Battle Scars
About the Book
Jason Fox served with the Special Forces for over a decade, thriving on the close bonds of The Brotherhood and the ‘death or glory’ nature of their Missions.
Battle Scars tells the story of his career as an elite soldier, from the gunfights, rescue missions and heroic endeavours that defined his service, to a battle of a very different kind: confronting the psychological devastation of combat that forced him to leave the military, and the hard reality of what takes place in the mind of a man once a career of imagined invincibility has come to an end.
Unflinchingly honest, Battle Scars is a breathtaking account of extreme soldiering: a chronicle of operational bravery, and of superhuman courage on and off the battlefield.
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Postscript: A Walk in the Woods
Picture Section
Appendix: A Rock to Recovery
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
BATTLE SCARS
A Story of War and All That Follows
Jason Fox
With Matt Allen
For the men and women engaged in their own personal conflicts with mental health issues.
This is my story.
The battles featured here occurred during the past decade in an unnamed warzone.
The names and locations featured in those operations have been redacted to protect the security of those involved and the practices of the British Special Forces. Some of the people involved in my struggle with mental health have also been disguised to protect their anonymity.
For my loved ones at home, the Killed In Action and survivors of war, everything else has been described as it happened …
1
Is this my time?
Not here.
I want to go home.
I should be so lucky.
And we’re back there now, the place where it all started.
The sky erupted. Bullets with a blossom. Vivid puffs of phosphorescent green that sparked in the desert terrain below and sharpened into small dots, arcing towards our helicopter through a hazy, pea-soup blur. The trippy, spectral visuals were tracers, their surreal glow created by the night-vision goggles, the ‘NVGs’, strapped tightly across my face. Pop, pop, pop! Hundreds of them, more muzzle flashes in lime, more shooters, more rounds, speckling the ground a thousand feet down, suddenly zipping closer as I sat somewhere under the Chinook’s whumping rotary blades. We had been spotted by a large group of enemy fighters, a couple of hundred at least, and their angry response was a rowdy launch of little lead wasps, each one approaching with an increasing velocity and brightness as they screamed by in their incandescent fury.
Anticipation grabbed at my chest. I was being wind-blasted from the air rushing through our windows, every glass pane on board smashed in to cool the oppressive desert heat outside – air conditioning, British military-style. The heavy smell of aviation fuel had clung to my nostrils for a while, but as the helicopter descended ever more rapidly, an all-too-familiar stench took over. Sweet and pungent, the desert environment had a whiff all of its own: a weird blend of human and animal sewage, vegetation, dirt and body odour, the filthy essences mixed into an intensely rich and warm perfume. I could almost taste the habitation, the stink of mud buildings, the straw roofs, animal feed, dirty water and tangy manure. The rot and detritus cooked in the hot daylight, and even at night-time the smells never stopped wafting across the sand. During missions that involved a slow approach by land, there was an almost undetectable change in smell as we advanced, and my senses were often attacked subtly by aroma, kilometre by kilometre. But dropping rapidly out of the sky in a helicopter delivered a swift shock to the system and the odours blasted and tingled the hairs in my nostrils.
After several years of working in arid warzones, this reaction had become a trigger point, a warning I was moving into trouble. In the military we referred to those instinctive feedback loops as ‘combat indicators’, a sensual sign of looming conflict. On the ground, one of these triggers might have been something that didn’t look quite right at the side of the road, a dug-up mound of earth maybe, or a hint of some recent enemy activity such as the not-so-subtle planting of an IED by an amateur. It was always a subconscious alarm bell, and my body and senses seemed to come alive with the realization … I’m in a helicopter, I’m surrounded by teammates, and know that smell … a fight was coming. Goosebumps prickled my skin; Kylie Minogue sang softly, sweetly, into my earphones, my iPod Shuffle delivering a surreal soundtrack to a night-op turned to hell when it could have easily thrown out something more befitting of the vibe, like the angry riffing of Iron Maiden or AC/DC. And then, a blast of pain hammered at my legs, an intense throbbing that seemed to begin in my kneecaps and wrenched at my thighs.
Oh no.
No.
No, no, no. Please not a hit.
I peered down nervously and squinted into the gloom, but I hadn’t caught a bullet or shrapnel splinter. Instead, the stress of incoming fire had tweaked my body’s sympathetic nervous system, the fight-or-flight response, and I’d instinctively grabbed at my knees, my fingers locking around the quad muscles in a white-knuckled grip as I painfully clutched at the flesh. Blowing away a sigh of relief, I pulled back and tried to reassure myself that everything was going to be OK. I’m not going to cop a round – not on this job. Weirdly though, there was no release from the throbbing sensation in my legs, even once I’d grabbed at the barrel of my gun for comfort. I winced. It wasn’t my knees I’d been clutching in terror: I’d been squeezing the soldier next to me, and he’d been squeezing me. We looked at each other, realizing that a surreal moment of accidental tenderness had briefly unfolded, the pair of us kitted out in body armour, ammo, shock-and-awe weaponry. We had been touching each other’s thighs and giggled nervously like it was a weird first date. Two soldiers about to land in the middle of a gunfight, rounds pinging past us, our helicopters dropping into the heart of a village brimming with enemy fighters armed with AK-47 machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, both of us feeling embarrassed at a split second of unintentional intimacy. It seemed funny for a second or two – unless you really thought about it.
A shout went up from the back of the chopper.
‘Three minutes!’
The call was echoed down the line of waiting fighters, from ramp to cockpit, every voice reaffirming to the next man that it was ‘Go Time’. Three minutes during which nobody should be in any doubt that a proper scrap was about to kick off. Three minutes until we landed. Three minutes of helplessness, of not being in control of anything. With the Chinook’s ramp slowly opening, I could assess our situation more clearly: Toyota Land Cruisers had pulled up underneath us, heavy machine guns mounted on the rear, the shooters on the back blowing the grainy green sky to ribbons. In response, our gunner popped off rounds, dragon-breath
bursts looking to strike the targets below, but we were moving too quickly and it was almost impossible to hit anyone as we swooped down to 500 feet. I took a split second to check over my kit one final time: gun, ammo, radio; a frantic pat-down that always took place whenever we were about to execute a mission. I switched my iPod headphones for the standard-issue earpiece that linked every soldier working on the ground.
The buildings ahead sharpened in my night-vision goggles. The sturdy-looking huts, made from mud and straw, seemed to tumble over one another, unplanned and built seemingly without thought. Their edges were stacked along uneven lines and confusing alleys, and I could never understand how the rows stayed together. But the buildings’ robustness under fire made them architectural wonders to me; sometimes the walls were several feet thick and it was often hard work to blow in the perimeters if ever we had to breach a compound.
There would be an engaging, if unnerving, chaos to entire settlements. The streets comprised disorientating, sprawling arteries of tunnels and alleyways; blocked-up squares used for dropping off human excrement; shop stalls and shutters – with no distinctive landmarks or signposts to help anybody negotiate their way from A to Z. Homes weren’t laid out in neat little rows and cul-de-sacs like they were at home in new towns such as Milton Keynes or Peterborough. Instead they popped up without permission or thought. Getting lost in the thick of an urban firefight was sometimes an occupational hazard, and somewhere in that sprawl was our target in a top-secret mission.
An explosion jolted me violently and our helicopter jinked to one side with the shock. Nowhere to run to. Avoiding the barrage from below was almost impossible now: moving around in the air too quickly would only burn the fuel we needed to get us away once the job was executed. Nowhere to hide. Tracer rounds peppered my field of vision along with the hypnotic, distracting blizzard of static electricity generated by the chopper’s spinning rotary blades, weird little shards of light that shimmered in the green dark of the NVGs. I looked across and watched the helicopter next to us receive another rush of heavy fire as we began our touchdown.
The last thing we need is for one of the helicopters to fall from the sky …
And then, another shout above the noise: the ramp had been fully lowered. I could see the tree branches bending and rippling ahead of us in the downforce of our arrival. The buildings and cars, and enemy fighters, were in full view. We were on the ground.
‘Time to move!’
Our cue to run headfirst into a tempest of bullets and bombs in a mission we had worked out only half an hour previously on the back of a fag packet.
I’m not a headcase. The sound of gunfire could sometimes put the fear into me as it would anybody else, but my stress was only ever temporary. Sometimes the rush of incoming rounds might kick-start a fit of the giggles, though. I couldn’t tell you the number of times I’d been on a routine mission, resting, or drinking a brew with the rest of the unit, only to be sent diving for cover when the phut-phut-phut of incoming fire had cut through the chatter. In those moments my mouth tended to go dry; I would suck hard at my CamelBak water pouch, the adrenal surge kicking in as the whizzing rounds landed nearby, their impact hammering a pulse. For a few seconds there would be silence, a moment of composure and recalibration. Where did that come from? Who the hell’s firing? And then, inevitably, the sound of snorting and chuckling; a bunch of soldiers crouched behind a wall, laughing at the screwed-up insanity of nearly getting dropped by a smacked-off-his-face farmer. Usually, the bloke had been armed with a barely working rifle and was taking pot-shots at us because he had nothing better to do. Somebody might whisper conspiratorially, ‘Ooh lads, it’s going off! Bloody hell …’ and then several years of combat experience would kick in. We’d fan out to points of cover and return fire, methodically clearing the area of hostile forces and angry agriculturalists, saving the teas for later.
There were even times when dodging a bullet seemed possible to me. Rounds didn’t fly in straight lines. Instead, through a pair of NVGs, I was able to watch a gunman firing at us from the ground as we flew overhead, the lead slug corkscrewing from the gun barrel, at first emerging seemingly in slow motion, which sometimes created the illusion that I could easily sidestep it before it landed. Whenever that thought crossed my mind – and thankfully it rarely did – the bullet would almost always pass by instantly, at light speed, embedding itself into a surface behind my head.
God knows how I could laugh at near-death experiences like that, and I’ve often tried to figure out why, exactly. I’ve told myself it was most probably the result of nerves, excitement even. Perhaps it was an instinctive defence mechanism, some weird, primal human reaction. Or maybe it was a boy thing, like when a bunch of drunken football fans become hyped up for a scrap, singing as they lob bottles and firecrackers at the people charging towards them. There is always a little humour to be found in fear. It’s screwed up, I know, but it was a true facet of military life. At home, the stories of us messing around while under fire always sounded weird, especially whenever I’d been reliving them at parties, or in the pub with friends and family. Explaining the laughing and gallows-joking to someone who had never set foot in a warzone often got me a funny look.
When it came to the AK-47, though, there was no fun, no games, and no time to mess about. The AK-47 was horrific because it was so aggressive-sounding. Ferocious. The angriest weapon in the business due to its bullet, a 7.62mm short, and when fired from the barrel it sounded like the bark of an angry Rottweiler.
Bark! Bark! Bark!
I ran off the back of the Chinook and shifted right.
Bark! Bark! Bark!
I knew we had to find cover in order to plan our approach effectively. I caught sight of a ditch just in front of the trees and sprinted towards it, engaging the unseen enemy fighters ahead with bursts of fire, running through the treacle-like mud as the noise ricocheted around me.
Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark!
More bullets. More noise. The sound of crackling gunfire and exploding grenades seemed to arrive from everywhere. Then a call came through my earpiece, a situation report to turn the stomach upside down.
‘One friendly force, KIA.’
One of our lads had been fatally shot. We were a man down already, only a few seconds into the attack, and human instinct meant it was almost impossible to numb the fear that it might have been a friend, one of the lads, somebody who had kept my spirits up during a never-ending tour in the middle of nowhere. My mind was thrown through a loop.
Get me out of here.
I couldn’t tell you what triggered the heady, emotional tumult that followed as I landed in that ditch and rolled on to my back, taking a second to catch breath. Maybe it was a physical reaction: my muscles burned from the death-or-glory dash across open ground, every step weighed down by ammo, grenades, body armour, radio, batteries and NVGs. Or it might have been news of the KIA. My thoughts spiralled at the Russian-roulette of the announcement, the nagging question of who it might have been, and how.
Is it someone I don’t know? One of the new boys, maybe …
… Or maybe Dave.
My heart sank; I experienced a dark feeling, an almost imperceptible sensation bracing me for bad news – that it was bound to be Dave, one of my good mates in the group. He was a 27-year-old Royal Marines commando sniper from Portsmouth and not long ago the pair of us had killed hours by dossing underneath the Chinooks, our only real shelter in the sweltering sun at our desert base. As we drank endless cups of coffee, Dave and I had connected. We talked about our home lives a lot. I was in the process of divorcing my first wife, a break-up that had knocked me badly – not that I’d have admitted the full details of my emotional pain back then, even to Dave. And because he was single and up for a laugh, I’d found a lot of fun hanging from his coat-tails whenever we went out back home; the nights out had helped me to forget my relationship issues. Being a younger bloke gave the impression
that Dave wasn’t able to look after himself as well as the other lads in the unit, though that was a massive misconception. His arms were a sketchbook of tattoos, each one detailing a military tour or overseas adventure. After several months on base, his bristling beard and rough complexion, lit up by a pair of bright-blue eyes, had given him a feral look, like a wildling warrior from the TV show Game of Thrones. A weird intensity clung to him, as if chaos was only a pint or five away.
Please not Dave.
My mind refocused. Forget it. I checked my weapon. Change the magazine on your rifle. Check your kit. Don’t lose any kit … Do not lose any kit …
There was a moment of realization. This mission is bloody horrible …
Then a flash of panic came in quickly afterwards. I don’t want to die …
Not here. Not now.
I want to go home.
Please let me go home.
And that’s when I thought of her for the first time in ages.
Mum.
2
Flashback: to a moment of innocence and security, a scene as far removed from the stink of cordite, sweat and fear in that ditch as I could imagine. There was Mum and me. We were sitting on a sofa, cuddled up as we watched Top of the Pops on the telly together. Me: ten years old, red pyjamas, silly haircut. Her: a dress from the mail-order catalogue, something hippy-looking – she used to like that stuff back then. I remembered us laughing at some big-in-the-eighties band. It might have been Duran Duran, I’m really not sure. But I know I felt protected there, safe, loved, sitting in our little council flat, the room warm from the small gas fire in the corner, my eyes drooping because bedtime wasn’t far away. Home was relaxed and cosy – secure. I wanted to go back.
Take me back.
The present: a ditch. I was muddy, trapped in some battle-scarred village a million miles from England. I had become soaked through with sweat, having carried all that kit while shooting at enemy targets. I was getting shot at. A teammate gone, dead; maybe Dave, maybe not. My legs were on fire, my boots were heavy with mud. There had been a sprint through God-knows-what but it felt like superglue, just to get to a ditch as the firing and bombing exploded overhead. How was I still alive? Everywhere bullets, shouts, chaos, panic. Bullets, shouts, chaos, panic. And now I was freaked out, thinking of Mum, wanting to go home. Wanting to cry.