Soldiering on
As a new book lifts the lid on the scandal of troops dealing with stress in civilian life, Joe Shute reports on the harrowing stories
The human tragedy of PTSD
In 2003, RAF Squadron Leader Hilary Horton was in southern Iraq running a medical outpost at the British Army base of Al Amarah. Brisk, brusque and professional to a tee, she had worked for many years in the NHS before joining the Armed Forces in search of new adventure. Instead, she encountered the ghosts that would haunt her for a decade.
One June day a Land Rover arrived containing the bodies of six members of the Royal Military Police who had been set upon by a mob in a nearby police station and savagely killed. The murder of the Red Caps was one of the most terrible episodes of the brutal war in Iraq. So horrific were their injuries that Horton dismissed her staff and processed the bodies herself.
Five years later, while working back in civilian life as an occupational health manager in Crewe, a film of that day in Iraq started to play in her head: pools of blood on the white tiles; the thrum of helicopters overhead.
In time, apparitions of the six murdered soldiers seemed to come alive. She would lie in bed while they stepped out of the walls and plead with them to leave her be.
Horton – who has recently managed to curtail the flashbacks by undergoing pioneering flashing light therapy, at St George’s Hospital in Stafford – delivers one of the most chilling accounts of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) recounted in Matthew Green’s stunning new book Aftershock: The Untold Story of Surviving Peace.
But the scars she discloses are far from unique. Green has spent the past two years interviewing more than 100 veterans from conflicts stretching back to Northern Ireland, about their struggles coping with the trauma of combat as they adapt to civilian life.
His book sharply exposes the faults in the current system – whereby the NHS and veterans’ charities are responsible for discharged soldiers – and reads like an urgent manifesto for change to cope with the growing number of cases of PTSD; the legacy of the 220,000 who served in the brutal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Nobody at the top is trying to make sure the most vulnerable don’t fall through the cracks,” he says.
Green, 39, is no stranger to the horrors these soldiers have been exposed to. For the past 14 years, he has reported from 30 countries for the
Financial Times and Reuters, as well as being embedded with troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2011 he returned from Libya and suffered the most extreme bout of a depression that had periodically troubled him in his teens and twenties. “I hit a wall,” he says. “I experienced what it was like to be in a dark tunnel.”
The stories Green has collected are so powerful, in part, because they are some of the only means we have of measuring the true scale of PTSD in Britain. This May, Combat Stress, the veterans’ mental health charity, revealed that 2,264 people had come forward over the past year seeking help for mental trauma – a 26 per cent increase on the previous 12 months. Official Ministry of Defence (MoD) figures published in January following a Freedom of Information Request show the number of Armed Forces personnel with “mental health disorders” has risen from 3,927 in 2011, to 5,076 in 2013. Many feel such figures don’t reflect the true extent of the situation.
The MoD has recently committed £7.4 million to mental health support for soldiers, and points to awareness campaigns such as “Don’t Bottle It Up”, yet Green says a culture of denial among senior military officials and “lager therapy” in the lower ranks is a toxic mix. Unlike in the US, Green notes, not a single senior British Army officer has come forward to describe their own PTSD.
He also questions the efficacy of the UK’s bewildering array of military charities. There are presently 2,000, with an estimated 350 relating to welfare and mental health – a group with an annual income of some £400 million. Many of the veterans criticise Combat Stress (the largest) for neglecting difficult cases, but Green says it is unfair to lay the blame solely at its door.
“It’s not reasonable to expect a charity to provide the whole range of services that we need – the problem is the government has abdicated responsibility to the charity sector.”
The book delves into recruitment heartlands in often overlooked corners of the country. In Perthshire, he describes in heartbreaking detail the suicides of Aaron Black and James Lindsay, two young Afghanistan veterans who marched in the same homecoming parade and died within a month of one another.
Many veterans insist more work should be done on preparing people for the transition from conflict to peace. In the words of one former Royal Marine, they are let out “with the safety catch off ”. “It’s not enough for the army to recruit from a pool of young men who have few other prospects, then let them leave the Army and stand back and watch them implode,” Green says. Though the symptoms may take years to materialise, we can no longer afford to ignore the ghosts in our midst.