Battle Scars by Jason Fox

Author:Jason Fox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2018-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

19

This is not good.

This is really not good.

As I bunkered down in a luxury hotel room, unable to push away my bed covers, unwilling to face the sunshine outside, I came to an understanding that riding the emotional roller-coaster of a gun battle was pretty similar to wrestling the fallout to PTSD. Both shared the same mental push and pull. There were moments of intense stress. Often my heart seemed to be bursting through my rib cage as I became weighed down by the never-ending questions of What next? and What if? My worst-case scenarios were replayed over and over. But then faint slivers of hope would arrive, and then fade, those painfully brief interludes usually trailed by flashes of anarchy as everything around me spiralled out of control.

During that period I believed there was nothing in my power to stop a bad incident from taking place – it was inevitable. I found myself living in epic chaos where surreal, almost slow-motion episodes of drama unfolded, such as a hellish argument at home. Moments of calm collided with moments of combustion. Life felt dangerously unpredictable, 24/7. There were so many false endings. On countless occasions I sensed some fresh breakthrough or an escape route that might lead to recovery. It might have been a thread of a new idea in my therapy sessions, or a combination of pills that temporarily lifted my mood, and for those brief periods claiming resolution seemed possible. The reward I wanted so badly in those snapshots of optimism was my military mojo, fully restored and in better shape than ever before, there for me to utilize once more.

But I couldn’t.

Given my experience with epic and awful battles, it would have been understandable had anyone outside the mental health profession assumed that I could carry my issues like a slightly-heavier-than-usual piece of kit. Elite fighters like myself were perceived as having been psychologically toughened; my working attitude was finely tuned to functioning within seemingly impossible scenarios. In the past I had been able to push past my breakpoint in elite training and operate in conditions so awful that only a tiny percentage of soldiers made it through. Suffering had become my speciality and no warzone had proved too tough. I once remember emerging unscathed from a seemingly never-ending battle that had lasted for over twenty-four hours – though its intensity was nowhere near as exhausting as my conflict with PTSD.

The details of that scrap still felt vivid. We had been ordered to attack a fortified position which was pitched on one side of a deep valley. We’d been informed that the place was heavily guarded with machine guns. Intelligence had warned us that a lot of senior bad dudes were camped there and the place was considered to be something of a hornets’ nest. It was decided we should open fire at night. During the crazy battle that followed, the valley was bombarded for six hours, the enemy firing all sorts of artillery at us; our

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