by Tom Marcus
I wake up to the sound of the front door closing. My wife was on the school run. I had a massive headache, and the bedsheets were soaked with my sweat. Severe dehydration from a combination of the diazepam and losing about 800 litres of sweat in the night was causing the throbbing pain in my head. As I hauled my body out of bed I heard the crinkle of paper under my elbow. It was a note left by my wife. ‘Be back soon, then we’ll go for a walk. Love ya.’
Showered and changed, I was still clumsy, like I’d been drinking all night and in that middle ground of not hungover but not yet sober. Except I hadn’t been drinking, I’d been heavily sedated because I was fucking mental. I made the decision there and then not to take any more prescription tablets until I’d seen this professor. I needed to be sure what this was so I could fight it myself, not artificially.
It didn’t take long before the letter came through with the appointment details, same building but this time meeting the professor. He wasn’t MI5, but he was a high-ranking officer within the military. He was widely known as a leading expert on post-traumatic stress and the impact dangerous work has on the mind. It was only a couple of days’ wait until I got an independent verdict on what the fuck was wrong with me but I refused to take any more medication, it was like being in a horror-filled coma.
The next two nights’ sleep went relatively peacefully; I was jumping and twitching a lot apparently but not thrashing or shouting in my sleep. Maybe the worst was over and I would be able to rejoin my team after all. I was going to fight my case as hard as I could with the professor and make sure he knew I was mentally strong enough to return to operations again.
Sue met me as I pressed the number 5 on the intercom just like last time. I sat outside a different door this time as Pam’s office was closed. I presumed it was empty, apart from the millions of clocks all ticking in sync. I was greeted by the professor as he opened the door to his office.
‘TC, is it?’
Shaking his hand firmly, I replied with a smile, ‘Yeah, nice to meet you.’
I was determined to show no weakness. We sat down in his makeshift office, closing the door, nothing in the room but two chairs and his bag. Not a clock in sight, thank fuck.
‘So, let me first introduce myself. I’m not a member of the Security Service. I’m an officer in the Royal Navy. I deal a lot with traumatic stress injuries primarily in the military, but occasionally with members of the intelligence agencies. I have no influence over your career. My aim today is to talk to you and discuss anything that might be troubling you or causing you not to sleep. Sound good?’
‘Yeah, no problem, quicker we get done the sooner I can get to my team.’
‘Yeah. TC, I want you to be completely honest with me during this visit. Welfare have passed me the notes from your previous session with Pam, and they have cross-referenced that with your group leader and the operations you have been involved with. The more we talk, the better the report I submit and the better chance you have. If you hide anything or try to front it out, it will be reflected on this report. If I say, “TC couldn’t open up properly”, then it shuts that particular door. See what I’m trying to say?’
I was backed into a corner here. The senior guys in A4 and welfare had obviously been talking and passed each other information about my operations, things that might have been particularly frightening. The service wasn’t trying to burn me, they were trying to help, I knew that. But I was caught slap bang in the middle between opening up and risking God knows what pouring out of me or trying to play the game and tell them some bullshit in the hope they bought it so I could return to my team.
The professor gave me a minute to think about things as he went to get some water before he started with his questions. Getting back on the ground was all I wanted, but if I did manage to fool these guys into thinking I was operationally fit, would that really be the best outcome here? Last time I trashed the bedroom and frightened the shit out of my wife, and then there was the night in the hotel during the Russian job, hiding in a corner because my brain was playing tricks on me. All that could become worse if I didn’t let these guys do their job. But would helping the professor do his job properly put mine at risk?
He walked back in the room with two bottles of water.
‘We good to go, then?’
He wanted an unofficial nod from me that I was going to tell him the truth.
‘Yeah, let’s go.’
Giving me a smile that suggested he wasn’t expecting that from me, he started taking notes as we went over my family history and role with Special Operations in Northern Ireland. We skipped over that quite quickly; he knew what events to ask questions about and he was looking for reaction. I made the decision to be completely honest to him, and whatever happened now was out of my control. I was an operator, I hunted on the streets for people who want to do us harm and it was all I knew. But at home I had a family that loved me despite me being away all the time; they loved the real me. It’s about time I found out who that person really was.
‘Tell me about your nightmares, in fact first, before we go into that, does the diazepam help at all?’
‘Not really, no, it switches my body off but my mind stays alert. It feels like I’m trapped wide awake in a dead body. All my nightmares start happening like I’m watching a film but my eyes are closed. If that makes sense?’
‘Absolutely makes sense, it’s your brain’s way of shifting all the information it’s taken in through your senses and filing it away so it can recall it at a later date.’
He started to explain how the different parts of the brain work and why traumatic events are sometimes misconstrued by the brain leading to PTSD, but to be honest he mentioned two really big words and I switched off immediately. I didn’t want a lesson in Latin, I wanted fucking fixing.
‘Tell me a bit more about that nightmare film, because up to date you haven’t been able to remember, is that right?’
‘Yeah, I never remember them usually. It starts off with one event then it morphs into another, sometimes certain people or targets would be in a different situation, like these cunts from a job we did ages ago, a cell planning to blow up a shopping centre in Manchester, they also wanted to blow up the gathering at the 9/11 anniversary in New York, in my nightmare they ended up laughing to a Russian we stopped stealing some tech.’
‘And have you been on operations recently with any of these targets? Reason I ask is your memory could be trying to file it all away neatly but might be struggling if you’re still involved with seeing them?’
‘Yeah, no. The cell was arrested and some deported to the States, the Russian we kicked back to Moscow so I’ve not worked against them since.’
‘And during those operations, TC, did anything happen that may have caused you some stress or anxiety, maybe even subconsciously?’
The professor knew about us getting attacked in the car on Op JENGA. Bastard. My team leader must have filled a report when the car was repaired or the ops centre passed it up the chain, describing how a police fuck-up nearly got me pulled out of the car when that mob in Yorkshire smashed the window. Pausing for a moment, I tried to think through my response. The professor beat me to it.
‘TC, listen, mate. You’ve been in the military, you know how to play the game. In my experience with the intelligence agencies, you need to be honest. If something frightened you, then say so. What is it you guys say? Something about a secret only staying a secret …?’
‘If more than one person knows a secret, it is no longer a secret.’
‘That’s it. TC, your group leader has gone through your operational file with the welfare team here. Pam and Sue have passed me the key events they think may be stressors. I’m not here to end you. If you are suffering with PTSD, trust me, you need my help.’
I struggled to swallow as I took a swig of water, my lip twitching again like some pathetic schoolboy. How the fuck did these cunts do it? He knew, just as Pam did, what questions to ask to trigger a response fro
m me; a response I didn’t even know I was capable of. My nose started to run as tears slowly crept to the corners of my eyes, and the professor made one last gentle nudge.
‘Having a group of angry men trying to kill you can’t be easy to deal with, especially when you didn’t have time to talk about it?’
I couldn’t talk now. Head in my hands, the tears were in full force. Completely uncontrollable. I tried to regain some dignity as I cleared my throat, straightening up and looking him in the eye before he hit me again.
‘Did you talk to anyone when you heard about Ian’s suicide?’
Shooting out of my chair, I felt the blood in my veins about to burst out. I could snap this fucker in half, fear and sadness instantly swapped for aggression and destruction.
‘He didn’t kill himself!’
‘And then there’s Stu the biker … How did that make you feel?’
I didn’t even realize I was losing my footing as I stumbled backwards and hit the office wall. Sliding down, my thigh hit the edge of the metal bin that was in the corner of the room, and the room started to spin as I sat surrounded by waste paper from the bin, the chair I was in now upturned on the floor in front of me. I felt weak and could feel that I was losing the strength to hold my head up. I was passing out. The professor knelt down next to me, but I could only just hear his words, like I was underwater. He put his hands on my chest and right shoulder, and it was then I noticed how fast my breathing was. I was hyperventilating.
After a few minutes I came to with the professor holding an oxygen mask over my face and Sue from the welfare team in the office.
‘Tom – Carl – Marcus, can you hear my voice?’
Nodding and pulling the mask away from my face, I tried to stand up. ‘Yeah, not sure what happened.’
‘That, my friend, was a classic, although extremely violent, anxiety attack.’
As Sue left the office the professor pulled my chair upright and sat me down.
‘I deliberately pushed a few buttons there, I’m sorry. But I needed to see what your body did when it remembered certain events. One more question, and it’s an important one. Do you ever see or hear things that aren’t there? Visual or audio intrusion?’
I flinched as I thought about the hotel room, hearing what I thought was a transmission in my ear when it was the TV, and later that night waking up to fight the invisible hand I thought was attacking me. I didn’t need to say anything, my small but very telling reaction did the talking for me.
‘OK, I’ll take that as a yes.’
Kneeling down in front of me, the professor adjusted himself to get a lock on my gaze; he wanted to make sure this message sank in.
‘TC, you have all the symptoms of PTSD. Your group leader has told us you’re hyper-vigilant, which for a surveillance officer in MI5 is crucial, I suppose, but it means you see absolutely everything and when that happens you start to see things that aren’t there, because your brain is filling in gaps from previous experiences. You’re having nightmares based on traumatic events that you haven’t had time to deal with. You need treatment and a lot of it.’
I was done, this was it. No more belonging. This was a fucked-up world, dark, dangerous and totally unforgiving,but it was my world. I didn’t want to leave it, but the professor wasn’t quite finished yet.
‘We need to treat you with medication and cognitively with therapy like EMDR through a specialist local to you. TC, this is going to get a LOT worse before it can get better. As the treatment starts to let your brain do its job and work things out it will unlock more and more that you’ve been hiding away from.’
Imagining I was about to be carted off in a straitjacket to some mental asylum, I wanted the ground to swallow me up. In fact, no, that’s bollocks, I wanted a magic pill to make all this mental health shit to go away so I could be normal again. I wished I had never asked for help now. If I had just found some way of coping with the nightmares I could have avoided all this shit and the bollocks that was to come as a result of whatever therapy these experts were going to throw at me.
I felt ashamed. I’d let my family and the team down. I wasn’t a complex guy, intense maybe but not complex. I wanted to do two simple things, provide for my family and protect them. I was starting to struggle to be able to provide properly for them and the vines of debt had taken a stranglehold around me, tightening ever more every month, and now I was about to lose the ability to protect them.
I started working in counter-terrorism by accident. I never fitted into the mainstream; even in the military I was always labelled as the ‘keen’ one. During my time with Special Operations I came top of my selection course despite being the youngest. I didn’t really fit in there either because yet again I was ‘too serious’. The operations I was involved in, for my part anyway, went without a hitch. Even my weapons work on the ranges was considered an example of ‘how to do it’. I wasn’t some sort of super soldier warrior, I just loved this work and being part of this world. It’s all I knew and for some reason my brain had decided to have a fucking fit. I couldn’t do anything else, I didn’t want to.
‘TC, I can see by your body positioning that you hate me, but I want to be honest with you. The operational experience you have and doing this sort of work from such a young age is, well …’
I didn’t want a pep-talk or praise for jobs I’ve been involved in. The professor was looking for words to pick me up before he sent me on my way, but I wasn’t in the mood.
‘Listen, if I wanted fucking medals I’d have joined the SAS. I don’t want your sympathy, this is complete bollocks and you know it is. I have a few nightmares. Who the fuck wouldn’t spaz out a few times dealing with this every day?’
‘OK, so you’re free to go home. I will of course send you a copy of my report and I’m presuming the ladies here will find and send you details of the specialist to see locally soon.’
As the professor stood up to shake my hand, I turned my back on him and walked straight out of that office. He was a professional and an expert in his field, but the people in this welfare department had absolutely no idea what it takes to keep the country safe fighting people who sometimes want to die in order to achieve their goals. As I walked straight past Sue, she made some remark suggesting she was there for me if I needed anything, but, ignoring her, I continued to the security doors. I was fucking done with this place. I’d given everything to ensure the very people in this building and the country as a whole stayed safe, and when my armour showed signs of becoming brittle I was retired without a second thought.
Explaining the whole situation to Lucy that night, I was fuming, and my core temperature was through the roof as I struggled to keep my voice down while my son lay asleep upstairs. My wife instantly brought me back down to earth and made me realize that actually this could be a good thing.
‘But they are going to help you with someone close to here? And keep your pay while you get better?’
‘Yeah, but I won’t be able to go back to the service after this!’
‘So fucking what?!? Listen, you can do ANYTHING! You’ve done your share, get better and let’s move on. You’re NOT surveillance, you’re NOT MI5, you’re a great husband and an even better dad. You can do ANYTHING.’
Lucy was right, I could do anything. But what? Can’t be much call at the job centre for spies who’ve been trained by Special Forces to kill people.
‘But what?? All I know is this stuff.’
‘We’ll figure that out, use this therapy whatever it is, and then we’ll make a plan, OK?’
She was right, she’s always right. I had to swallow my pride and go through the motions with this therapy. If it worked then maybe I’d become a better person. Family mattered more to me than anything. The next morning I got a phone call from the unarmed combat instructor from the SAS who had witnessed me taking out the Special Branch officer in the car during situation awareness training. After we exchanged brief pleasantries he offered his support.
‘Listen
, I heard about you taking some personal leave from the teams. Everything OK, mucker?’
‘Yeah, erm, sort of. Not been sleeping great, got to see a specialist.’
‘Mucker, PTSD is a fucking lottery. I know the strongest men in the world, some absolute monsters. There is nothing you can do, it’s like a stray bullet. You can be in a thousand contacts and never get hit, then out of nowhere you take a round and you hit the deck. No shame in it, it’s a fucking minefield, the longer you’re in it the bigger the chance of getting hit.’
He summed it up perfectly, and it gave me a sense of self-preservation. It took some of the blame I was imposing on to myself away too, but I still had one huge hurdle to get over. My ‘illness’ was a mental one, something people couldn’t see. In the military if you have your legs blown off saving someone’s life then you’ll be a hero and honoured accordingly with medals and thanks. But work undercover on the streets in Top Secret operations and develop post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of your work, and you get nothing. No medals, no thanks. The only thing you do get is suspicion from people who question whether you are actually ‘ill’ or not.
Just like the appointment with the professor, it only took a few days to get an appointment letter through for the specialist, with the warning that I wasn’t allowed to disclose who I worked for or what I actually did for the service, which was going to make it nearly impossible to use the treatment to any effect. My wife took me to my first session with him, which was about a ten-minute drive away from our house. I was starting to panic. My meetings with Pam and the professor had resulted in me either crying or needing oxygen. This specialist was trained to unlock my memories so I could deal with them properly. I didn’t want that. Whatever I wasn’t remembering, I was sure there was a reason for it. I’d ring-fenced those experiences for a reason.
Thankfully, though, this time, unlike my assessment with Pam, the meeting with the mental trauma expert went as it should do when people meet for the first time professionally, although I had some explaining to do.
