the British military, so the people we were fighting knew the only way of competing successfully was to learn and improve. Just like an animal that needed to survive, they often built desperately from the ground zero of their mistakes. They were always capable of surprises, and while a lot of the lads I fought alongside wouldn’t like my saying it, I was sometimes impressed by their updated modus operandi. Hats off to them: they’re keeping us on our toes out here.

  It was true, too. They were forever watching how we operated and reacted accordingly. The very first time we landed a chopper, they observed what we did from cover, noting where we arrived and how we disembarked. The next time we dropped off our soldiers in the exact-same spot they attacked, killing one or two of our lads along the way. On some occasions they would fire at us from hidden locations. On others, they would booby-trap the area around a landing zone with IEDs. Once we knew that they knew an area was capable of taking helicopter landings, we avoided using it, conscious that something was probably waiting for us. It was almost impossible to utilize the same landing-area twice.

  Not that our pilots seemed too bothered this time.

  ‘Hunker down, boys,’ came the call over the comms system. ‘We’re coming to get you …’

  It would be a seven-minute wait. Seven minutes for the lads to gather together and construct an all-round defence; a loose circle of fire that downed anything moving across our path while we awaited the helicopters’ low throb as they moved into earshot. Seven minutes before I escaped the dark thoughts tightening around me as my mind seemed to unravel even more.

  Please let me see my kid again …

  I heard their bullets first, then the sound of a Spectre gunship arriving somewhere in the darkness, smashing everything around it, the crew on board firing and reloading a light artillery weapon. Normally an indirect tool, which lobbed shells on top of its target, it had been retooled into a blunter instrument. A gunner fired it straight down the throats of the enemy below and the noise, impact and tremors ripped through the air in a powerful sonic symphony: first, the whip of a shell exploding from its tubing, then the slow, shrieking bomb cutting through the sky before landing with a low, powerful WHOOSH! as everything was blown to shreds in a sensory overload.

  It wasn’t long before I spotted our helicopters through my NVGs; distant at first, then more distinct as the trippy sparks of static from the rotary blades moved into view. But all that sound had given our enemy a position on which to focus their fury. Pretty lines of tracer fire zipped worryingly close to our rides, though at least the attention had been briefly drawn away from anybody on the ground. We approached the landing zone as a group, a laser beam lancing down to indicate our pick-up position. The triangulated stream of light from the nose of one of the choppers illuminated the smoke and cordite curlicues choking the air, the lightshow resembling the inside of a warehouse rave as my brain flipped from intense stress to the blissed-out euphoria of possibly, maybe, getting out of this nightmare. We raced towards the ramp knowing it to be our only escape-ticket home.

  And then I was inside one of the helicopters, on the floor, listening to the sergeant major – the man responsible for making sure that no man had been left behind – counting us in as the barking bullets lacerated the ground around him. At some point or another most lads would have talked of wanting his job, if only for the pay grade. In that moment, however, not one of us would have traded places with him. Standing in the open, ushering soldiers inside, he looked exposed and vulnerable to any approaching shooter. No thanks, mate. Working as the last man on the ground was like shepherding cats through a sandstorm.

  He was yelling now: ‘Assault Team, do you have everyone?’

  I heard shouting, more yelling. More pandemonium.

  ‘Lads, keep the noise down on the radio!’ he screamed, before completing one final headcount and signalling the bird upwards.

  It was done. The Chinook began to rise, its incredible lifting-power seemingly vacuuming us skywards with some unseen force as the aircrew rinsed the enemy with rounds, our two helicopter gunners screaming at one another in relief and excitement as we moved out of range. I watched them as they high-fived and hugged, an adrenaline-rush spiking through them, but I didn’t have the strength to share in their relief. I was laid out in the darkness, spent, my skin covered in dirt, blood and sweat, my flesh cut to ribbons from the vegetation we’d been pushing through. Hot air rushed through the helicopter’s smashed-in windows, buffeting me again. Overwhelmed with the not-knowing of how I’d got out, or who I was with, the smell of aviation fuel was back in my nostrils.

  Lucky, lucky, lucky.

  I bumped the body lying next to me and looked over. It was Johnny, a senior soldier with a few more years experience than me. He was flat on his back, breathing hard, sucking on a water pouch strapped to his kitbag.

  ‘What happened down there, mate?’ I asked.

  Johnny shrugged. Like most of us, he had heard only the basics: our mission had been nailed; in return we had lost at least one person, though nobody seemed to know who, exactly. He looked buzzed, his eyes wide with endorphins. We had done it. We were heading back to base. We were safe again. I wanted to feel the same high, a rush that always arrived when I’d successfully finished a dangerous job, but I was unable to suck it all in this time. The adrenaline wasn’t there. Instead I felt numb and detached. Something unknown had happened; the push of a button had taken place in that ditch and on that walk to the landing zone, and I had freaked out momentarily in a flat spin of emotions that had never struck me before – not that powerfully, or viscerally, anyway.

  I’d been thinking about Mum in the middle of a scrap. I’d worried that I might not see my family again.

  Am I a mess?

  Have I lost it?

  The idea might just have changed my life for ever.

  The storytelling began as soon as we landed. It always did – descriptions of near misses and tales of war wounds.

  There was also a body bag to deal with. It was just the one, though, and it wasn’t Dave who had been zipped inside – thank God. I’d already clocked him as we tore our kit off in the hangar, the pair of us laughing in relief behind our facemasks of blood and dirt.

  ‘Mate, I was convinced it was going to be you,’ he said, pointing to the black, soldier-shaped plastic sleeve being unloaded from the chopper. He had no idea I’d shared exactly the same dark thought.

  So who had been killed?

  Nick. I barely knew the bloke. He was one of the new lads, not that it made his KIA any less of a downer. While decompressing and showering away the dirt and battle and blood in the living quarters, one of his teammates had tried to process t
he death as we’d stood side by side in the toilets, washing our hands.

  ‘Nick caught a bullet to the head,’ he mumbled, looking a little frazzled. ‘I tried to patch up the wound, but as I held his skull my thumb slipped into the hole. There was nothing I could do …’

  Talk about an emotional overload. We had been rinsed, every single one of us.

  There’s no aftercare following a mission like the one we’d just survived – there simply isn’t the time.

  No How are you doing, Sergeant Fox?

  No Has anything upset you today, Sergeant Fox?

  And no Have there been any issues after losing it in a ditch, nearly accidentally dropping a kid, and thinking you might never see your family again, Sergeant Fox?

  War doesn’t give a soldier the opportunity to reflect too hard on his or her emotions. Instead we relived operations step-by-step in a debriefing session, the group hopefully learning from our mistakes, while noting the tactical gains in our successes. There wasn’t a process for the therapy a normal person required when stepping in and out of traumatizing situations like we were in. The stress I had to deal with on missions was the kind managed alone, lying in a bunk while trying to figure out how the hell I was still alive. As for the wondering about whether I was a coward for thinking of home and my family when I should have been focused on the job? Well, that was all on me too.

  The actions and tactical planning that led to our mission, and Nick’s KIA, hadn’t upset me. I didn’t feel any anger. All of us understood that death was an occupational hazard in our line of work. Yes, we were risking our lives, but that was what the job entailed. In the same way that a fireman puts out blazes, we sometimes attacked enemy targets in high-pressure situations. I saw it as just another mission and wasn’t bent out of shape about it – I didn’t know any lads that felt differently, not publicly anyway. I also never took any notice of the political contexts in which we were working. An elite military group like the one I soldiered within was a strategic asset called upon by government ministers in times of crisis. At certain moments we were placed into warzones to deliver on a tactical level, but we might also deliver on a political level. It wasn’t really worth thinking about the parliamentary side too much because governments changed and prime ministers came and went, but our role remained the same.

  I hadn’t joined the military out of patriotic desire, anyway. I loved Britain, for sure, but I went into the job for the personal challenges it would bring me. Once I’d worked on a number of dangerous operations, I sold the idea to myself that I was protecting the people I loved at home by preventing an enemy from actively improving their reach and training to a point where they might have been capable of inflicting widespread damage upon the UK.

  I had also built up a strong dislike of bullies. I’d been that way since I was a kid, and I believed that I was stopping oppressors from doing bad things. I’m aware of the simplicity of that thinking, but it’s how I rationalized the unpleasant work we were doing at times. A number of conflicts I’d been inserted into had been debated in the media, and people argued about their validity until they became blue in the face, but I had to believe I was fighting the good fight. As a collective of blokes, we never discussed the morals of going into war. My only focus was the square foot in front of me at any given time, and the seconds ahead. Psychologically, the job was broken down into lots of smaller components. The bigger picture was always to neutralize an enemy force, and I and the guys I worked with were methodical, efficient and professional. Beyond that, nothing else mattered.

  I got back to the base’s sleeping quarters and dropped my kit on the top bunk, collapsing on the soft bed underneath, my body sinking into the mattress. It felt good to free myself from the weight of the backpack, my combat vest and a heavy weapon. I loved lying flat out following an operation. It delivered a few moments of calm as my back stretched and clicked after the physical grind of running around with all that baggage strapped to my body. The tension and adrenaline pinching every muscle seemed to slowly subside and it wasn’t long before I had drifted off with the exhaustion. But it wasn’t proper sleep. It was so rarely proper sleep.

  My eyes opened a couple of hours later. They stung with fatigue as my brain raced, the stress and terror of that night mission again impacting on my synapses like a hundred mini breakdowns – that flashback to my life circa 1984; me thinking of my kid as the enemy came down around us.

  Am I supposed to be feeling like this?

  Is this normal?

  I questioned myself and briefly wallowed in the doubt and self-loathing. Mate, you’re supposed to be a highly trained soldier, not someone lying in a ditch thinking about their mum. What a loser.

  I rallied and my mood turned defiant. Stress? Not having it. That’s a get-out-of-jail-free card for some people, usually when they screw up or lose it. Not you. You know what’s right and what’s wrong, and when you make a mistake you ’fess up to it. You’re not going to say you’ve messed up because of some awful past experience or something you’ve seen in a battle, are you? Anyway, it only lasted a few moments …

  Pride inevitably followed shortly afterwards. It often did. Don’t bother mentioning it to the other lads. It’s not worth it …

  I was fooling myself, though, and deep down I think I knew it, too. That ditch and those moments of uncontrollable terror represented my psychological tipping point, like the final drops of beer that caused a pint glass of emotion to overflow, spilling on to the table and pooling slowly in a sloppy mess.

  5

  When people imagine the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder they usually picture the Hollywood version: a handsome but roughed-up Damian Lewis-type experiencing night terrors, horrific nightmares and the sweats, his character waking from a terrifying dream or thrashing crazily in the bed sheets and screaming the house down. Or it might be the clichéd scene with a veteran cowering underneath a restaurant table at the sound of a car backfiring outside (or a screaming baby, a dropped plate – anything noisy and unexpected), the classic, stylized expression of trauma etched into their face as he or she relives a gunfight or IED explosion, the mind unable to tell the difference between the present and a grim and gory past.

  But PTSD isn’t like that, not always, and not for me. It was slow-moving, sluggish. It crept into the corners of my life, enwrapping my mind and body, emptying me as I became detached, disorientated and indifferent to the things that ordinarily would have brought me happiness, such as my family, a football match on the TV, or a few beers in the pub with mates. Intensifying anger, anxiety and a lack of sleep only added to the internal dread that life had become a pretty rough ride.

  Heavy slime, or gloopy treacle, oozing into every emotion and thought, clinging at the skin and adding pressure to the internal organs: that’s what PTSD really felt like. It first clawed at me a couple of weeks after that helicopter ride to base, at home, in the not-so-Hollywood location of Poole High Street – a drab, pedestrianized strip of grimy chain stores, bookies and boarded-up shop fronts. I had been standing at a level crossing as I stared into a depressing parade of shop windows lit up with Christmas decorations, the street busy with shoppers, my mind a warzone away, back in the cluttered alleyways and squares of a hostile desert outpost, in the heat and in the stink of sewage and sweat. I was frozen. The world in Poole rushed around me at a million miles an hour. People with umbrellas, people wearing cagoules, people walking dogs all passed by in a blur, like one of those album covers where the lead singer of a band is captured in razor-sharp definition while a whirlpool of faceless figures swirls around their image. Only I wasn’t a rock star; I was a soldier out of war, and not twenty-four hours previously I had been in the scorching sun at our camp, covered in sand and grime, packing up my kit, laughing with friends, feeling exhausted but looking forward to the long journey home. Now I was having an unsettling, almost out-of-body experience in the December wind and drizzle of Dorset. I felt light and wrenched from reality, the connection to my phys
ical self somehow yanked away. Not that I understood the realities of my condition; I didn’t have the first clue what PTSD might have felt like at that time, and it wasn’t exactly a condition I’d have expected to take me down. Stress disorders weren’t something that affected battle-hardened soldiers like myself – not that I knew of, anyway.

  So what was happening to me?

  Feeling a little bit moody at home wasn’t a new sensation. In settled and safe domesticity, life sometimes seemed underwhelming and after a week in England I usually missed the chaos of war – ironically there was a weird order in conflict. War had defined lines in black and white, but in real life there were too many grey areas that messed with my head. In war, I knew that the enemy wanted to shoot me dead, so I had to shoot them first if I wanted to survive. Even as I write that, I know it must sound horrible to people who haven’t experienced combat, but it was a fairly simple rule to comprehend in the anarchy of a battlefield. I even liked the places we operated from. Dusty villages made up of claustrophobic alleyways and a confusion of maze-like streets, the perimeters dotted with food stalls and hanging linen. They seemed otherworldly, like something from a sci-fi movie, and flying over the desert in a helicopter, the burning fires visible beside the Bedouin tents below, was always a beautiful sight – until somebody decided to shoot at us.