by Jason Fox
Should I really be admitting all this to a complete stranger? Wasn’t I supposed to be an experienced soldier: superhuman and immune from negative emotion? Is this normal? Am I a loser? Have I broken some unwritten code?
The feelings of insecurity and vulnerability became more and more real as I continued to blurt out my story. Then I became embarrassed. I imagined myself as weak, as if I’d blown it in my roles as a fighter and as a man, when to everybody around me I was functioning perfectly well (the odd bad mood aside). Only the other day at the base, one of my teammates had mentioned those brief moments in the ditch on the helicopter mission. He’d been recalling how he was crouching alongside me, pinned down by fire, as we figured out how best to get to our target. When he spoke I suddenly feared my mental spasms might have been obvious and that he was now building up to The Big Reveal. Was he about to expose the chink in my armour?
‘Mate, you were like a ball of fire,’ he said, laughing.
I thought I’d misheard him at first. ‘Eh? What do you mean?’
‘You got up and ran across the field. You were, like … unstoppable. I saw you kicking through the bushes, taking shots. It was awesome …’
Funny. We had both been doing the same thing at the same time, but as different people seeing different things. In his mind, my actions had been heroic, like something from an action movie. The truth was that I had been choked up with terror and shame.
‘Mr Fox?’ said the psychiatrist, halting my train of thought. I had zoned out, replaying the moments in my head again. I must have looked vacant.
‘Mr Fox, I think you have PTSD, mild depression and chronic burnout …’
The words sounded muddled, warped, as if I were underwater in a swimming pool and somebody was shouting at me from above. I imagine it would be the same for someone receiving a terminal illness diagnosis. To my mind, the conditions were terminal; I was mentally ravaged. Finished.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Look, what you’ve experienced in war has caused issues,’ he said, ‘but we can help you – though we’ll need to sign you off work and you’ll have to begin taking antidepressants.’
‘But, mate, I don’t want to be signed off!’ I argued. ‘And I really don’t want to be taking any pills.’
‘It really is the best course of action for you. You can sign off sick, which will give you a chance to right yourself through therapy, and the tablets will help you with the depression. We’ll simultaneously put you on a treatment plan. We’ll start with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and a procedure called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy, or EMDR.’
I nodded as if I’d registered every word, when really I hadn’t understood any of it. (I later went online to learn what both of those treatments would involve – neither of them sounded like fun.) The realization that I was taking sick leave and being given antidepressants upset me – and being told by a complete stranger who didn’t know me from the next bloke! When Dr Beckelmann handed over the prescription, I looked moodily at the paper, my identity unravelling in a soulless office somewhere in Portsmouth, a million miles away from the places where the damage had first been done. And over and over and over, the troubling, terrifying question of … What would happen to me next?
But I was all out of ideas.
17
I drove back through the grey and wet to Poole, my head in tatters. The rain seemed heavier than ever before and the water whooshed across the tarmac and surged under the cars ahead. Within the big picture, I didn’t really know what was going on; I wasn’t sure what the psychiatrist’s plans might mean for my life and my career. The good news was that I could be fixed, hopefully. I was still sure of that. I told myself that maybe, with more sessions alongside the psych nurse, some tablets, the CBT or EMDR – whatever that was – I would be back to my old self in no time.
I glanced down at the prescription note resting alongside me on the passenger seat, a neatly folded certificate of defeat. Those pills, though. What would they mean for me? I was so unsure of what I was actually stumbling towards by taking medication, and what its visible effects might be, that I feared for my reputation rather than any long-term healthcare gains. In terms of priorities, getting better was almost secondary to my respectability within The Brotherhood, which was bound to take a battering if any of the other lads discovered Dr Beckelmann’s treatment plan. His medical diagnosis had grabbed my ego and shaken it like a rag doll. I couldn’t allow the bruises to show.
I was exhausted. The last few hours had only amplified my increasing sense of disorientation, but I needed to collect the antidepressants. I stopped at a chemist somewhere on the way to Poole, bashfully handing over the paper to a checkout girl as if I’d been requesting ointment for an embarrassing condition. Would she know? When I got home, the bottle sat on the coffee table for hours before I found the minerals to neck my first dose, easing myself in with a half-tablet on the doctor’s recommendation. Breaking the pill apart, I scanned the list of side effects stuffed inside the box, each bullet point a reminder of my mental injuries and the mess I was now living in. Nausea, increased appetite and weight gain would be some of the less impactful consequences upon my life. But fatigue, insomnia and constipation sounded horrible, as did drowsiness and the occasional dry mouth, though not entirely impossible to manage. Most frightening, though, was one sentence which seemed to stand out from all the others:
‘Might experience a loss of sexual desire and other sexual problems, such as erectile dysfunction and decreased orgasm.’
Great. Not only was I being made to feel like a loser in my job and as a man, but now my sex life was in the bin as well. I was completely stressed about it. The fear of impotence and a malfunctioning cock lay in wait like a militia ambush.
I swallowed the split pill, grimly gulping it back. And waited. Initially nothing really discernible happened, not something I could define with any confidence, anyway. I started to feel more tired, for sure, but the other side effects took hold more slowly. As I increased the dosage over the next twenty-four hours, different chemicals oozed into my system. Gradually, each pill brought a numbing sensation to my existence and I became even blurrier in the head than before. My new default setting throughout the day was one of increased drowsiness, indifference and emptiness, when feeling drowsy, indifferent and empty was already one of my biggest problems. In the rare conversations I had with mates on the phone, or when I was chatting with my new girlfriend, who I’d met recently, I noticed my mood lurching wildly up and down. At the lowest points I was a miserable sod and incredibly difficult to get on with. Whenever I attempted to get a point across, people found it very hard to understand me – probably because I didn’t really understand myself.
My sick leave was soon in place. The walls were closing in. I knew I had to escape for a while from Poole, where I felt surrounded by The Brotherhood; they were everywhere, and it wouldn’t take long before people started to pester me about why I wasn’t showing up at work. Someone was bound to cold-call me at the house, especially once word had spread that I’d been signed off. They would ask what was up. There would be phone calls, comments in the pub and plenty of jokes about my health and whatever socially awkward condition they fancied conjuring up for me in my absence.
Contagious is it, Foxy? Yeah, I bet it is. You dirty so and so …
In all my confusion I feared I might give the game away. I was scared it would take place during some random, innocuous conversation, and my pride was dented enough already without everyone knowing the truth. I had to find some way of avoiding any questioning. On those rare occasions when I was needed on base, I kept my head down upon arrival, all the while praying I could collect my things, or land at a meeting, without bumping into somebody I knew. I was mega-embarrassed. Unknowingly, I had made the first steps towards detaching myself from the military, physically at least, when in reality I should have pulled my closest friends even tighter for support, opening up to them about what was happeni
ng to me. Maybe if I’d embraced The Brotherhood and told them the truth at that point, my recovery would have started, and finished, more swiftly, but the antidepressants pamphlet hadn’t imparted those vital words of advice. There were no guidelines, or protocols for how an experienced soldier should handle himself in the middle of a mental breakdown.
And so I bailed.
After a few weeks of ghosting around Poole, I became convinced that a change of scenery was my best hope for any form of peaceful recovery – but where? This feeling only intensified once my girlfriend had suggested that I take up a job at her family’s bar in a seaside resort on the south coast. She reckoned I could work there part-time, earning some cash and filling my days between visits to the therapist’s office back in Poole. At the thought of a temporary release there was suddenly more room to breathe, especially without The Brotherhood’s intolerance to weakness bearing down on me. I agreed to my girlfriend’s offer, ignoring the full consequences of my running away from the problem (partially due to the pills clouding my judgement). A couple of months after my PTSD diagnosis, I’d moved from the base’s married quarters and started a new life as a temporary civilian, wiping down tables in a boozer, pulling pints and taking medication for my mental health while commuting a couple of hours every week to have my head checked by the psych nurse in Poole. The superhuman component of military existence was a rapidly disappearing speck in the rear-view mirror.
At first I convinced myself that working in a bar at a cool seaside town was a good move, the only rational decision, but I was in denial, lying to myself. At times, the realization that I’d been signed off from work returned and I became moodier and distanced from what I was doing. That was unsurprising, really. I was on the mother of all comedowns. Not that far back I had battled my way through the jungle. I had worked on dangerous missions and headline-making operations in all manner of bullet-riddled hellholes. Like the astronauts I’d read about in that magazine, I had seen my metaphorical Earth from Space. Now I was aiming a bottle of Cif at a grubby bar top and sweeping up half-eaten chips from under the tables for my encore. The stink of stale booze and bleach surrounded me; I was a thirty-six-year-old bloke working alongside students earning cash for their degrees and beer money. Talk about demoralizing.
One morning, as I readied the bar for another lunchtime rush, the world slowed to a standstill. I gawped at the traffic outside, my mind blurry and confused, my mouth dry. Those bloody pills. The memories of war swept in once again. This time I remembered that terrifying sprint to cover as the enemy closed in during that fateful helicopter mission, my legs lifting higher and higher in order to escape the suck and grab of all that gloopy mud. Bullets were churning up the ground ahead of me …
‘Foxy …’
A voice seemed to be ricocheting around in the background. Somebody was calling my name.
‘Foxy!’
I had been snapped into reality, as if yanked back on an invisible cord. I looked around, startled. One of the barmaids had noticed me staring into nothingness and was calling me over.
‘Bloody hell, mate,’ she said, sounding worried. ‘Are you all right?’
‘What?’
‘You’re on another planet,’ she said. ‘You’re staring a million miles away. What are you thinking about?’
I brushed her off, but my freak-out moment, where I had gawped into space, caused me to wobble even more. What had I looked like? As I carried on wiping down the tables I realized that if a nineteen-year-old girl had noticed the state I was in, how could I possibly hide my problems from anyone within the military when I eventually got back to Poole? I hated the idea that someone could read my emotional disconnect, even if it was only for the briefest moment. I felt exposed, vulnerable. Psychologically I wanted to be safer, higher up, in a position where I could see any approaching trouble from a distance, a feeling I’d last craved after Danny had been shot in the throat. I knew I needed to shut down even tighter.
So when the next bloke from the base called up asking where I’d been, I concocted a plausible excuse, hoping it would throw him off-track.
‘I’ve been diagnosed with tinnitus,’ I lied. ‘My ears are in bits from all that gunfire.’
‘Really? Shit, Foxy …’
‘I know. Mate, do yourself a favour, the next time you’re heading into a scrap, wear your ear defenders.’
My alibi was believable. I’d been involved in so many head-shrinking firefights it was highly conceivable that one of my senses would have been irreparably damaged. The fact my mind had been injured was a war wound too embarrassing to reveal.
18
Drugged-up and drowsy, I arrived for another session with the psych nurse, sneaking into the base with my coat collars pulled up, a camouflage to anyone noticing my arrival as I walked along the sports pitches towards the medical offices. The work ahead had the potential to unbalance me even further, but only because of my suspicious views on mental health care: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing was a style of psychotherapy treatment designed to alleviate the chaos associated with traumatic memories. From what I’d learned online, I was about to be ‘mentally stimulated’ by an expert directing my eye movements laterally, from left to right, with an object such as a pen. That had sounded weird enough, but I could also expect to be questioned at the same time. While staring at a fast-moving biro, the shrink and I would discuss deeply disturbing incidents that I believed had broken me down. The idea was that within this processing, the exact catalysts for my meltdown would become clearer; there might even be an unexpected root cause that would surface along the way, though I wasn’t exactly chuffed at the thought of sitting idly while a nurse bored down into my happy early family life yet again. There had been a slight shift in my mood this time, though. After a brief period of confusion and then denial, I was beginning to accept that PTSD, depression and burnout were now a part of my life, as was therapy. I had to. If I wanted to be fixed, I needed to be open to just about anything that might help me to rediscover my military buzz.
In yet another bland, soulless room, the psych nurse did exactly as my Google search on EMDR had described. I was settled into a chair and told to relax, which felt almost impossible under the circumstances. My innermost thoughts were about to be picked apart.
‘It might be a good idea to use the mission you mentioned in our first session as a jumping-off point,’ he suggested. ‘How about we start in the helicopter again?’
Again?
The nurse loomed over me, his index finger raised in front of my eyes.
The bloody helicopter.
My eyes traced from left to right, right to left, following the finger moving across my line of vision.
‘Think about the helicopter … What were you experiencing? What were you feeling?’
I went there yet again, to the memories of fear and adrenaline tumbling over and over as I remembered the first flashes of muzzle fire in green, my throbbing knees as I grabbed at the legs of the bloke sitting alongside me, and he grabbed me. I saw the helicopter riding next to us rocking with the kinetic energy, the tremors caused by an explosion nearby. The trees were bowing and bending in the rotary blade’s downforce as we came in to land …
The nurse stopped suddenly. ‘Right, Mr Fox,’ he said. ‘What’s the first thing that comes into your head?’
‘The mission, the gun battle,’ I said.
‘Oh, right … Are you sure?’ replied the nurse. ‘Normally, it’s common for people to go back to the original source of the trauma, something deep inside that might have messed you up previously. Something from your childhood, or family, maybe?’
I shook my head. ‘Look, I told you about my family,’ I said, tensely. ‘I had a great time growing up.’
I felt as if I was being treated in the same manner as any other civilian patient; that the discussion was primed to deep-dive into a series of non-existent father issues, or some other form of long-forgotten psychological event, when it was combat that had be
en the trigger for my stress.
The nurse nodded. ‘Well, don’t be surprised if at some point you end up going back to your childhood in these sessions.’
I became annoyed. ‘Don’t be surprised if we stay in a helicopter.’
I knew I’d presented an unusual case for the military’s psych nurse: a soldier of experience admitting to being thrashed by the extreme limits of war. Most people in my position wouldn’t have confessed to feeling rinsed psychologically. Meanwhile, I understood the military was in a learning phase about how to handle the complicated and nuanced symptoms of PTSD, a condition that differed from one example to the next. Every case was unique in one way or another. But when it came to treating mental health issues, I was learning that most institutions had a square hole, square peg philosophy: they were going to hammer somebody towards their idea of a perfect programme, hoping it might fit, whatever the shape or size of the patient’s problem. I knew the military liked things to be cut and dried and almost compartmentalized; they were always big on procedure. Thinking outside of the box in a case such as mine wasn’t going to happen, which was a shame because, as I learned later, I could have explored a million different treatment options. There was no mention of me trying alternative practices such as group therapy, or something more holistic. I had been placed on a set path, a catch-all course of treatment, whether I agreed with it or not.
‘Listen, Mr Fox,’ said the nurse. ‘Over the coming weeks we’ll do this with all the stressful events that have taken place in your life so far. Then we’ll see what the response is. When you go home, have a ponder about what they are …’
I went dizzy thinking about it all. For nearly a decade I had served in war, jumping in and out of gunfights, trying not to die. I couldn’t remember a time when I wasn’t stressed. My combat backstory also seemed like a tangled clump of wool, confusing and impenetrable. Yanking at the threads in this way was a disaster waiting to happen. Like the military, I realized that I, too, was in a new learning phase of emotion and mental health, and disorientated about how to handle my complex condition. The feelings and the processes needed to manage my wounds were new to me. I was scared. Almost immediately, the toolkit I believed the Navy medical team at Poole might have had – the one that would give me back my love for the job – felt rigid and blunted. I was frustrated at its unwieldiness. As I left the psych nurse, the thought of never going back to work again filled me with an overwhelming sense of despair.
