Never Broken (9 page)

Switching off completely from the hell of Iraq was bliss. I put on the only civvies I had with me: filthy brown combats and a black T-shirt. I’d never been anywhere like Kuwait, which is a beautiful country, dripping in wealth. It was a world away from where we’d been and it felt much richer than our own country. There was a sense of unreality – we had just stepped out of a war zone and now we were able to jump in a taxi, stop for coffee and walk freely and without fear. Even using a cashpoint machine felt like a treat.

The streets were lined with more Ferraris than I’d ever seen in my life and I wandered from shop to shop looking in the windows, admiring the latest fashions and drinking in the normality until we found a Debenhams, the only store we recognised from the UK. Inside it was exactly like the shops at home, except the clothes were more modest, with long sleeves and dresses and skirts that would cover legs. Desperate to take off our dusty clothing we all splashed out and bought
a change of clothes each. I chose a bright pink kaftan so my arms were covered, and a pair of long shorts, along with a modest black swimming costume as we planned to visit a water park the following day.

We’d arranged to stay at the US camp as it catered for Allied troops who were moving forward to other countries and when we discovered the American soldiers had a line dancing night, it only added to the surreal atmosphere. We stayed up all night before heading to Kuwait’s biggest water park and had the time of our lives there, whizzing down water shoots, diving and swimming and generally letting our hair down. All the women were in burkinis but no one bothered us and we had an amazing time – mostly because it was in such stark contrast to where we’d been.

That night we dined at the exclusive Kuwait Towers. Eating amazing food, although there was no alcohol, we gazed out at the views across the city. It was spectacular, but all I wanted was to have Jamie and Milly with me, and the elephant in the room was that we had to go back. We crammed a two-week holiday into forty-eight hours, staying out until literally ten minutes before we had to be at camp for the flight back, dressing again in full kit in case we faced an attack.

Within hours of flying back to Basra I was brought back down to earth with a bump. Talking to Sally, while I was ironing my kit for the next day in our tent, gossiping about our break, we were interrupted by a distinct whistling over our heads. ‘What was that?’ I said and she said: ‘It must have been a helicopter or something.’ With that, there was an absolutely enormous bang and dust flooded into the tent. Everything that we owned fell to the floor. My ears were ringing – it was such an enormous boom. A mortar had sailed over the top of our
heads and landed close enough to shake the ground around us. With that, the mortar alarm went off.

That night, the camp took such a pounding from too many mortars to count. Hit after hit, it just went on and on. We all put on our body armour and helmets and lay inside our concrete coffins, praying for it to stop. Every time another mortar went off, I shook more and more, just waiting to get blown to smithereens. I grabbed one of the photos I kept of Milly beside my bed and I looked at her, praying the onslaught would end.

After forty-eight hours of relative normality I found the whole experience overwhelming. I’d never known fear like it. I kept inwardly repeating to myself: ‘Please let it pass’ and I tried to focus on Milly’s smile when we were reunited, but as the bombardment became more intense I started sobbing. I knew that people were dying. Reality had dawned by that point that there was a chance I might not make it home to my family. I became acutely aware of the fact that I was in my early twenties and of my own fragile mortality.

During a brief lull my friend Sally crawled over and lay inside my breeze blocks with me. Cuddling me, as much for her own comfort as mine, she said, ‘Are you alright?’

Desperate, I replied: ‘I’m not going to get home from here and I’ve got a two-year-old daughter.’ Inconsolable, I just couldn’t shake a terrible feeling that something bad was going to happen to me and I was genuinely scared witless. Somehow I’d managed to pull myself back together by the time the onslaught ended. I’d had my self-pitying moment and now I had to get over it and get on with the job I’d been trained to do.

But after Kuwait it was just incredibly hard to get back
into the mindset of being in a war. When the mortars stopped flying, our ordeal didn’t end. Members of the ordnance team started walking round the perimeter of our tent. We could see their feet and the flash of their torches and they kept saying: ‘Stay down! Stay down!’ as the all-clear hadn’t been given.

‘What do you think they are doing?’ I asked Sally.

‘They are looking for unexploded devices,’ she replied.

So they must have counted the incoming devices and realised there was an unexploded one somewhere. We lay there in fear that it would detonate before they got to it. I don’t know if they ever found anything – thankfully it wasn’t around the perimeter of our tent, but that was the worst attack I ever experienced and it was so traumatic that I remember it like it happened yesterday.

It was so bad that my boss, who was much older than me, came to find me to check that I was OK. He gave me a big hug and said: ‘Are you alright?’ My eyes welled up as I said: ‘No.’ So we went outside with some of the lads for a cigarette to calm our jangling nerves and then we got hit again so we all had to lay on the ground until it was over.

Because I’d had my tears I was OK for that second attack, but one of the lads afterwards couldn’t light his cigarette as his hands were shaking so much. He kept saying: ‘Fucking hell, I can’t believe this is happening!’ and his adrenaline was going, whereas my tears had been my release. I grabbed hold of his fingers to steady him and used my lighter to spark him up.

I realised then that the lads felt exactly the same fear as I did – it’s just that they often bottled it up and that’s why, when they got home, they struggled more in some ways to come to terms with what they’d gone through. When the
bombing ended, and after seeing his reaction, I couldn’t help but think of the young boys who had to face so much and that it included potentially facing down insurgents every time they left camp. Even though everyone believed at that time we were in Iraq for the right reasons, I felt it still must be hard to deal with.

When Op Minimise was lifted a day later I rang my dad. For weeks I’d been coming to the realisation that my chances of getting out unscathed were diminishing day by day. I remember sobbing down the phone: ‘Dad, you need to get me home. I’m going to die out here. I don’t care how you do it but you’ve got to get me back.’ I hadn’t told them how bad things were before, but now I was scared and I wanted to go home. It had been easier not to tell them about it beforehand as I didn’t think they’d understand, and also I was worried about worrying them. For that reason I went for weeks without emailing as I didn’t want to lie, or I’d write funny stories about the Portaloo man to avoid talking about what was happening.

Dad told me afterwards he was worried but he didn’t let me know it. ‘Don’t be silly, you can’t be a deserter, you need to do the job that you have trained to do. You are out there to help Iraq. You will be home on R&R soon and you will be fine,’ he said to reassure me. I remember repeating: ‘You don’t understand. I’m going to die out here. I’m not going to come home. There’s been a terrible mortar attack, people have died out here.’

At the time they dismissed it as just a really bad day and that I was having an emotional outburst. Inside they were worried sick and every day Mum would check the news the minute she got home from work to see if there had been any explosions, injuries or deaths. For the months I was out there she feared
hearing on the news: ‘Someone has been killed but the family have not yet been informed.’ But Dad’s words made me get myself together. I hoped that in some small way I was helping to make a difference to innocent people out there, perhaps even a child like my own daughter.

Over time I got used to the rockets. Sometimes I even thought I preferred it when there was lots incoming – at least we knew what they were up to. I even managed to sleep through some of the alarms at night, although I don’t know whether that was a good thing or not. Camp life wasn’t all bad.

One of the highlights was a Saturday night on camp. The camp was dry – meaning there was no alcohol – but after the pounding I decided we needed a drink. I had a rare day of stand-down over the following twenty-four hours and I knew I would have no responsibility the next day, so I asked one of the locals who worked on camp, who had tried to sell me booze previously, to get some for us. I paid him in dollars and the following day, he walked up to me with my contraband: a litre-sized bottle of Smirnoff vodka, which I concealed in my tent.

That night everyone had the same aim: to have a toast to friends and try to forget the shit of where we were. Quickly quite tiddly, I decided to wander over to a social tent. John spotted me giggling while he was playing cards with a senior officer and immediately knew something was up. He quickly threw in his hand and got me out of there the moment he smelt booze on my breath. I’d only had a little tipple, but if I’d been caught, there would have been a strict punishment for flouting the rules. Thanks to John no one spotted me and that was the only time I broke the no-alcohol rule.

In May 2007 I became aware via my colleagues that a VIP
would be arriving through my primary role in OPLOC. The VIP had to be signed in and out of Theatre, just like everyone else. News of a mystery arrival spread like wildfire around camp as all the lads had to put up green netting the length of the perimeter fence, just in case an insurgent sniper decided to try to take a pot shot from outside.

When the VIP arrived, it turned out to be Tony Blair, on what was to be his final tour of Iraq as Prime Minister. While I saw his entourage, I didn’t clap eyes on Blair himself, as we weren’t allowed close enough, but through the office I knew when he was expected to be checked out of Theatre. While he was there, the camp experienced a mortar attack, so he had a proper taste of what it was like. He ended up leaving earlier than we had anticipated but whether that was for operational reasons (timing it earlier than it was supposed to be, just in case someone tried to attack the plane) or due to the mortar attack, I suppose I’ll never know.

While the PM was a diversion from the monotony of camp life, without booze we also invented other ways to let our hair down. John decided to host a fancy-dress night to boost morale, so thirty of us all got dressed up from odds and sods we managed to salvage from around the camp. I was a fairy made out of old ration boxes covered in tin foil and my pink shower curtain; John dressed as a hula girl, with two paper bowls covered in brown camouflage cream as his ‘coconut bra’, along with a ‘grass’ skirt made of mine tape. Even ‘Mustafa Shag’ was dressed and put in an appearance during the night! It was brilliant seeing everyone dressed up in their costumes. Two of the guys brought along guitars, followed by someone with a battery-powered iDock, so we had music.

Ironically, it was my friendship with John that ultimately
changed my life. As I explained earlier, when he told me that he was at the end of his six-month deployment and could get home early to his wife and son I didn’t hesitate to volunteer to cover his duty. I wouldn’t have got through my tour without John so I was really happy to help him, perhaps more so than for anyone else on camp. Whether it was bad luck or fate, that decision changed the trajectory of my life. Shortly after the duty started, the building I was standing in took a direct mortar hit. There was no warning, the building was flattened and I was buried, alive and alone, beneath it.

I
t’s the call every parent who has a son or daughter serving abroad dreads. Just after midnight, Jamie rang my parents at home in Cumbria and his voice cracked as he told my dad: ‘I’m so sorry but Hannah’s been injured. She’s alive but it’s bad.’

The Army had wanted to send someone to knock on their door, but instead of sending the local police, as there was no barracks nearby, Jamie wanted to break the news himself. Mum has always been stoic and she was immediately practical: ‘What can we do?’ was her first response. They would have been prepared to fly out to Iraq if that were possible, as they just wanted to be with me.

Jamie said: ‘For now, we can only wait. All I know at the moment is that she’s very seriously injured [VSI]. It’s such early days they are still working on her at the hospital out there and it’s going to take time before anymore information comes through. Let’s just hope to God that she’s OK.’

In Army speak there are various grades of injury and the first is Casualty, which is generally not too bad. After that, there are three further grades of injury, where your next of kin would need to be informed: Serious, Very Seriously Injured, and Death. Jamie and my dad were aware that VSI meant they weren’t talking about a scratch, but thankfully Mum had no idea of the significance of those three words.

The time spent waiting was the worst of their lives. They didn’t sleep; it was agonising waiting for the next piece of news to drip through. Once she knew I wasn’t flying home for forty-eight hours Mum decided to go into work, just to occupy her mind. She was so ashen that as soon as the head teacher saw her, he called her in and said, ‘I can tell by your face that something is terribly wrong.’

As soon as Mum told him, she was given time off indefinitely to help look after me, no questions asked. Meanwhile, Jamie had to get Milly up and break the news. He said: ‘Mummy is coming. She’s been hurt in an accident but she is coming back to see us.’ Afterwards he told me that it was gutting to try and prepare her, while not scaring her about what was going on.

I remember nothing of the ten-hour flight back to RAF Brize Norton, apart from briefly stirring and being patted on the hand by my nurse. As I was wheeled off the plane I woke up again. Being back on British soil felt so good as I knew I was finally safe, but I was desperate to see my family and I was disappointed they weren’t standing there on the airfield, waiting for me. An ambulance was instead waiting on the tarmac and I was taken, with sirens blaring, to Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham and put into a side ward as I was the only woman soldier injured at the time, and hooked up to countless machines.

I hadn’t looked at myself in the mirror since the field hospital in Iraq and I was scared as to what everyone would think as I knew I was a mess with thirty stitches in my face and my leg so swollen, cut and bruised that I couldn’t even bear a sheet touching it. Doctors had to work on me first, checking all my vital signs, plugging me into machines and drips of antibiotics and pain relief, and generally sorting me out.

Jamie walked in first with Milly. The left-hand side of my face, which was swollen and full of stitches, was the nearest to the door and as she toddled into the room, she didn’t recognise me. That was gutting.

‘Milly, it’s Mummy,’ I said. It broke my heart that she didn’t know who I was. As soon as she heard my voice, though, she stopped dead in her tracks and stared. I nearly started crying because instead of running to me like she always did, she was scared because I looked so horrific.

I coaxed her by saying: ‘Milly, don’t worry, it’s Mummy.’

She clung on to Jamie, who said: ‘Don’t worry, Mummy’s a bit poorly but she’ll be OK. Let’s say hello.’

Finally, she came up to me and gingerly got up and lay next to me on my hospital bed. I’d dreamed of the moment I was going to see her when I got back from Iraq; she’d be in the crowds, waving a Union Jack and smiling, but this was nothing like that. Jamie was a rock, saying no matter what, he was there for me and we’d cope and face everything together, which reassured me, but Milly’s reaction knocked me for six as it brought home to me just how bad things were. But I didn’t cry because I knew I had to be strong for her, so we took some photos of me in bed next to her. In them, Milly’s eyes are wild and terrified. It took her a week to come up to me without being scared, and even when I look at those
photos now I feel not only devastation but above all guilt that my child went through that.

Once we’d spent some time together, the next person I desperately wanted to see was Mum and I got so distressed that I rang her, saying, ‘Mum, where are you? You said you’d be here.’

She was frantic as she’d been held up in heavy traffic on the M6 and when she finally arrived, I started crying as she hugged and kissed me, saying: ‘Hannah, I’m so relieved you are still alive.’ She put her hand to my cheek and said: ‘Hannah, you are going to be alright.’ That’s one of my strongest memories, as I desperately needed to hear those words from her.

Within hours I went down for surgery for the shrapnel wounds to my face and all my abdominal wounds, but because my foot was so mangled, they needed to let the swelling go down for at least two weeks before they could operate on it. Before I was taken down, Mum popped out to get a cup of tea and she was white when she came back.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

‘I had to walk through the hospital and ward and it was the first time I have ever seen so many young amputees.’ Everything I had been through was hitting home, mixed with her relief that I was still there.

The next few days were gruelling as I had so many injuries a team of doctors, led by an extraordinary man, Professor Keith Porter, who was later given a Knighthood for his work, had to work through each and every one. There was barely a part of my body that hadn’t been affected in some way by the blast. From the moment I’d arrived in Selly Oak I’d become aware that my hearing wasn’t right and things were muffled, and also my vision was obscured. It’s impossible to
treat everything at the same time when you’ve suffered so many injuries, so doctors have to prioritise and treat the most serious first. I’d perforated both my eardrums, was left with just 20 per cent vision in my left eye due to retinal damage, a shattered foot, permanent nerve damage, a high-velocity shrapnel wound in my abdomen, facial scarring, a moderate brain injury, multiple flesh wounds that required surgery, a ripped-apart hand, a pole through my leg and face and countless other shrapnel wounds.

Each passing day seemed to bring a new diagnosis, so my list of injuries kept growing and growing. There were so many it was hard to keep track and to process exactly what I’d been through. They did an amazing job on my wounds. One surgeon had to do extra stitches in my face and he said to me: ‘Whoever did this in Iraq did a wonderful job.’ He promised his stitches were going just as well and he was as good as his word. My hand was heavily bandaged after they stitched it all back together and they also made it as good as new.

Jamie, Mum and Dad were just overwhelmed with relief that I was still alive but I was in deep shock as it slowly dawned on me how lucky I had been with such a huge number of wounds. I slept, on and off, for days due to the painkillers. I was overwhelmed by exhaustion as my body fought to recover, seeing only my family, who were my line to the outside world, making me laugh and giving me little snippets of gossip, which gave me respite from my pain.

I had a phone by my bedside and when it rang, four days later, I almost thought I was dreaming. When a male voice said: ‘Hannah, it’s me,’ I had to think for a second about who was on the line. ‘It’s John,’ he continued and I realised then it was John Lewis, with whom I’d swapped guard duty
in Iraq. From the moment he’d heard I’d been blown up, the day after it happened, he’d been worried sick and I was so pleased to hear him, although I was drugged up to the eyeballs on morphine.

He asked me how I was and when I admitted: ‘I’ve been better, but I’ll get there,’ he became quite choked up.

He said: ‘I’ve got to say this to you, Hannah, I’m just so sorry as I know this shouldn’t have happened to you. I feel so awful that you did such a good thing for me and now this has happened.’

I said: ‘John, there’s absolutely nothing to feel sorry for’, and I meant it. I’ve never regretted swapping guard shift as he was a good friend to me, and that’s what you do in the Army – you look out for your own. No one in the British Army was to blame for what happened; the blame for what happened to me fell squarely at the feet of the insurgent who fired the mortar that blew me up. I hate him. Everyone has free will and he could have chosen not to do it. I still feel anger that he’s out there somewhere with no idea of the destruction and pain he has caused.

Mum, Dad, Jamie and Milly were constantly by my side during those first days. So they were as delighted and touched as me when, later that day, I also had a really special visitor who instantly had me in floods of tears, or ‘bubbling’ as he’d say. Karl, who’d pulled me from the rubble in Iraq, knocked on the door to my room and limped in with a big smile, carrying a huge teddy bear. Just the sight of him set me off, partly out of relief that he was OK. He was pretty battered from the blast; he’d suffered some serious shrapnel wounds and seeing him again took me right back to the moments beforehand when we’d shared a cigarette and had a laugh. It seemed a
lifetime ago and neither of us had had any idea of the impact those few seconds would have on our lives. I realised it must have been him that I’d seen on the plane as he said he’d come back at the same time as me. He’d tried to see me several times, but each time I’d either been in surgery or asleep.

He said: ‘I’ve been worried sick and I’m so, so sorry.’

I started crying really hard as I said: ‘Thank you for getting me out of there’, for Karl was the man who saved my life. He was so close to losing his own life that day and even though he’d also been badly wounded by shrapnel, he still dug me out of the rubble. It was an heroic act, and for me, Karl is an incredible man. From that moment on I always felt a special bond with him because he was the only man who had a real insight into what happened and we both suffered in the aftermath.

Mum then asked to speak to him for a moment outside my room. As they stood on the ward outside, she told him: ‘Thank you for pulling my daughter out and getting her home to me.’ Karl also gave Milly the teddy bear, which we still treasure to this day. It meant a great deal that he had come to see me as I’d wondered how he was and to this day I feel such immense gratitude that he pulled me from what would otherwise have been my grave.

During those first six weeks I had so many operations I lost count. They ranged from minor extra stitches to my face and smaller wounds under local anesthetic to major operations on my hand. Surgeons also continued to clean out shrapnel injuries on my abdomen and leg, and pump me full of nuclear-strength antibiotics. I was in a cycle of surgery, recovery and then I’d have another procedure. I was pretty out of it a lot of the time as I was taking all kinds of drugs and I wasn’t really
engaging in life. It was like I was in a bubble: distant from everything with the painkillers and other drugs acting as a warm, fuzzy cushion from reality. To be honest, that was a blessing at the time.

I also underwent scans for the bleed on my brain. As soon as I could manage it, I was attached to a special machine that sent ice down to a custom-made boot, which was used to try to reduce the swelling of my foot so they could operate. After three weeks they decided they would try to operate on it for the first time. I was full of optimism that they could put things right, but it wasn’t to be.

Afterwards, my surgeon said he had to be honest and that he was gravely concerned. ‘Your foot is terribly injured and while we will try everything we can, there’s no guarantees about what the future holds,’ he told me.

In my head amputation was not even in the equation and I was prepared to go to whatever lengths were necessary to save my foot and leg. When I told him that, he nodded and promised he’d try everything and explore every avenue possible for me. He warned that it would be a long haul with no guarantees of success, though.

While I was in hospital I managed to go short distances on crutches and when I finally got out of my side room, I saw some of the guys who had lost limbs or had suffered terrible burns and I was relieved I didn’t face the same as them. They were absolutely amazing and they would whiz around the corridors of Selly Oak, getting on with it, but I remembered the doctor’s words at Basra’s field hospital and thought: ‘I’m glad that’s not me.’ I still thought I was going to be OK in the end and the failed op was a temporary blip.

After six weeks, with the exception of my foot, my other
injuries had healed well enough for me to be discharged home until surgeons could operate again to try and pin my foot back together again. The bones were all floating around and they struggled to find an anchor to piece parts together again. On the morning I was discharged home I was ecstatic. A nurse helped me pack up my toiletries, magazines and loads of ‘Get Well’ cards I’d received. Raring to go, I was ready long before Jamie arrived to pick me up.

As soon as I arrived home my bubble of excitement burst. I couldn’t even get down the stairs without him supporting me and once I was out of the cocoon of the twenty-four-hour care at the hospital and back at home, my life fell apart. Somehow I was supposed to use crutches to get around but I couldn’t manage and so I became housebound, able to do little more than move from room to room, permanently in terrific pain.

I wasn’t provided with a proper wheelchair because I hadn’t been categorised as officially disabled yet as I still had both my legs. Normally, things like that are sorted out by Headley Court, the rehabilitation centre, but I never made it there for years as I was always having an operation or recovering from one. So basically, I slipped through the net. After two weeks, things were so desperate that Jamie asked the Red Cross to donate me a wheelchair.