The Times Magazine 21That summer was also a fulcrum in the
Afghan war, the point at which advantage
slipped from the coalition’s grasp and the
conflict became an attritional waiting game
that was to culminate in August last year,
when America blinked first and ceded
Afghanistan to the Taliban.
2009 has since become infamous for
another reason: as the source of clusters of
suicides among British veterans who served
in Helmand on Herrick 10, whose deaths
are the most public manifestation of the
wider-scale mental health crisis affecting those
who fought in the Afghan campaign.
The Rifles are central to this story. As
the largest British infantry regiment, which
had undertaken more operational tours there
than any other, they had suffered the highest
corresponding casualty rate in the army
during the Afghan campaign: 55 soldiers
killed and 258 wounded among its five regular
battalions of the time.
The war followed many home. At least
22 serving or former Rifles soldiers have died
through suicide or misadventure since 2011,
according to figures gathered by the veterans’
activist group Veterans United Against Suicide.
Ten of these dead soldiers served with 2 Rifles.
Each suicide followed a unique path
involving different factors, but for many of
those who came back with PTSD, it was the
loss of connection with their fellow soldiers in
the aftermath of leaving the army, the sense of
“thwarted belongingness”, that served to amplify
the trauma of the war, multiplying the mental
impact of the original horrors. Bad things
happened in war, but peace could be hell too.Since being wounded in Sangin, Paul Jacobs has
emerged as one of the most inspiring soldiers
of the Afghan campaign, fighting to redefine the
boundaries of what can be achieved as a blind
survivor, climbing Kilimanjaro, undertaking
triathlons, marathons and parachute jumps. He
speaks of his physical challenges and PTSD
with searing emotional articulation. There
are multiple dimensions to his own trauma,
beyond the savagery of his blinding moment
and last recall of sight. Severance was one.
As a child he was raised in care and
experienced an upbringing that had included
violence, hardship and trouble. He was hungry
and sleeping rough before joining the army. As
a soldier he found a place of belonging and
security that he had never known before.
“I came from nothing,” he told me. “Next,
I’m so proud to be wearing the greens, my
boots are dead clean. I’ve got a bathroom,
a wardrobe, a TV, a bed. And I felt safe. For
the first time in a long time, I felt safe. And
I wanted to prove myself so badly.”
“The army taught me how to love,” he
said on another occasion, “when I’d never
had love in my life.”He was also a natural soldier, who as a
“Vallon man”, so called because he was at the
front of Sangin patrols sweeping the ground
for IEDs with a Vallon detector, became one
of the most trusted riflemen in his company.
“Jakey was up for everything,” recalled
Rehan Pasha, a corporal with 2 Rifles in
Sangin. “You just knew that, in going to him,
you’d get a volunteer. He was so up for it.”
Discharged from the army due to his
wounds, Jacobs had to readjust from being the
ambitious, go-to young fighter in 2 Rifles, a
soldier everyone wanted up front on patrol,
to being a blinded civilian with severe PTSD
who needed help to cross a road. “I still
struggle with it,” he said. “Unfortunately, I am
vulnerable. I may be a big, burly 6ft 2in man
with all the mouth and the get up and go. But
how can I get up and go if I need assistance
to cross the road? I have to accept this fact. In
my head I’m still me, but physically I am not.”
Last year added to his psychological
burdens. In January Jacobs received word
that a badly wounded soldier he had helped
evacuate after an IED blast in Sangin had
been found dead in his sleep. Not long
afterwards, three 2 Rifles veterans, all in
their thirties, died by suicide or misadventure
over a three-week period.
He reached out to a veterans’ mental health
agency. “I begged them for help,” he said. Covid
restrictions delayed the response. Eventually he
was offered an appointment with a counsellor
in a room at the back of an Asda store.
“I’m struggling with my head, and they
wanted me to walk through Asda to meet
some tosser in a back room who has probably
never seen or had any experience like that.”
He turned down the appointment. Soon
afterwards came word of the fall of Kabul.
“I mean, what came out of my eyes was
like a bloody waterfall,” he told me. “I cried
and I cried and cried.”Yet when we met, Jacobs was on the up
again, this time boxing blind, sparring with his
coach, Luke Nevin, another former rifleman
and onetime battalion boxer. Nevin was one
of the founders of a Liverpool boxing charity,
Hard Hitters, established last year as a place
for ex-soldiers to meet and train. He had met
Jacobs by chance after noticing the scarred
man’s Rifles tattoo in a gym. Ever up for a
challenge, Jacobs was keen to box as a blind
fighter. He found too that boxing alongside
former soldiers, including other men damaged
by the war, gave him an invigorated sense of
purpose during a harsh year in which the war
had loomed over his thoughts.
Recognising the appeal of lost kinship
among the city’s wider community of veterans,
Nevin contacted a new outreach programme
for Rifles veterans, Always a Rifleman, and
sought advice from two Liverpool veterans
at its helm, Baz Melia and Danny McCreith,
on how to establish a boxing charity as part
of their programme. The synergy between
Jacobs and Nevin evolved. Other veterans
gravitated towards them to train. Hard Hitters
was formed, and the charity is now branching
out as a space for veterans to meet, train and
spar across several of the city’s boxing clubs.
For Jacobs, at a low ebb, the regathering of
tribe carried immediate positive effect.
“I’m getting back to who I am, because
I’m finding the right people,” he told me after
a Hard Hitters sparring session with Nevin
at the city’s Willaston Amateur Boxing Club.
“It doesn’t matter how many tours you’ve
done or what medals you have. Once we’ve
closed the door in here, we are all back with
a community that we understand.”The lonely voyages of traumatised soldiers,
bereft of their clan, journeying through
emotional exile after war, have been described
for thousands of years. Homer’s poems were
replete with the loss, rage, guilt and solitude
experienced by psychologically wounded
warriors. Best known among them, Odysseus,
burdened with PTSD-like symptoms, took a
circuitous ten-year journey in The Odyssey,
beset by trial and challenge, as he tried to
return home after the Trojan war.
The condition entered modern popular
consciousness with the 1982 film First Blood,
starring Sylvester Stallone as traumatised
Vietnam veteran John Rambo, wandering
small-town America, unable to adjust to
peace and primed to clash with authority:
a state many of today’s Afghanistan veterans
would recognise.‘WHENEVER I AM IN A DARK SPACE, THE LAST
THING I SEE IS PRIVATE YOUNG TRIGGERING AN IED’
Paul Jacobs on patrol in AfghanistanCOURTESY OF REHAN PASHA