One afternoon last month Dave Forshaw drove his Land Rover to a woodland park
in Esher, Surrey. The 32-year-old Territorial Army volunteer removed his
shoes, reclined his car seat and closed the windows. He then started a
chainsaw and lay there while the fumes killed him.
He was seen in his car the next morning by people walking dogs, but they
assumed he was sleeping. When he was still there the next day they summoned
help. The police found his army identity card inside the car and a letter
from an Australian colonel commending his conduct after his vehicle was hit
by a roadside bomb in Basra in July last year. Private Forshaw was
unscathed, but his three passengers were all injured. “I was astounded at
David’s composure as he went about the business of comforting his comrades,”
the colonel wrote.
On the night that the body of her son was found, Janet Dawes, the mother of
Private Forshaw, discovered a note that he had left in a wardrobe in his
bedsit in Mitcham. He was dyslexic, so she believes he must have spent many
hours writing it. He asked for the flag of St George to be draped over his
coffin, for Everybody Hurts, a song by R.E.M., to be played at his funeral
and for his ashes to be scattered at the Emirates stadium of his beloved
Arsenal football team.
Private Forshaw, normally a gregarious, fun-loving man, told why he had taken
his own life. “I’m leaving a lot of good friends and family behind and
taking the easy way out, but for once in my life instead of making other
people happy I am making myself happy. The best time of my life was being in
the Army and fighting for my country, England,” he wrote.
Mrs Dawes told The Times that her son, a decorator, had always wanted to join
the regular Army, but was barred by his dyslexia so joined the Territorials
instead. In October 2005 he was sent to Iraq and served two six-month tours
with only four weeks off in between. When he returned home in November 2006,
“he was the happiest I’d ever seen him, he was at his absolute prime”, she
said.
Then the decline began. He could not settle back into civilian life. He
drifted from one job to another, ran up debts and stopped attending training
sessions with the Territorials. He became moody. Some days he would hide
himself away. He began eating alone and visited his mother less. All he
wanted was to return to Iraq or Afghanistan, but his efforts to go back as a
soldier or private security contractor were repeatedly frustrated. “He could
not go on living the kind of pointless life he felt he was living. He wanted
to live a life of real purpose but it wasn’t there,” said Bobby Stevens, who
was his landlady for 11 years. So he ended it.
The military did not send an official representative to the funeral of Private
Forshaw and he will not appear on the official list of Iraq war casualties.
He may or may not have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD), but he was, in his own quiet way, a victim of that conflict, and in
that he is not alone.
The MoD keeps no figures, but at least one other reservist is known to have
committed suicide after serving in Iraq. In 2004, 13 months after returning
from a stint as an ambulance driver for the TA, Peter Mahoney, from
Carlisle, put on his uniform and medals and asphyxiated himself in his car,
surrounded by photos of his four children.
Experts believe that hundreds more reservists have returned from Iraq with
psychiatric problems and that many are isolated, bewildered, depressed and
in need of help. They say that reservists suffer more than regular soldiers
because the transition from military to civilian life is so abrupt, that
they are less prepared for the horrors they encounter and lack the same
support networks. Also, specialists such as medics and engineers in the
Territorials are often sent to Iraq individually, not as part of a unit.
A study by the King’s Centre for Military Health Research concluded last year
that as many as 6 per cent, about 700 in all, of the 12,000 reservists who
have been deployed in Iraq could be suffering from PTSD, and that reservists
suffered higher rates of depression than regular soldiers. A follow-up study
revealed that they found it harder to adjust to being back home and said
people did not understand what they had been through.
Shaun Rusling, vice-chairman of the National Gulf War Veterans and Families
Association, says that his organisation receives more than a hundred calls a
year from reservists with mental health problems.
Combat Stress, another charity that helps traumatised servicemen, believes
that the true scale of the problem has yet to emerge because it can take
soldiers years to realise that they need help. “The average veteran takes 13
years between leaving the services and getting in touch with us,” says
Robert Marsh, the spokesman for the organisation and a former reservist.
Reservists who developed psychiatric disorders after being demobilised had to
rely on the NHS until late last year, which had limited experience with
problems arising from conflicts. After the report by the King’s Centre, the
MoD opened the Reserves Mental Health Programme last November. This offers
mental health assessments at the Reserves Training and Mobilisation Centre
at Chilwell, near Nottingham, followed by treatment in military facilities,
if necessary. In its first 11 months the programme assessed 35 reservists
and sent 25 for treatment.
But independent experts say that the programme falls well short of what is
required because it relies on reservists seeking help at a time when they
are mentally debilitated. “Most people who have PTSD don’t know they have
it,” said Scott Garthley, a reservist from Northampton who was injured in
Iraq, developed PTSD, lost his long-term partner and £100,000-a-year job as
a banker, and recently brought a £2.8 million lawsuit against the MoD for
medical negligence. Few soldiers will readily admit to mental problems.
“It’s a macho world”, said one reservist, speaking anonymously. “First of
all, no one is going to give you a weapon again, but also you can’t say you
suffer from something because you’ve seen stuff, because it’s not meant to
bother you.”
Bill (not his real name) is a case in point. He is a burly veteran of the
Territorials who returned from his second tour in Iraq late last year.
Neither he nor three fellow reservists that The Times met in a bar in
northern England this week would give their names, because the MoD forbids
them to talk to the media. On his first tour an Iraqi stabbed Bill in the
groin during a riot in Basra. On his second his base was repeatedly hit by
mortar attacks. He now shows all the symptoms of PTSD: mood swings,
nightmares, flashbacks, chronic insomnia. He loses his temper over tiny
things and cannot deal with serious problems such as mortgage payments. Ask
about his civilian job as a van driver and he says: “I can’t give a f***
anymore. I just turn up, do what’s expected and go home.”
When he was provoked in a pub, a fight ensued and he bit the man’s ear off. He
is drinking twice as much as he used to, his marriage is strained and he can
no longer cope with civilian life in a country where, he says, few
understand, appreciate or are interested in what servicemen are doing in
Iraq. “I can’t settle down,” Bill said. “I’d go back to Iraq, or to
Afghanistan, tomorrow.”
For a long time Bill refused to admit that he had a problem. His wife and
friends persuaded him finally to visit a doctor. But when the doctor gave
him a form to fill out he threw it away. “You just can’t be bothered,” he
said. “It’s the knock-on effect it will have on my job in the TA. If I have
to go and see a shrink and they recommend time off, does it affect my
civilan job? Will it go on my record that I have a mental health problem?
You ignore it and say it will go away.”
None of the four reservists knew Bill was eligible for an assessment at
Chilwell, though the MoD says that it has made strenuous efforts to
publicise the programme. Indeed, they all felt that the moment they
demobilised the MoD lost all interest in them.
In one sense, however, Bill is lucky. His three friends served in Iraq with
him, and he can talk to them in a way that he cannot talk to his wife or
workmates. Private Forshaw did not have that. Like many reservists, he was
sent to Iraq with strangers. His mother said that after he returned to
suburban Surrey he had no friends who had shared the same experiences.
Nobody from the Territorials or the MoD contacted him to see if he was
coping with the transition to civilian life. He was not the sort of person
to share his problems with others — and knew that to have done so might have
scuppered his chances of returning to Iraq.
As he wrote in his suicide note: “The help was there but I did not take it.”
