26 The Times Magazine
Three more soldiers were wounded by another
IED and the patrol came under fire from
the Taliban. The firefight continued as the
riflemen tried to evacuate their wounded
through a labyrinth of village alleyways. Lycett
ordered his men to hurl grenades over the
compound walls to clear a route to a landing
site, so that a helicopter could reach the
injured. By day’s close, the patrol were safely
back in their base. They had fought through
trouble under Lycett’s command. Wounded
comrades had been evacuated. Then a crowd
of about 200 angry Afghan villagers gathered
outside the base. They carried two litters: an
elderly woman lay dead on one; the body of a
little girl, about six or seven years old, lay on
another. They had been killed by British
grenades. Lycett allowed the families into
the patrol base to speak with him. The
conversation lasted three hours. The details
of what was said are wiped from his recall.
“The short version is that the two families
came in and I spent three hours talking with
the son of the old lady that we had killed and
the father of the little girl we had killed,” he
told me. “You don’t know whose grenade it
was, but essentially throughout those three
hours you are the one responsible for having
killed another man’s child.”
After leaving the army – he had wanted to
stay but was medically downgraded due to his
hearing loss – Lycett worked for five years in
security-related positions in the Middle East,
Africa and Afghanistan, restless and high-
functioning, until a sudden panic attack (so
severe that he blacked out) precipitated
full-blown PTSD, complete with nightmares,
hyperarousal and rage. His first suicide attempt
came seven months later. A second followed.
Unable to work, at one point he lived in
a homeless shelter for former soldiers; at
another, he lived on Dartmoor, where he
spent time with drifting communities of
travellers among whom Afghanistan veterans
were a regular presence. “This might sound
dramatic, but, in the past four years, the
number of days of joy I can count on two
hands,” he told me. “There is a rage that I
have not felt before, long periods of insomnia
and an inability to put order in things.”
He is saving to pay for an evidence-based
treatment for PTSD used in America among
Navy Seals, a stellate ganglion block (an
injection of local anaesthetic into a collection
of nerves in the neck). Earlier, Lycett began
a course of eye movement desensitisation
and reprocessing – EMDR – one of the two
principal treatments for PTSD used by the
NHS. The sessions involved him holding
electric paddles as a specialist asked him to
recall moments of extreme trauma. For some
it works. It drove Lycett wild.
“Most sessions would end with me
throwing down these vibrating paddles,”
he said. “I just couldn’t f***ing do it. I just
wanted to tear the place up.”There was no element of moral injury
involved in Caroline Bull’s work in Sangin.
As a 26-year-old combat medic with 2 Rifles,
she had treated wounded British soldiers and
Afghans alike. Yet the repeated anticipatory
stress of waiting in her small aid post for the
sound of explosions or shooting that could
either signify the arrival of damaged riflemen,
or her requirement to run to them amid
screams and shouts and gunfire, carried a
hidden mental barb. She healed people. The
war got her anyway.
Most of her tour was spent with C Company.
On her first night in the patrol base at Wishtan,
a soldier became a triple amputee. Ten days
later she had helped triage the casualties of the
July 10 daisy-chain bombings. She was waiting
as part of a quick reaction force on August 20,
2009, when Paul Jacobs went out on patrol.
As soon as the first bomb went off, killing
Private Young, she ran towards the explosion
to treat the wounded. By the time she got
there the second bomb had detonated, killing
Serjeant McAleese and blinding Paul Jacobs.
Bull gave immediate treatment to Jacobs,
whom she found standing upright, covered in
blood and with dreadful injuries, swearing
loudly as gunfire rippled across the scene.
The wounded soldier was loaded on a
stretcher into the bucket of an engineers’
digger, and Bull perched beside him as the
vehicle bumped its way back to the patrol
base. “Jakey had a lot of injuries and was in
intense pain,” she recalled. “So every time we
went over a bump he’d gasp. At least I knew
he was still responsive.”
Originally a reservist, her return to civilian
life after the Sangin tour was immediate, and
her subsequent career working in the security
crisis management and kidnap and ransom
sectors accelerated, taking the former combat
medic around the world. Then, suddenly, one
morning in 2017, eight years after her tour, she
could not get out of bed.
“I woke up one Friday and thought, ‘I can’t
do this any more,’ ” she told me. “And that
was just the thought of getting up for work...
I couldn’t see past it. Suddenly your cup
overflows and you are unable to function asa normal human being. My body just stopped.
My mind stopped with it.”
As symptoms of PTSD developed, any form
of waiting, even a queue in a supermarket,
triggered a response in which Bull, nauseous,
her heart hammering, was overwhelmed by
feelings stored from her experience of waiting
daily to treat victims of violence in war.
Crowded spaces; bars; loud, hyperactive
individuals – all became unbearable,
resurrecting chaotic sensations attached to
Sangin’s shouts and cries. Her life froze for a
two-year period. Incapacitated and unable to
work, she took to wearing noise-cancelling
headphones to silence the world.
“There were times when I wanted to go to
sleep and not wake up,” she said. “I never had
suicide ideation as a thing, but I can see how
easy it is if you want the pain to go away and
you don’t feel there is anything else to help you.”
Bull’s experiences trying to seek help
through the NHS were disastrous. The first
therapist assigned to her case announced that
they were unable to cope with Bull’s level of
combat-related PTSD trauma after only the
second session. Reflecting on her lowest ebb,
she described herself as “dead wood”.
Yet she survived. Regeneration is a shoreline
that most soldiers afflicted by the tangled
trauma of their war can reach, provided they
can first master the riddles of accessing the
right treatment. Caroline Bull’s recovery began
with a six-week residential course of treatment
at Combat Stress. A long journey followed,
much of it orientated towards redefining her
identity in the place beyond war. Today, her
headphones remain in her study. She is in the
final stages of retraining as a paramedic and
can bear the noise of the world once more.
“The blood, guts and gore were never my
trigger,” she said. “That wasn’t my problem.
My problem was being in a country full of
IEDs and people shooting. Operating at a
certain level again is good for me. Being on
an ambulance in London gives me a buzz. It
gives me the buzz back.”
We talked for a while longer, as outside the
room unseen London traffic droned past the
window and Tube trains rumbled through
the floor, reflecting on the war gone by and
that August day 12 years ago when I listened
to her fate though the crackle of radios in
Sangin as Paul Jacobs’ world went dark and
Rob Thomson’s eyes glowed in grief. We
spoke of the fall of Kabul, Helmand and
the blood of summer.
Just before she left, I asked if she were to
have her time again, would she go to Sangin
with 2 Rifles. I knew the answer already:
war’s great paradox is no surprise. Thomson’s
“tight gang” remained tighter than perhaps
the general knew.
“Yeah,” she said smoothly. “Hands down.
I don’t regret going at all.” n‘I THOUGHT, “I CAN’T
DO THIS ANY MORE.” MY
BODY JUST STOPPED. MY
MIND STOPPED WITH IT’