A hero broken by war: Afghanistan veteran Jake Wood admits he's a walking timebomb - and there are hundreds more like him



Struggle: Jake Wood spiralled into the bleakness of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Jake Wood is paranoid. To stand any chance of sleep at night, he must lie facing a closed bedroom door with a hammer close to hand under the bed, so he can kill any night intruders before they kill him.



And even then he may well wake up screaming and drenched in a sweat of terror.

Taking a shower in the morning, he never takes his eyes off the bathroom door, though he knows full well that it is locked and bolted.

Out in the street, the sound of a pneumatic drill sends him to the ground on one knee, arm raised, primed to fire.



‘Just the bang of a door and I am back in Afghanistan,’ the former soldier says.



Everyday life defeats a man whose courage under fire cannot be questioned, but who is haunted by what he has seen and done.

‘I cannot stand the sensation of anyone walking unseen behind me. On the Underground, I never take my eyes off anyone with a backpack in case their hands make a sudden movement towards a detonator.’

His senses deceive him. ‘I see blood in the blank canvas of snow, just as I saw blood in the pale sand of Helmand Province.



'I know I am hallucinating, but when I turn away and force myself to look again, it is still there.’

And, as he explains movingly in a new book, Wood knows the precise moment he finally lost control in Afghanistan.

As an experienced Territorial Army NCO, he was trying to stay alive under an enemy onslaught on forward operating base Inkerman — a makeshift outpost behind mud walls in the dangerous Sangin Valley — when a mortar eviscerated his respected, loved company commander.



As the ‘boss’, Captain Dave Hicks, lay dying in front of him in 2007, Wood’s mind went blank and his eyes took on that far-away look known as the ‘thousand-yard stare’ — the indication of a man who’s seen too much blood-letting and done too much killing.

What angers him is that ‘idiots’ back home who know nothing about the reality of war try to emulate that look.

‘I know of young men, sitting in front of war films and war games, who idolise this condition as a mark of a true warrior. But only some naive soul who had never felt this nothingness would think something so dumb.

‘You are no longer human, with all those depths and highs and nuances of emotion of a normal person. There is no feeling any more.

‘My mind has locked all this down. Instead, there is just an overwhelming blackness.

‘But when I close my eyes, I see the faces of the Taliban I killed. And I see Dave Hicks on a stretcher, a gaggle of anxious soldiers around him, an arm holding an IV fluid bag above him, voices urging him to hang on and him shaking gently as he tries to stay in this life, but can’t . . .’

Taking a shower in the morning, Jake Wood never takes his eyes off the bathroom door, though he knows full well that it is locked and bolted (stock pic)

Here is the almost unbridgeable gulf of understanding between the reality experienced by front-line soldiers we send to fight in Afghanistan and ‘home’ — the safe place they leave and then return to, many scarred in a way that the rest of us can barely imagine.

As a military historian, I have read thousands of first-hand accounts of war, in all its gore and glory, brutality and suffering. But there were tears in my eyes as I followed Wood’s story of his descent into the bleakness of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

I fear that, having sent tens of thousands of our young men and women to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, our society sits on a volcano of suppressed emotion like his that — with the condition still not fully grasped and sympathised with — may erupt in our faces in years to come.Wood, a lance-sergeant, was a part-time soldier, dropping in and out of three-month and six-month tours.

It made the contrast with ‘normal’ life even sharper and more painful.

One minute he was just another grey-suited systems analyst in a bank in the rat race of London’s financial district, fighting for a place on the Tube or a drink at a bar.

The next, he was a squaddie in sand-coloured fatigues, toting an SA89 assault rifle in the badlands of Helmand Province, being shot at by Taliban insurgents.

The dissonance was huge and mind-blowing. He chose to go to war. He was bored at work, he had girl trouble, he wanted some excitement.



After months of killing, the thoughts of what he had done would keep him awake at night

So, as a fully-trained member of the Honourable Artillery Company, the City of London’s centuries-old volunteer regiment, he went to Iraq in 2003 with the invasion force to oust Saddam Hussein.

Out on patrol, he lapped up the danger and thrived on the camaraderie.



Then, back home in the office, he was among people he could no longer relate to, living lives he thought frivolous. He felt like an outsider.

At the next opportunity, he took leave from his job again and returned to Basra in Iraq, where the British occupation force was fighting an increasingly bloody war against the insurgents armed with deadly roadside bombs and rocket- propelled grenades.

Under siege in their fortified camps, he and his mates endured ‘bowel-turning, sweating wet eternities of terror’.

Out on patrol, each man faced the extra horror of knowing that capture could well mean being beheaded.

Then again, the buzz of action thrilled him, and he revelled in the aggression needed to do his job and stay alive.

Amid the adrenaline and fear, his long-distance love affair with a girl back home soured — foundering on her loneliness, his jealousy and the fact he could not talk even to her about how it felt to be constantly balancing between living and dying.

The official Army advice to soldiers is to ‘communicate’ their feelings. But avoiding them is precisely what he — and thousands of others — did. Walled up inside their experiences, they suffered their traumas in silence.

Another return to ‘real’ life in London turned into disaster. He was losing his grip, exploding into violence in a bar, curling into a ball and crying when alone.

He was at odds with the world he came home to, where people seemed obsessed with celebrities but ignorant and uncaring of his reality.

When the call came to return to the front line — in Afghanistan — he leapt at the opportunity, because soldiering was the only life that made any sense to his troubled mind.



Up to this point, he had never knowingly killed anyone. He had nearly pulled the trigger several times, but never committed the ultimate act.

And, bizarrely, in his increasing frenzy, he longed to.

‘In the darkest, most naive recesses of my soldier’s soul, I wanted a “kill,” ’ he confesses. ‘Maybe it would be a thrill or as straightforward and impersonal as aligning sight and target and squeezing a finger.’

In Afghanistan in 2007, he got his wish. From a hilltop, he trained his monster of a 50-calibre heavy machine gun on a house in a compound where four Taliban were hiding. ‘I fired, a man died. I tried to feel something, anything, but there was nothing.’

But later he heard a radio transmission from that compound and the terrified voice of one of the wounded men trapped there calling for help.

He had a name — Musafer — and when no help came he bled to death. Suddenly, Wood could not get the image of this dying man out of his head.

After months more of killing, the thoughts of what he had done would keep him awake at night.

‘Much later, back home, feelings ambush me when I’m on my own, and I shake and break down.

‘I remind myself of what the Taliban would have done to me or my friends. But it does not take away the memory of methodically firing bursts into every corner of that compound — cold, pathological.

‘I scream and wither as my soul screams and withers, too, as my mind’s eye brings the gun sight to the fore — and I remember the bleeding, terrified Musafer.’

And then, not long after he had poured death on another human being, he was in the firing line as 150 Taliban surrounded the Inkerman military base and threw everything they had at its flimsy defences.



A grenade punched through the wall and blew the legs off an Afghan Army soldier nearby.

‘He is bleeding everywhere from the waist down. He looks up into my face with glazing eyes, smiles the faintest of smiles and murmurs soft snatches of song as he slips away into the darkness coming to take him.’

Then came the death of Captain Hicks, and Wood could take no more.

A sergeant-major saw that ‘thousand-yard stare’ in his eyes and sent him off to a psychiatric nurse, who diagnosed Acute Stress Reaction. He was told he was the 50th psychological casualty on that six-month tour alone.

Soon he was on his way home — and, as a part-time soldier, straight back into civvy street.

He came back to a country that seemed utterly indifferent to the suffering of its soldiers.

‘There are no flags or crowds of waiting loved ones, just the steadily corrosive feeling of being overlooked — and in favour of Paris Hilton and all the latest meaningless distractions inherent to our celebrity culture. I realised the so-called Military Covenant between soldier and nation was just a piece of paper, filed out of sight and out of mind.’

Meanwhile, ‘the ghost of Afghanistan walked with me in every footstep I took.



The war had come home with me. In my dreams, I run alone through streams and alleyways from innumerable hordes that want my blood.

‘Sometimes I kill some of my pursuers and wake just as their waxen faces and glassy eyes stare back at me. In other dreams I wake just as I am about to be ripped apart.’

It wasn’t just the memories and guilt that affected Wood. It was also the fact that the things that had kept him alive in Afghanistan — innate aggression, suspicion of any untoward movement, instant reaction — were unwanted in ‘normal’ life.

As a soldier on the front line, he was constantly alert for lethal threats.





'The book’s title is Among You, and its message is that mentally and morally wounded soldiers like him are all around us, but society tends not to see them.'

His life depended on that. Back home, this had him ducking for cover whenever a car backfired.



He found it harder than ever to get on with people. He couldn’t concentrate on his job at the bank.

‘One moment I’m a heartbeat away from fainting and the next having to clench my sweating fists under the desk to stop me exploding. I feel like the walking dead.’

He was not surprised when the bank sent him home on sick leave — but disgusted when the private health care company he had been paying into refused the cost of treatment, because his condition was ‘caused by war’.

Wood’s problems piled up. The bank fired him, he was medically discharged from the Army and — the final straw — banned from going to his old regiment to meet mates because he dared to criticise the lack of support his family had received while he was away, and the lack of care he was getting.

With no job, forced to live on benefits, he self-harmed and contemplated suicide.

‘The ghosts and demons never leave me alone. I cannot sleep.



And I do not want to be part of a life that is just going to fade away into financial poverty, as a waning shade of my former self.’

The Army’s offer of a derisory £9,000 lump sum for his pains only added to his crippling sense of abandonment and betrayal.

Therapy, followed by a stay in the psychiatric wing of a hospital, dragged him back from the brink. Then a sympathetic lawyer took up his case for proper compensation.

He won. His claim that his mental health had been seriously affected by his battlefield experiences was successful, he was awarded £140,000 and a guaranteed income for life.

He began, slowly, to mend. Writing the book was part of the process. It deserves a wide, appreciative audience because it takes us on a haunting journey into the mind of someone who was no saint, who went to war for his own purposes and of his own free will, but did our dirty work and suffered gravely as a result.

The book’s title is Among You, and its message it that mentally and morally wounded soldiers like him are all around us, but society tends not to see them.

‘Wounds may heal, but scars remain,’ he says. He longs for a wife, children, love, but fears he may be too damaged.

But there is hope. At a Bonfire Night party, he nerved himself to endure the bangs, and the six-year-old daughter of a friend took his hand. ‘Don’t be scared, Jake,’ she said. For the first time, he wasn’t.