‘Aftershock’: A new book on how the British are handling PTS issues

Here is an excerpt from Matthew Green’s book Aftershock, being published in England this week:

For Dean Upson, a fly-fishing enthusiast who lives in Maidstone, the trigger is the smell of petrol. The fumes take him back to a desperate day rescuing casualties in a Chinook helicopter. Sounds are drowned out by the roar of the engines, his uniform is stained with blood and he is cradling an Afghan girl in his arms — a girl who will not survive.

For Stewart Mackay, a young man who lives in the Scottish borders, the trigger is the smell of fresh bread. The aroma yanked him out of the aisles at the supermarket where he used to work as a cleaner. Once again, he was first man on patrol, passing glass-fronted shops where Pashtun bakers flipped round, unleavened loaves. He felt the sun beat down and a prickly sensation he came to know well in Afghanistan — the sensation of being watched. His supervisor would tap him on the shoulder and he would start awake, clutching his mop like a rifle.

For Cheryl’s husband Carl, the trigger is raised voices – reminding him of the screams of women in Bosnia. One day she will return to their home in Liverpool to find ‘Don’t Shout’ scrawled across the living-room walls in marker pen. When Carl is anxious she sometimes catches him performing an involuntary mime: cocking a weapon with empty hands.

In Somerset, I went for a drink with an Army major who had served in the Gulf War. She flinched at the thunk-thunk sound of a fruit machine spitting coins. In south-west London, I met Roland Riggs, who had served in Northern Ireland in 1971 and 1972. He cannot help glancing up as he walks down the high street, scanning for a slightly open sash window or missing roof tiles. He is on the lookout for snipers, more than forty years after leaving Belfast and Londonderry.

For many, the trigger is an anniversary — particularly of a comrade’s death. As the day approaches, a corrosive sense of guilt begins to creep in — the kind of guilt that can only be felt by those who have forged a bond under fire, then felt that bond break. Fireworks are a universal bane — the bangs and smoke reminiscent of gunfire and the smell of cordite. But for some the trigger can be as innocent as the twinkle of fairy lights on a Christmas tree – evoking the red or green diodes blinking on military equipment.

Sometimes the trigger is a word. For one soldier the mere mention of ‘Afghanistan’ sent him into a paroxysm of uncontrollable shakes.

On Remembrance Sunday, we drop a coin in a tin and pin a poppy on a lapel to honour the fallen. The ritual, begun by the Royal British Legion in 1921, ensures that the sacrifices made by generations of soldiers are not forgotten. Yet there are those among us for whom remembering is not a choice, for whom the boundaries between past and present blur, and for whom every day brings a fresh reminder. This book is about the British ex-servicemen and women still fighting wars in their minds.

The story is both very new and as old as war itself. From Homer’s Iliad and the plays of Shakespeare to Tim O’Brien’s stories of Vietnam in The Things They Carried, and The Yellow Birds, the novel by Iraq War veteran Kevin Powers, writers have explored the rage, alienation and melancholy that have followed soldiers home from battle. The centenary of the First World War has prompted a new wave of public fascination with the plight of the men who fought in the trenches, where the term ‘shell shock’ was coined to describe the strange symptoms of those who broke down: vacant eyes, trembling limbs and shuffling gaits. The struggles of a contemporary generation of service personnel and their families, by contrast, are taking place largely behind closed doors, with symptoms that cannot be seen. ‘I can roll my sleeve up, I can pull my pants down, and I can show you seven feet of scars,’ said one former special forces soldier. ‘But I can’t show you the seven hundred feet of scars in my head.’

Today, stories of homecoming hold a special significance. Since 2001, more than 220,000 members of the British Armed Forces have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan – where 632 service personnel have died and many more been wounded. In addition, growing numbers are leaving the military as the Army shrinks to its smallest size since the Napoleonic Wars. Some 20,000 personnel leave the forces each year – many returning to a civilian world they last knew as teenagers.

The number seeking help is growing fast. In the spring of 2015, Combat Stress, the biggest veterans’ mental health charity, reported that the number of ex-forces seeking help in the past year had risen by 26 per cent year on year — an increase driven mainly by individuals who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nobody knows how many more will come forward in years to come. With memories fresh of Britain’s campaign in Afghanistan, there is a great deal of goodwill towards those who serve — as the phenomenal fund-raising success of Help for Heroes and other charities has shown. Nevertheless, there is widespread concern in the military that public generosity may dwindle as recent campaigns fade into the past, even as demand for support continues to rise.

Against this backdrop, I set out to answer a simple question: how does war break people, and how best might they be healed? I wanted to understand how ex-forces navigate the transition home from the battle-zone and who is there to help them. Above all, I wanted to hear what lessons soldiers might have to teach anybody — military or civilian — who may be burdened by those species of grief, anger, despair or remorse that time alone appears powerless to heal.

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