The Times Magazine 23One young former rifleman I met sparring
at Hard Hitters last autumn, Stephen Murtagh,
who had his leg blown off in Helmand aged
19, described how he spent some of his
compensation payout on a car and two years
later rammed it into a police vehicle during
a chase. Raging at the officers who arrested
him, he was promptly sectioned.
“They told me I had mental health
problems, sectioned me and medicated me for
18 months until I finally managed to persuade
them that I wasn’t ill – that I was 19 when I’d
had my leg blown off and was wild,” he told
me. “But they wouldn’t listen. They came and
signed me out of the army while I was in a
mental health hospital.”
Although debate around PTSD’s origins
continues – some treatment therapies interpret
the condition more in terms of an injurious
trauma stored by the body rather than the
mind – most mental health specialists regard
it as a psychological disorder that results
from the brain glitching during a moment of
extreme trauma and misfiling the event rather
than laying it down as a memory, so that
it repeats itself as part of the present when
triggered, resulting in acute, disturbing recall,
sometimes involving visual flashbacks but
more often intrusive thoughts or emotions.
“The more you are at risk of losing your
life, or the more you witness others at risk of
losing their lives, the more likely it is that you
will get PTSD,” explained Dr Walter Busuttil,
consultant psychiatrist and former medical
director at Combat Stress, the UK’s leading
charity helping veterans recover from war-
related mental health issues. “The condition
is related to dose-response [the greater the
exposure, the greater the effect].”
Most soldiers return from war without
PTSD. Yet among those who are afflicted,
soldiers discharged from the army with the
condition untreated are most at danger of it
worsening. The experience of leaving their
regiment, the break in connection and the
attendant sense of “thwarted belongingness”
this brings, when combined with PTSD, add a
fuse to the trauma of war. In some, it takes all.When Andrew Francis came back from Sangin,
Sangin came back with him. He was 18 years
old when he went to Helmand with 2 Rifles in
2009, yet the unseen scars of the war remained
with him long after his homecoming, darkening
his moods and troubling his dreams.
A radio operator with A Company, he had
endured the excruciating heat of patrols, laden
with the weight of the radio on his back, his
Osprey armour, rifle, ammunition, grenades
and water; he had dropped to his knee every
five metres or so, while the man at the front
sweeping the ground with the Vallon detector
checked out possible IED locations; he had
lost friends and witnessed the grotesqueeffects of explosives on the bodies of fellow
riflemen; and when not witnessing the
violence himself, he had heard it through his
headset: a soundtrack that sometimes included
screaming and shouting, a mayhem of garbled
voices and desperate requests to a backbeat of
gunshots and explosions.
He was manning a radio when five soldiers
from C Company were killed on July 10 and
another ten wounded. The incident, the
deadliest of its kind for British soldiers in the
entire Afghanistan campaign, still pulls like a
black hole in the recall of Sangin veterans.
The day went like this:
A patrol set out. An IED went off. It killed
one soldier and dropped his remains over a
wall, badly wounded another and took the
leg from a platoon commander. There was
shooting. A quick reaction force rushed to the
scene to help evacuate casualties. The area
was strewn with daisy-chained IEDs. More
IEDs went off simultaneously, killing three
more soldiers. Their bodies were thrown high
in the air, described to me either as “bodies
up” or “ragdolled” by those who saw it. A flare
in one of the dead soldiers’ chest webbing
ignited as his body hurtled upwards. Another
rifleman was mortally wounded. Some of the
younger soldiers were crying; other men were
shouting and screaming. Some of the dead
had lost their faces. One soldier described
picking up lumps of a comrade and putting
them on a stretcher so they would not be
eaten by dogs. The survivors, the wounded
and the dead made it back to the patrol base.
The sound of weeping came with the night.
“There was a lot of sobbing,” I was told
by Rehan Pasha, the C Company veteran,
recalling the day. “Many of the riflemen were
just 18, 19 years old. Beyond reminding themthat those who had just died were good guys,
what can you say to someone at that point?
You have to leave them with their grief.”
I was told that, at day’s end in a nearby
patrol base, knowing that friends were
among the dead, Andrew Francis wept too,
overwhelmed by all that he had heard on his
radio headset. Another incident also troubled
him. During that tour he had killed a 15-year-
old Afghan during a firefight. It was unclear
if the teenager was a combatant.
Back home after the tour had finished, the
rifleman drank heavily. His moods dipped.
Late one night in 2010, the soldier’s mother,
Sharon Garton, heard him talking angrily
to himself while he was home on leave in
Mansfield. She went downstairs to find him
in deep distress.
“He was crying. He was angry. And I tried
speaking to him to ask him what was wrong,”
she told me when we met. “He said, ‘I can’t
tell you. You are my mum. I don’t want to
burden you with what is in my head, what
I’m thinking, what I’ve seen, what I’ve done.’ ”
They spoke for a while. At one point
Andrew Francis confided that he had killed
the teenager and mentioned that he had later
learnt the dead youth “had not carried a real
gun”. He never referred to the incident again.
Continuing his career as a soldier, he
completed a further tour of Afghanistan
in 2011, much quieter than the first. Later,
his regiment’s bugle badge tattooed on his
chest, Francis became a lance corporal in the
reconnaissance platoon, the battalion’s most
skilled formation. The gangly teenager-at-arms
had developed into a proud and dedicated
soldier, a veteran of two Afghan tours.
Yet the anniversaries of friends killed in
Sangin would often plunge him back into
grief. His medical records on his discharge
from the army in 2016, after he had been
medically downgraded following a back injury,
include the observation that the soldier, still
then only 25 years old, was suffering from
post-traumatic stress disorder. Although he
had a few token counselling sessions before
he left, the army made little effort either
to treat him before he was discharged or to
co-ordinate further treatment with the NHS.
Even the most cursory examination of
Andrew Francis’s service record should have
highlighted him as being vulnerable. His age
when exposed to multiple combat traumas
including the deaths of friends, the way he had
experienced moral injury in killing a possible
non-combatant, that he was diagnosed with
PTSD while in the army but then hastilyHIS FIRST SUICIDE ATTEMPT CAME SEVEN MONTHS
AFTER DEVELOPING FULL PTSD. A SECOND FOLLOWED
Ed Lycett, a platoon commander with 4 Rifles in Helmand
in 2009, currently seeking treatment for his PTSDJUDE EDGINTON