SAS medic who saved 100s kills himself WIDOW SPEAKS OF HEARTBREAK
AN SAS medic who saved the lives of hundreds killed himself after his pleas for help with his mental trauma were ignored.
Staff Sergeant Jamie Ferguson, 36, made a video recording in which he said: “I asked for help but no one was listening, they didn’t understand.”
Moments later the dad of one shot himself at Leuchars Military Base in Fife, Scotland, 10 days ago.
Now his widow Sammi has joined calls from the Sunday People and MPS for better mental health support for our troops amid shocking suicide rates.
Combat
Sammi, 50, said: “My message to the Army and the MOD is please stop relying on charities to deal with your mental health problems. It’s the Mod’s job.
“My husband should be alive today. There will be Army wives who think their husbands are fine but who are planning to kill themselves.”
Staff Sgt Ferguson, originally from Leicestershire, joined up at 16 and was in the Royal Army Medical Corps.
He became one of the Army’s most battle-hardened combat medics, serving in Iraq and Afghanistan and with the SAS between 2008 and 2012.
He treated the victims of a checkpoint ambush in 2009 when a rogue Afghan cop shot dead five solders and severely wounded six others in Helmand.
Sammi said: “Jamie loved working with the SAS and would never turn down an operation. There was one year where he was only home nine days.”
He was treated for stress last year after failing to save a soldier trampled by an elephant in an antipoaching operation in Malawi.
But Sammi, from Kirkcaldy, Fife, said her husband of 13 years hid his turmoil only too well. She said: “On the day he died he got up at 5.30am, he came into the bedroom and said, ‘Goodbye, I will see you later. Love you.’
“Later I looked out the window and I saw two guys coming towards the house who I thought were salesmen.
“I opened the door and I saw one of the guys had a Police Scotland ID badge. They said, ‘We’ve found the body of a deceased male on Leuchars Military Base at the back of the airfield.’
“I said, ‘No, you’ve got the wrong person.’ And he said, ‘Sorry, but he left his passport out.’ I couldn’t process what had happened. I still can’t. It feels as though Jamie is in the next room. I can’t take it in that he has gone.
“Jamie was the last person I’d have thought would do this. Anybody else but not him. He bought me my dream house. I can see out to sea. I can see Edinburgh.
“He decorated the house and made it perfect.
“Two days before he died I said to him I have never been more happy and content in my life and he said, ‘Yes, me too.’
“I feel that he got everything set up and then said, ‘I can go.’
The evening before he died he went for a seven-mile run, came back and told me he loved me.”
Voice of the Sunday People: Page 27