Battle Scars Read online

  Am I a coward?

  The reality check: I acknowledged the emotions as they hammered at my heart rate, it was a way of rationalizing a psychological paralysis that was threatening to pin me down. Gulping in a deep breath seemed to slow everything that was going on around me as I focused on our surroundings. But was I scared, really? Fear was an emotion that had struck me during the job in the past, but it had often kept me alive, sharpening my focus in chaotic situations. The feeling was always fleeting and I had usually been able to turn it off like a tap.

  Not this time.

  I tried convincing myself that maybe I wasn’t scared at all. Was I unsettled by some other emotion? Might it have been the blurring boundaries between home life and war that had caused me to freak out and think of Mum? I listened to the Bark! Bark! Bark! of the AK-47s again, the rounds whistling overhead and hacking at the branches in front of us. They seemed to shake me, which was an unusual experience. I had previously found it fairly easy to zone out on operations because I was detached from the mundane, or painful stuff happening in England. The people I loved there felt distant, like Mum and Dad, or my daughter. The bills, family issues, and domestic problems seemed inconsequential too, because they were taking place thousands of miles away. But the infrastructure of base life had suddenly changed. Technology and social media unsettled our day-to-day routines and we all felt it creeping into our lives. On top of the usual letters and phone calls, emails from home were coming in every day; online photos and texts, too, when that kind of thing hadn’t been available to us on previous tours. Our mobile phones were usually close by as we worked at the base. With those pinging intrusions came the tears, the stress, and the arguments that sometimes flared up between couples separated by miles of desert and mountains. The void seemed even bigger when dealing with time zones and unpredictable operational hours. For the helpless ones stuck at home, a sense of separation was only amplified by the countless sleepless nights spent stressing about the latest newspaper headlines on IED injuries and friendly fire. I had even heard some of the lads fretting about the way they’d left a Skype conversation with their parents, wife or kids. Have I said the right thing? Did I make it all worse? Shortly afterwards they would step on to a helicopter for another mission, feeling distracted or angry, which made those intrusions all the more hazardous for everybody.

  Was that happening to me, too?

  Previously I had sat in the back of a Chinook, worrying that my ex had been sleeping with somebody at home, and all because I’d received an email warning me as much. (Though we were in the process of a divorce, I was hoping we might patch things up.) I was moving into a gunfight but overthinking my home life at the same time. I readied my kit and seethed, the other lads joining me as the helicopter lifted up, my thoughts whirling at the uncontrollable possibilities happening thousands of miles away. What’s she doing? I had visions of her sleeping with another bloke. But who? And it wasn’t just her on my mind. I was also thinking about my younger brother, Mat, a Marine fighting in another episode of the war. Please let him be OK. His emails often bothered me, not because he was inexperienced or incapable, but because he was my little bro and I wanted to protect him. Now, for a split second in that ditch, my earlier home life had crept into the black-and-white of a battle when it needed to be the farthest thing from my thoughts.

  I closed my eyes. I reminded myself of the realities of war, that loads of soldiers had probably thought of their families when pinned down in horrendous situations like the one I was experiencing. I remembered watching the opening scene from a haunting, bloody war movie where a kid who was probably only seventeen or eighteen years old had been cut in half by machine-gun fire. He was still alive, screaming for his mum, disembowelled and bleeding out in agony on a beach in World War Two as his friends lay dying around him.

  Keep it together … Just keep it together.

  The thought process seemed to steady me. There were some more deep breaths, some more internal chatter.

  Come on, you’re an experienced soldier. You can do this. You live for this. You don’t really want to be just another civilian bloke, do you? Sat at home, drinking beer in front of the telly? You’ve got purpose out here; kudos, near super-humanity.

  I had regained self-control.

  You love this job.

  The disorientating panic felt like minutes, but it would have lasted only a few seconds, and in that brief flash of chaos I had rationalized exactly what was happening. I was extremely stressed, emotionally overloaded, in the fight, and I had been presented with two options. One: lie back and give up, probably die. Or two: get my head together, remember why I was there in the first place and do the job I was being paid to do. I reached for clarity, remembering the person I truly was: ‘Foxy’, a Royal Marine commando from the age of sixteen; highly trained; part of the military elite, working from the shadows in the world’s most dangerous warzones; Jason Fox, husband, son, oldest brother, dad to a beautiful daughter. I looked across at my two teammates, unrecognizable in their camouflage cream and NVGs, crouching down in the ditch beside me as they waited for a signal to push forwards. I was refocused on the awful reality and how to survive it. Mum, Dad, my brother, and the soon to be ex-wife had been compartmentalized. Forgotten. I could worry about my freak-out later.

  Conflict rushed back into focus.

  I looked up. More tracer fire zipped overhead like a meteor shower, the effect created by flare material in the bullets, and as the lead screamed towards its target, the rounds glowed in the dark. A rocket-propelled grenade exploded nearby and the air around us rippled with its powerful kinetic energy. I didn’t wear ear protectors like some lads did; I found they reduced my spatial awareness and their noise-cancelling technology amplified every little sound while diminishing the louder explosions and bangs to a crazy, teeth-grinding krzzchhh! Even without them my hearing was still on edge, the senses heightened with adrenaline. I peered through the NVGs, my legs steadied for another charge across what could have once been farmland, churned-up mud that required me to lift my legs higher than normal as I raced across it. There! Several muzzle flashes and a burst of tracer fire revealed the positions of two fighters, the pair of them suppressing our movements with a barrage of bullets. I raised my gun and steadied myself.

  Everybody on this mission is having their own little drama, I thought. Everyone here is in a bad place.

  It was true, too. Some of the unit were engaged in contact with a group of enemy fighters that had found cover behind a clump of trees. Others were dealing with a cordon of gunmen hiding on the other side of the compound. I could hear them lighting everything up around me. Mayhem had crept into the mission, and as an older head in the group I was fighting with, I needed to use my emotions to lead. I had to let the stress of combat sharpen my thoughts, not hinder them. I pulled myself up, moving quickly over the exposed land with the others, into the darkness, towards the treeline, taking out two enemy gunmen as we moved. All across the mission, dozens of horror stories were being written.

  I just had to deal with mine.

  3

  We were surrounded by hostiles. An intense gunfight had begun. Through the darkness I could hear more shouting in the distance. Crackling instructions on the comms only added to the chaos and every sentence carried more bad news and occasional flashes of misinterpretation.

  ‘Mart’s on the stretcher,’ said one of the blokes moving alongside me.

  ‘He’s dead?’

  ‘No, wait!’ shouted another voice. ‘He’s carrying the stretcher, he’s not actually on it …’

  We seemed to be working on the worst of the worst, a mission where we were outnumbered and outgunned, all of us understanding there would be no let-up until our job was done. Not that any of us were in a position to down tools and quit anyway. There was no time-out option and no white flag to be waved. We were strapped in until the bitter end.

  The sensation of chaos hadn’t been unfamiliar to me. Missions I’d worked on took unexpe
cted turns all the time, and for all manner of reasons – good and bad. Surprise was something to be expected in my line of work. I remember during my first-ever tour with the military, we had received intelligence that a high-value enemy fighter was holed up in a village and his plan was to wreck shop on the British Army lads with a suicide vest. We were sent in, and having arrived at the house where he was supposedly hiding, our unit encircled the area. An interpreter yelled at the guerrilla to come out, shouting and screaming warnings, but nothing happened. Everything seemed still, too still. We lobbed a grenade into an empty corner of the courtyard outside his home, a fairly aggressive way of coaxing the bloke outside, only to watch, surprised, as the door burst open and a family emerged with their arms in the air, blinking and coughing into the dust and debris. The good news was that nobody had been injured during the hunt; the bad news was that the target had gone – and his escape made us edgy as hell.

  Rarely did we get bogged down with problems of our own making, though it wasn’t entirely unknown. I’d been on missions where one or two of the lads had become carried away and tried to overreach, or act heroically, usually after a job was nailed and a sense of overconfidence had crept in. Whenever our guard dropped, trouble tended to follow shortly afterwards. I remember one patrol where we were required to investigate an outpost and we walked on to the area early in the evening, kicking in doors and searching buildings while the sun dropped. There was a gunfight, but nothing too rowdy, and once the shooting had calmed down, we collared a couple of interesting prisoners for questioning. One unit even located a bonanza of enemy hardware along the way, including laptops, mobile phones, explosives and rocket-propelled grenades. It was quite a score.

  Sweet, I’d thought as we wrapped up the job. That was fairly easy.

  Perhaps a little too easy …

  Somebody shouted over the comms: ‘Squirters heading north! Give chase!’

  ‘Squirters’ was a term we’d long used to describe people legging it from a scene. Often they were vigilante farmers or stray fighters, and hardly worth dealing with. In some countries they might even have been kids fleeing with guns or ammo – that’s how screwed up my places of work were sometimes. Giving chase wasn’t worth it usually, especially if our prime objective had been already completed, and we often just extracted ourselves from the scene. But for some reason, on that occasion, the whole team gave chase, all of us running into a field of head-high crops, not quite sure where we were going.

  Our pursuit led us into the unknown. Within seconds I was disorientated, surrounded by tall plants, my feet squelching in gloopy mud. I had lost sight of the other lads. The group was divided and in the scratching, grabbing vegetation it seemed impossible to detail any points of reference or head for one visual target. Then I heard the first fizz of a passing bullet, followed by the crackle and pop of an automatic rifle.

  The shooting had begun.

  Whoever we’d been chasing had turned, found cover and was firing wildly into the undergrowth. Three of our lads were hit almost immediately in the melee and everybody seemed to be flapping, caught in a state of confusion. Wounded soldiers yelled over comms for assistance, while the rest of us desperately struggled to pinpoint their exact location or the whereabouts of the shooters. Luckily, nobody in the unit had been seriously hurt, but they were banged up badly enough for us to require a casualty evacuation (CASEVAC) with a helicopter as the squirters escaped into the wilderness.

  We had ballsed it right up. Before giving chase into the weeds, our forces had been in control. Intelligence had detailed in advance the buildings we’d needed to search, also establishing the anticipated number of enemy fighters on the ground. We’d held all the cards and fulfilled our brief in double-quick time – then we overreached. During the ride home, one look at our three casualties was enough to deliver a sobering lesson in how not to work in the wilds. But it could have been so much worse.

  It could have been here.

  It could have been now.

  In the desert, my mind in bits, the operation was falling apart. This wasn’t a swift, glory-packed adventure, the stuff of documentaries and embellished stories in the pub. We were bogged down in a messy gunfight, outnumbered and surrounded.

  Away from the ditch, my team pushed through the trees and brambles, cutting across an alleyway that led to the heart of the compound. Positioned at the end were two fighters, dressed in dark robes and headdresses, armed with AK-47s, firing blindly at anything that might have been moving in the darkness. Without NVGs they couldn’t see us, but we could see them. The team halted and everybody pulled in close.

  ‘Right, let’s just calm this down,’ whispered a voice behind me. ‘This place is all enemy fighters, so we can pretty much rip through the whole compound.’

  With a few rounds, our two targets were taken down, but at the noise another figure seemed to lurch from a doorway, running blindly towards me in the black, an AK-47 in one hand, a wounded fighter slung over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. He aimlessly squeezed off a shot or two, hoping to hit something – anything – in range, his frame staggering back with the recoil. Off balance, he didn’t stand a chance, but when our returning gunfire dropped him to the floor my stomach flipped. Behind him was a kid. A boy just four or five years old, standing there unharmed in the murky-green haze. He was clutching a dirty teddy bear and was draped in a worn-out old football shirt that dangled around his knees like a nightdress. His eyes looked jet black and unblinking through our NVGs, his mouth shaped into a silent scream.

  Our intelligence was off.

  ‘Wait! Wait!’ someone shouted. ‘There are still civilians here. Think about what you’re shooting …’

  There was no time to grab the kid as he ran away from the buildings and towards the trees for safety, no time to drag him to a secure hiding place or to console him; our route to the compound was now clear. With our path free, all of us sucked up deep breaths and regained focus in a few precious seconds of respite. Everything seemed to slow down very slightly. I advanced down the alleyway, checking for more shooters, only for a game-changing signal to come over the radio.

  ‘Assault Team … Jackpot,’ crackled the voice. Or, as it’s translated in the military dictionary: ‘We’ve got what we came for.’

  All of us looked at each other. No way! That’s it? Job done …

  The operation changed in a heartbeat. Our aggression, a shared mood that had driven us into the heart of a hornets’ nest outpost, killing several gunmen along the way, was turned off. Immediately our new objective became escape, without the horror of anyone losing a limb, or worse.

  Let’s just get out of here.

  4

  Everything seemed to pile in on top of us.

  The sky lit up like a firework show in algae green. The enemy was angry. There were even more shooters now, but who could blame them for getting riled up and attacking in numbers? We had landed on their turf, ripped through their base, snatched what would have been considered a prime asset in the war we’d been fighting and wiped out a bunch of personnel in the process. They kicked back in numbers. Rounds seemed to strike at us from everywhere, and over the noise and roar of a heavy gunfight new orders came through. I was instructed to lead a group of soldiers towards a suitable landing area for the helicopters coming in and my team moved away from the compound, into the unknown.

  When I remember back to what happened in those next few minutes, hacking through some unknown vegetation, the scene always arrives to me in snippets, like torn fragments of a photo being pieced together. I know we walked along another irrigation ditch in some effort to gain protection from the incoming fire, but in the darkness I had no real idea of where we were going. It was guesswork and whenever we pushed in one direction, a voice in my earpiece warned me to stop.

  ‘Wait … Wait! Point man needs to halt. Four blokes setting up an ambush twenty metres ahead.’

  I was point man. I was their target.

  We doubled back, but the same w
arning came through again and then again.

  I later learned that four hundred fighters had swarmed into the area. There were also pick-up trucks that had been loaded with weaponry, and they were firing at us from a distance. Armoured positions were now smacking our location with rockets, while mobs of gunmen swarmed into the foliage around the village like dogs on a hunt, sniffing out exactly where we were in order to cut off our teams, one by one. Stress crept in, the type of crap-your-pants stress that entangles itself around the limbs, lungs and guts, and in the tension I felt myself shutting down again. Dark thoughts peppered my thinking as I pushed towards any potential landing spot.

  I don’t think I’m going to get out of here alive.

  This is it …

  There was something different this time, though. My apprehensions were more reflective and fretful, almost final. I imagined home, the security of England and my first daughter. The possibility of not coming out alive seemed to burn at the edges of my emotions. I remembered my kid’s face. That smile. Her laughter.

  I don’t think I’m ever going to see her again …

  My stress was tinged with guilt. She was only two years old and had a birth defect. I often felt upset about the lack of time I’d shared with her. That was only made worse by the fact that in the beginning I certainly hadn’t been as close to the family set-up as I should have. I’d become too involved with my job, consumed by it, but the military would do that to a bloke. I also hadn’t seen her as much as I would have liked at first because of the split from my wife and I was staying away from the house. I was emotionally wounded and failing spectacularly to handle our situation in the right way. Whenever there was the opportunity to spend any time with my kid, or when it was my weekend for childcare, I spun out. I couldn’t understand the issues connected to her illness. Meanwhile, she couldn’t understand the pain and discomfort that was overwhelming her. I became frustrated, often losing it over whatever was going on at the time. Weirdly, I was able to manage the other types of chaos in my life quite comfortably – a Royal Marine Commando speciality – so I should have been well equipped for domestic turmoil, but I wasn’t able to get my head around her condition and her vulnerability. Still, whatever happened, she was my daughter. I loved her and I found it impossible not to think about her, especially during a moment where the chances of me seeing another day seemed to be shrinking with every footfall.