And that’s how it felt now leaving the Army and looking out on the aftermath of twenty-six years of battles. It’s the swing of the pendulum, one extreme to the other. From twenty-six years of superhuman endeavour – in combat, feeling unbeatable and euphoric; out of combat, charged with eager anticipation waiting for the next battle to begin – to this, the intense boredom that could be the rest of my life.
I picked up the Hereford Times and broke into a cold sweat. My eyes focused in sharply on the article as if it were a gun-wielding enemy looming up into my line of fire. I felt strangely compelled to read it even though I knew it would stir up a slurry of black emotions. ‘Tragic End for Shell Shocked Hero’, ran the headline. It was about Private Jones who lived in the Hereford area at the beginning of the twentieth century. He had won the VC for heroism at Rorke’s Drift in 1879. When he got back, he couldn’t adjust to civilian life in rural Herefordshire. He was tormented by recurring nightmares of the stabbing, slashing, blood-soaked spears of screaming Zulu warriors. He walked out one day and blew his head off with a double-barrel shotgun.
Will the day finally dawn when all my stress comes bubbling out? How will it show itself? It doesn’t take a genius to work that one out. ‘These Men are Dangerous’ – that was the title of a communiqué from Adolf Hitler to the French occupation forces, directing that all captured SAS troops be turned over to the Gestapo. The Army turns you into a ruthless killing machine. In every battle, instinct tells you to keep your head down, hug the ground, keep a low profile. So what was it drove men to stand up and charge over the top of the trenches in the First World War, sacrificing their lives for another yard of mud? And what drove men to storm full frontal up the murderous beaches of D-Day to face near-certain death? Army training and discipline, perfected through centuries of practice, that’s what does it. That’s what overcomes fear, confusion, logic and the survival instinct itself. That’s what turns you into a killing machine. The trouble is, what turns you back into a human being at the end of it all?
I dropped the Hereford Times down the side of my armchair and went into the kitchen to make a brew. I stood gazing out of the window waiting for the kettle to boil, my mind drifting over my turbulent career in the SAS. I recollected the very first day of selection, that twenty-six-week course from hell. The Colonel was addressing the rows of hopeful candidates, 135 of us in alclass="underline" ‘You have a difficult task ahead of you. Twenty-six weeks of exhaustive scrutiny. Half a year of uncertainty.’
He was wrong. It wasn’t half a year of scrutiny and uncertainty. The ones that got through, only seventeen of us in total, faced a lifetime of uncertainty, never knowing if we are going to explode with the stress of it all. That niggling thought never leaves you. As it says in the SAS survival Top Ten: all five-second grenade fuses are three seconds. So how long was my fuse? I had survived the stresses of the Army and even the psychiatrists’ scrutiny at Woolwich but Civvy Street was another matter.
What was I going to do? I doubted if the NHS could help. Can you imagine it, a group therapy session with the flotsam and jetsam of today’s society – alkies, druggies, divorcees? I’m sat there like some fucking freak till it’s my turn. What questions would they ask me? Are you married? Do you have any children? What does it feel like to storm an Embassy and kill terrorists? And then they move on to the next case, some sad bastard whose life has been torn apart because his pet dog died… No, I couldn’t quite see it somehow. NHS counsellors don’t spend time in execution chambers watching people get killed. They’re not taken round mortuaries to see the dead. They don’t ride shotgun with paramedics to see bodies ripped to shreds in road traffic accidents. They don’t get desensitized, they don’t get to become immune. What do they know?
What can a civilian possibly know about the unremitting brutality, the violence, the aggression, the twisted and ugly spectacle of a battle zone? Combat in the front line? I’ll tell you what it’s all about. It’s about ruptured arteries spurting out plumes of blood. It’s about that frogspawn of scarlet foam, that gurgling and unearthly whistling coming from some poor bastard’s throat with a hole the size of a fist ripped from it. It’s about that deadly cocktail of looks in a fatally wounded man’s eyes – the torment, the urgent plea, the faltering realization, the imminence of his last breath struggling up out of tortured lungs. It’s about the shock in the eyes of your best mate lying there staring in disbelief at the oozing sausage-spill of purple-veined innards splashed out over his webbing belt, the ignominious stench of his private sewage consuming the air all around you. Wringing wet, sleeping rough, surviving on hard tack and cheese out of a tube, senses tormented by seeing bodies ripped apart and blown limb from limb, ears seeming to be ringing permanently with some voice screaming ‘I’m hit… I’m hit… I’m hit…’ – and any moment it could be your turn next. How could a civilian diagnose me and offer me a cure after that?
My trouble was I’d fought the wrong kind of wars. When my father was in the Army during the Second World War, there were no sociological questions about the ethics of war being debated on primetime TV. There was no hand-wringing and agonizing over hidden political agendas and what the true objective of the conflict was. Where Hitler was concerned it was black and white, good versus evil. And at the end of it all, there were cheering crowds in the streets to welcome you back, to prove you’d righted the wrong, to slap you on the back and tell you what a marvellous job you’d done. My kinds of wars were the bad kind. Nothing was clear-cut. The enemy was not always obvious, there was scepticism and lack of popular support at home, our hands were tied by legal and political constraints. No black and white there, just treacherous shades of grey. No cheering crowds in the streets when you come back. Shrouded in secrecy, we were processed through RAF Lynham or RAF Brize Norton in the dead of night. Whether returning from deadly combat or routine exercise, it was exactly the same.
The Yanks returning from Vietnam soon found out the moralebursting stress of that particular kind of silence. At least the American public knew about Vietnam. Most of my wars were not only the wrong kind but they were secret too. Covert operations, confidential assignments, anonymous infiltrations. We moved in silently, did our job, and melted away again. No speak, no tell, no profile. The British public were none the wiser. The Sixties and early Seventies – flower power, summer of love, make love not war, better red than dead? Bullshit! I was fighting in the Middle East in the 1970s. The Commies seemed to be taking over the world and we soldiers were the ones tasked with doing something about it. But no one shouted it from the rooftops. That’s the culture of secrecy. Everything’s clamped up inside, suppressed, bottled up. That’s when the time bomb starts ticking.
I could hear the church bells ringing down in the centre of Hereford. I used to dream of days like this when I was undercover in some far-off land preparing for combat. The sun would be shining, the civilians around me going about their usual business, everything eerily normal. I’d suddenly think that back home right now my father would be relaxing in his armchair reading his Sunday paper and drinking a brew of tea, my mates would be going down to the pub for a livener, and there I was about to enter battle and fight for my life. Very weird. But now it was Sunday and it was me that was at home, wishing I was back in combat. I had to face up to the fact I was hooked on the adrenaline hit, the camaraderie, the SAS gallows humour. The hit is so powerful and so addictive that you get withdrawal symptoms sat at home, worrying about mortgages, gas and electricity bills, all the mundane elements of so-called normal life.