Medic: Saving Lives - From Dunkirk to Afghanistan

by John Nichol

  Weston was forced to confront what had happened, and the outcome was good for him. In a sense, the visible nature of his injuries meant he could not hide, and that may have been the saving of him. Stretcher-bearer Tom Onions returned from the Falklands in one piece, but with scars inside that no one could see and which he tried to ignore. His best friend died in his lap on Mount Longdon, and Onions thought he could bury away the experience. ‘When I got home, I wouldn’t talk about what I’d seen. People asked me what it was like out there, and I’d just say it was something I never discussed.’ He kept his silence for three and a half years, until one day he decided to unburden himself to a friend, ‘a civvy’, over a drink in a pub in Wolverhampton. ‘He asked if I wanted to talk about it and I said, yeah, I do actually. I just let it all out, and it was pretty emotional. But my mate couldn’t handle it. I was trying to tell him everything that had happened but, after half an hour, he interrupted and suggested we went to another pub. In other words, “Shut up, I don’t want to hear it.” It was all too much for someone who hadn’t been there.’

  Now a policeman and a former member of the Royal Protection Squad, he still feels affected by his time in the Falklands. ‘I thought I had detached myself from what happened down there, but I hadn’t. I still had nightmares and just a mention of the Falklands made me feel incredibly sad and emotional. So, two years ago, I contacted Combat Stress.’ He learned to talk about what he had experienced. He also went back to the islands, a ‘pilgrimage’, as he called it, and was deeply moved by a memorial at Teal Inlet for the Mount Longdon dead.

  He has yet to discover whether he is truly on the mend emotionally, whether he has at last managed to bury the past. Time will tell. But he has at least achieved some perspective, because his sympathies lie less in the past and more with the new generation of British soldiers. ‘I look at what the guys are doing out there in Afghanistan at the moment. My battle on Mount Longdon was intense, but it lasted only three or four days. These guys are fighting day in and day out over a period of three or four months. I don’t know how they cope. I think they have it worse than we did.’

  They will, though, get more help than the Falklands veterans did. Some lessons have been learned. When the troops returned in 1982, they were sent instantly on six weeks’ leave. This was a mistake, Steven Hughes, the 1 Para doctor, realized later. They simply took their problems home and never dealt with them. He reckoned that, instead of being dispersed, they would have been better staying together as a unit, to readjust together. It is what now happens as a matter of routine. For troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, ‘decompression’ time with their mates, reacclimatizing to reality, is considered crucial.

  Whether this will prove to be enough remains to be seen, and Hughes is not over-optimistic. There has indeed been a shift in thinking, and PTSD is no longer necessarily the career-breaker or the sure-fire shortcut to a discharge it once was, but handling the condition is still a major task, and many men and women who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan are in danger of falling through the precarious safety net. ‘PTSD is still a very real problem in the military,’ says Hughes. ‘Today’s conflicts could be producing a time-bomb, with psychiatric casualties emerging years after the conflict is over.’ He is wary about the notion that stress is now accepted as normal in the services and every bit a war wound as a bullet in the head. He isn’t convinced that the connotations of ‘shell shock’ from the First World War don’t still lurk in the military psyche today. ‘There is still so much stigma associated with psychiatric illness. Military people at all levels are reluctant to accept these problems, because they don’t fit with the image.’

  And how long do the after-effects of war last? A lifetime, if the experience of RAMC captain Malcolm Pleydell in the Second World War was anything to go by. He was medical officer on a pleasure steamer that joined the flotilla of ships rescuing the British army from Dunkirk. As it pulled away from the pier with a thousand men crammed on board, he was down in the blacked-out saloon with the wounded, and groping his way between the stretchers filling the floor. ‘Crouching down beside a man with an M for “morphia” marked on his forehead, I was trying to make out the dose on the rough notes on his field dressing card when our steamer hit a destroyer head-on as it raced into the harbour at about forty knots.’ The collision threw everyone into a heap, the steamer listed dramatically to starboard and panic broke out on the deck above. ‘We could hear heavy army boots over our heads, thudding backwards and forwards, this way and that, drumming a mad tattoo.’ He feared the sea would come flooding down, ‘and we would drown like rats’.

  He battled to get the stretchers up the companionway and on deck so the wounded would have some chance to escape. Somehow, the steamer extricated herself from the bows of the destroyer and limped back to Dover and, as she docked, Pleydell realized it was his birthday. ‘Not one to forget!’ he noted, and he never did, nor could. For months afterwards, his pulse would race and his hands run with sweat if he was in a room and heard the footsteps of people overhead. He would remember the mad drumbeat of boots on the ceiling and feel once again his fear of being trapped and drowning. Writing down his thoughts nearly half a century later, he asked, ‘So when did Dunkirk end for me? Was it ten, twenty, or forty years later?’ The answer was never. ‘Even now, when I go below decks on a ship, the memories come flooding back. The mental scars remain.’ From Dunkirk to Afghanistan, much has altered in warfare and in military medicine. But some things never change.

  One aspect of post-battle stress is particularly poignant – survivors’ guilt, the belief that it is wrong still to be alive when many of those you fought beside are dead. It surfaced years after the end of the Second World War, most notably and publicly when the politician Enoch Powell, whose wartime service saw him rise from private to brigadier, wept on a radio programme when recounting his inability to come to terms with the deaths of comrades. He wished, he said, he had died with them. The prescient army psychologist T. F. Main had spotted this tendency in 1945 and warned of men ‘ruminating over the death of comrades or some particularly distressing experience in action that now fills their thoughts and dreams. They reproach themselves for infidelity, neglect of duty or some slight and perfectly unintentional injury they may have done to others. Lapses into alcoholism or acts of delinquency may be not infrequent.’

  A generation later, Simon Weston, coming home from the Falklands hideously injured, a man whose survival was a triumph of courage over adversity, nonetheless was at times consumed by the same sense of failure and regret. ‘I was haunted by the fact that I couldn’t save any of my mates who had died. There were many times I wished I’d died alongside them.’

  Self-reproach is still a burden many soldiers bear. Warrant officers in the British army are not prone to breaking down in tears, but that was what one did in 2008 when relating to an inquest in Wiltshire how, during an incident in Afghanistan, he had to choose between two badly wounded friends. A weapon-mounted Land Rover was on patrol in Gereshk when a suicide bomb was detonated against it. Warrant Officer Simon Edgell of the Grenadier Guards was in the vehicle in front and turned back to the wreck, where four men lay badly injured. One of them was in a bad way, his windpipe smashed by ball-bearings that had been packed around the bomb to cause maximum damage, and blood spilling from a ruptured artery in his neck. Edgell knelt beside him, clamping his fingers round the wound and pressing hard to stop the flow before it was too late. Then he realized that another man was missing. Royal Artillery sergeant David Wilkinson, the driver of the Land Rover, had been hurled from it in the blast and was nowhere to be seen.

  Edgell had a terrible choice to make. He knew that, unless he got the wounded man to a medic at Forward Operating Base Price ten minutes’ drive away, he would die. But that would mean abandoning even trying to find Wilkinson. The time taken looking would probably be a death sentence for the other man, and he decided he couldn’t take the risk. He gave the order to head for FOB Price immediately. At th
e coroner’s court, he wept as he recounted how he had had to tell the others in his party, ‘I can’t find Dave.’ Later, Wilkinson’s body was found in a drainage ditch. He had died from head injuries. The other man survived and recovered from his wounds, which suggests that Edgell had made the right call. The coroner certainly thought so. Of the warrant officer’s conduct, he said: ‘In the agony of that moment, he had to make a decision. He had one badly wounded serviceman he knew he must get to the medical centre as quickly as possible, and that he did – understandably in my opinion.’12

  But no amount of official understanding or rational assessment can ever totally wipe out the sense felt by some soldiers that perhaps, just maybe, in the heat of battle they could and should have done more, or acted differently. Medics, as we have seen in the dozens of individuals whose stories we have told, are particularly prone to this anxiety. Alex Craig, whose shirt, emblazoned with the legend ‘Airborne Paramedic’, was blown off his back by a mine at Kajaki in Afghanistan and who made it to safety, never stopped wondering if he could have saved the life of his platoon commander, Corporal Mark Wright. ‘Should I have gone back in? I’ll always wonder.’ He knew the guilt was unrealistic and unmerited, ‘but it’s something that nags at me’. ‘Tug’ Hartley, another of the Kajaki medics, had a recurrent nightmare of his friends being injured and him not having the bottle to go and help them, even though everything he did in the minefield that day was incontrovertible evidence of the opposite.

  There are no quick fixes for these feelings of having let down your mates. Bill Bentley carried a similar cross from the Falklands War, and was plagued by a bad dream in which he was back at Bluff Cove and could see the casualties being brought off the Galahad, but could not reach them. ‘I would be standing there watching, incapable of helping.’ It would be a quarter of a century before his mind released him from this torture of self-flagellation. ‘I’ve pretty well got a grip of it now,’ he said, when he spoke to the authors in 2008, ‘because I’ve come to believe that everything I did that day in 1982 was perhaps not perfect but it was the best that was possible in the circumstances. I am utterly convinced of that. At last I’ve got a clean conscience.’ Time, though, does not always turn out to be a healer.

  *

  It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Falklands conflict and, on Horse Guards Parade, the mighty square in the centre of London where military celebrations have been held since the time of Henry VIII, ten thousand veterans of that war were drawn up in ranks in front of Prince Charles, Margaret Thatcher and then prime minister Tony Blair. There was silence as, across to the raised platform in the middle of the square, strode a confident young woman in scarlet high-heeled shoes and a bright yellow dress. All eyes were on Kathryn Nutbeem, a lone figure on a vast dais big enough for a whole choir. Who was she? What was she doing here? On her dress was pinned a campaign medal – her father’s. Kathryn was five when RAMC Major Roger Nutbeem died in the smoke and flames of the Galahad. He had loved singing and went everywhere with his precious guitar. It was among his effects, sent back from the Falklands and, as she grew up without her dad, she treasured it as her link to him. A professional singer now, she had come to pay homage to a very special man in a very special way. The bandsmen of the Royal Marines and the Guards stood shoulder to shoulder behind her, but their brass and silver instruments were at rest. Instead, a single piano struck up, and she began to sing in a soft, sad voice that rippled around the square and lapped up against the ivy-clad walls of the Admiralty, the Foreign Office, Downing Street. ‘Somewhere along the road, someone waits for me…’13 In that place symbolizing power and military might, the tragedy that war brings to human lives was poignantly displayed. Little girls lose their daddies and, just as with Julie Harden, whose medic father won a posthumous VC in 1945, the heartache can never be repaired. Among those battle-heartened veterans listening, throats tightened with emotion and eyes moistened.

  Because she was so young when he died, Kathryn’s memories of her father are few. ‘I remember him in his combat gear, and I have a vague memory of him comforting me after I caught my finger in the front door and cried.’ She cried, too, the day her mother told her he was dead, and a new life began for both of them. ‘Mum did brilliantly after Dad was killed, and as a result I had a really happy childhood. We talked about him, and there were pictures around the house, so I always had a sense of him.’ It was in her teens that she really began to miss him. ‘Seeing friends with their dads, I realized there was something I had missed out on.’ Music is her point of contact with his memory. ‘I remember him playing the guitar. He was into folk music, and that’s the music I’m into as well. His battered old guitar means so much to me. It’s a tangible part of him, his legacy to me. People also say I have the same smile as him.’

  She heard Steeleye Span’s ‘Somewhere along the Road’ when she was nineteen, and the lyrics summed up her feelings perfectly: ‘Sometimes when winds are still, unexpectedly/ Perhaps beyond this silent hill, a voice will call to me…’ – and it still does. ‘It’s twenty-six years now, and I still think about him. Curious things jolt the memory, such as watching a film with a father in it or reading a book about a father figure. I didn’t really know him, but I still really miss him. I think about him when I play his guitar and sing. I find myself wondering, what would he have been like now? I miss what might have been. I’ve missed a whole lifetime with him. I’d give anything to have him back.’

  The same sentiment hangs like a mushroom cloud of grief and regret over the Hampshire village home of Sally Veck, the mother of nineteen-year-old combat medical technician Eleanor Dlugosz, who was killed in 2007 by a roadside bomb in Iraq. This is hero country. A wreath of poppies lies against the rugged stone cross commemorating those villagers who died in the First World War, four of them from one family, a heavy toll. ‘Forget them not, O land for which they fell,’ reads the inscription.

  A skittish colt is led by and stops to crop the grass around the monument. Life goes on in this idyllic setting, where tunnels of trees loop over the lanes and wild roses peep from the hedgerows. The only sounds in the still of a warm summer’s day are the cawing of rooks, the screech of swooping swallows and the piping of chaffinches. A poster advertises next weekend’s village fête, with stalls and pony rides, to be opened by an admiral. This is the ‘English heaven’ that Rupert Brooke’s soldier, lying in a foreign field, dreamed of. But life has stopped in the cottage where, a year after her daughter’s death, Sally Veck spends her days trying to come to terms with a loss so deep it wrenches the heart to see. There are no words to console. Pride in Eleanor’s bravery and brilliance is no substitute for a light gone out for ever. Sally struggles to speak, but the words won’t flow easily, only tears. The ever-effervescent Eleanor once told her breezily, ‘You’ll be fine if I’m killed, Mum.’ ‘But I’m not. They say that the pain lessens, but it doesn’t. It will never be the same. I don’t think I’ll ever be fine again. But I couldn’t have stopped her going, and I wouldn’t have tried. It was what she wanted to do.’ Eleanor’s possessions, returned from Iraq in seven large boxes, are in storage, unpacked, the task of sifting through them too painful to contemplate. Her ashes are unscattered. ‘I just don’t know what to do with them. I don’t really know what the future holds at all. The pain is too raw. I try to remember she was out there making a difference. I like to think that she helped some children or some women, improved their quality of life for a bit perhaps…’

  ‘She helped.’ If epitaphs there must be, then this is a good one, and fitting for a medic. For all those whose deeds we have recorded here, from the dive-bombed beaches of Dunkirk in 1940 to the suicide-bombed alleys of Afghanistan two-thirds of a century later, the personal wish to help others has been what sent them racing into hell with hardly a second thought. Bob Steer speaks for them all when he says, ‘I’m proud of being a medic, because you can make a difference. War is designed to wreak death and destruction, but we can actually do some good. Regardless of wh
at the politics are, or the reasons for the fighting, we are in a position to save lives and make them better.’ Rick Jolly, the Falklands surgeon, takes pleasure in knowing he has done ‘something useful in his life’, words he would settle for on his gravestone. To experienced RAF paramedic Andy Smith, the job he went out to do in Afghanistan this year (2009), flying across the desert to the rescue of wounded troops, was ‘the most rewarding I have ever done’. It was, he said, terrible that young Marines were losing limbs, ‘but at least we are there for them and we give them the best possible chance’.

  Those they rescue are full of admiration too. ‘I have nothing but praise for the medics who treated me on the ground, in the helicopter, in the field hospital and afterwards,’ says Andy Stockton, the grievously wounded sergeant major with whose story this book began. ‘They were all phenomenal. Medics see so much and do so much. I take my hat off to them.’ Stu Hale is even prepared to suspend the Paras’ traditional contempt for ‘crap hats’ from other regiments when it comes to medics. They were ‘outstanding’ in saving him at Kajaki. ‘Before that incident I was quite disdainful about them, but now I really admire and respect them.’ There is no finer tribute from a red beret – or from anyone, for that matter. Whenever the agonized cry of ‘Medic!’ went up, it was answered with selfless devotion and courage, and it will continue to bring out the best in humanity as long as wars are fought, lives need saving and wounds need binding. In Arduis Fideles, as the motto of the RAMC so rightly says, summing up the essence of all military medics – faithful in adversity.