Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
My ‘coping b me survive u mass graves but nothing c the agony of my wife die
Iwouldn’t necessarily recommend the coping box as a strategy for others but it somehow saw me through the toughest of times. It was a Colour Sergeant who introduced us to the concept. He said: “The way I’ve always got myself through is by putting all my worries in a box – what I call a coping box.
“When you’re in the heat of an operation, when your mates are being killed and maimed, you don’t have time to grieve, don’t have time to think too deeply about what’s happening.
“You just have to get on with it. Better to store it all away in that box and deal with it later.
“When you get back, maybe then you can open it up and deal with it.”
I first used it in the war in Kosovo. We were dropped by helicopter into an area that had been occupied by Serbian forces. There was something about the place that immediately struck me as not being right. I just got a sense that we had arrived at somewhere that had witnessed horrors.
As we neared the village we saw a young woman walking towards us.
There was a terrible sadness in her dark eyes and a haunted expression on her face. I couldn’t tell if she was afraid of us or of who had been there before. Or both.
As I was considering whether to call to her, there was a message from the lead section that they had found something. I watched the woman disappear like a ghost into the trees.
Called forward to examine the find, I discovered it was a pit about the size of a singledecker bus on its side. It had been covered with a mound of earth. It looked like it might be a mass grave.
I walked cautiously up to it, wondering if it might be boobytrapped, and knelt beside it.
Something smelt very bad. Then something caught my eye – protruding out of the mound a couple of metres on from where I was. I could feel my heart pumping. I looked more closely. There could be no mistake – it was a human hand sticking out of the dirt. I edged closer, my eyes fixed upon it.
On the wrist of the hand was a watch. It was still ticking.
I wondered about the woman I passed earlier. What horrors might she have witnessed or suffered?
I tried not to think about the watch, or the hand, or what was attached to it, and what else was hidden in the mound. I tried to put out of my mind the very distinctive stench of death and the haunted young woman’s face.
Into the coping box it all went and I got on with what we were doing.
After the war, life carried on and deployments around the world followed. Then, in 2000, I met Caroline.