Jason Fox - Battle Scars: A Story of War and All That Follows

A lot of people have helped to pull me through the low points of my personal story. Even more have been alongside me for the highs. Most of them have been introduced already in the pages of Battle Scars, but some deserve an extra mention. Among them, my therapist Alex Lagaisse, Andy Leach and Debbie Smith at Sodexo, my coach Malcolm Williams and Jamie Sanderson from Rock2Recovery. Mum, Dad, Mat and Jamie have been so important and so supportive of me, and, of course, my other half, Jules, who has been alongside me through some of the biggest changes in my life. Some of those changes were completed with the other lads from SAS: Who Dares Wins and Team Essence. Then there are the others who cant be named: the fighters from The Brotherhood who gave me the support network and camaraderie I needed to survive in some of the most dangerous places on earth. Finally, the making of this book wouldnt have happened without the efforts of my agent Charlotte Walker at M&C Saatchi Merlin, Jon Elek at United Agents, my editor Henry Vines, and writer Matt Allen, who helped to turn the black and white of my story into colour (and NVG green).

Foxy
London, 2018

TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

6163 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA

www.penguin.co.uk

Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Bantam Press

an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright Jason Fox Consulting Limited 2018

Front cover portrait Robert Wilson; background photographs Getty Images and Alamy

Jason Fox has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473563100

ISBN 9781787631168

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

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

Is this my time?

Not here.

I want to go home.

I should be so lucky.

And were 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 Chinooks 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 didnt 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 Im in a helicopter, Im 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 hadnt caught a bullet or shrapnel splinter. Instead, the stress of incoming fire had tweaked my bodys sympathetic nervous system, the fight-or-flight response, and Id 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. Im 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 Id grabbed at the barrel of my gun for comfort. I winced. It wasnt my knees Id been clutching in terror: Id been squeezing the soldier next to me, and hed 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 others 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