Aftershock: The Untold Story of Surviving Peace

In an extract from new book, Aftershock: The Untold Story of Surviving Peace (Portobello Books, 2015), journalist Matthew Green explores the struggle of a soldier suffering from PTSD.

A decade ago, police in Liverpool set up Matrix, a specialist team dedicated to tackling spiralling rates of gun crime in the city in north-west England. Marksmen were put on standby while officers served warning letters to anyone suspected of links to armed criminals. Sue had never been in trouble with the police, but she came to know Matrix well. Officers clad in riot gear and equipped with stun guns had repeatedly deployed in her front garden.

One time, her husband Joe clambered onto the roof of their semi-detached house and began flinging tiles into the street. On another occasion, he donned combat gear and dug a trench in the back garden, his collection of laughing Buddha statues watching serenely from the shrubs. Joe was never armed with anything more than a kitchen knife but in the midst of his flashbacks he felt 21-years-old again—as if the incident more than two decades earlier in Northern Ireland that had injured his back, and possibly his brain, had never happened.

There was little doubt that the greatest danger Joe posed was to himself—once he had grabbed a chopping board and tried to cut off his trigger hand. But of all the many crises that Sue had faced, the one that was engraved most deeply occurred when she had come home to find that Joe had locked himself in the house, convinced he was under siege. Sue gave the police permission to break in by smashing a window. There was a tinkle of breaking glass and Joe charged down the stairs shouting: "IRA bastards!"— a reference to the gunmen he had fought during Britain's 1969-2007 campaign in Northern Ireland. Assembled officers heard the sound of the knife drawer rattling and alerted Matrix.

"About 10 police cars rocked up, they just came from everywhere," Sue told me as we drank tea in her living room. Joe, a bald, heavyset Glaswegian, sat next to her on their couch. He wore a solemn, moon-faced expression as Sue recalled how one of the officers had called out to a comrade who had served in the forces to try to reason with him through the front door.

"It was only when the guy opened his mouth, I was like: 'Get him away from there!'" Sue said. "The guy had a Northern Irish accent." Convinced that he was in mortal danger, Joe grabbed the fridge in a bear hug, barricaded the kitchen door, then ripped the oven from the wall. Gas filled the house—Sue could smell it from the garden. The police would not dare to use their stun guns for fear of igniting a fireball. The standoff lasted eight hours until Joe was eventually persuaded to drop the knives out of a kitchen window.

"I just can't remember nothing of it," Joe said, his eyes downcast. "He was in hospital for about two days before he recognised me," Sue said, casting a sidelong glance at her husband.

Sue wanted a cigarette so we went into the garden. Their Yorkshire terrier, Arwen, scampered back and forth on a lead attached to their washing line. Arwen had become so attuned to Joe's moods that she could sense the onset of the interior storms caused by his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) even before he could, and would bolt for the door in anticipation.

For most veterans, it is not the British Army, nor the National Health Service (NHS), nor charities that provide the bulk of their support when they struggle with symptoms of PTSD—it is their partners. Across Britain, hundreds of women, and some men, face an agonising choice: Walk away from a loved one who may have become abusive or violent as a consequence of war trauma, or adapt to life as a carer for someone who bears scant resemblance to the person they married. The duty can feel as demanding as looking after an adult child.

In many cases, the strain of living with a husband plagued by symptoms of PTSD, anxiety, depression or alcohol abuse becomes too much and the relationship dissolves. But there are some who refuse to accept defeat, displaying more heroism than many soldiers have shown in battle. Such women soon find themselves confronting a mirror image of their husband's encounter with grief, guilt, anger and despair—with the added burden of having to fight on their behalf to obtain the right care.

Sue, who had married Joe before he joined the army, became my unofficial guide to the parallel world of military wives. As she began her battle to find help for her husband, she realised she was not alone, and co-founded the support group called Combat PTSD Angels. Members could swap information or simply vent on a members-only Facebook page. The group started with six women—within two years it had more than 200, with dozens more waiting for Sue to approve requests to join.

Queries might include: "My husband has started carrying a knife—should I tell the police?" To which Sue's response would be: "Not unless you want him Tasered," followed by a discussion on how best to try to resolve his potentially dangerous behaviour. Another might report that their husband had gone out to the shops and been found hours later, apparently lost. Sue's advice: "Google 'dissociation'"—a trance-like state that can affect some trauma survivors, who temporarily lose touch with the world around them. Christmas posed particular problems: The enforced jollity could stir profound feelings of guilt over lost comrades. Even the sparkle of decorations was a hazard. Sue tweeted a tip: "Christmas tree lights a trigger for your veteran? Try static white or blue lights instead."

One technique she shared with new "angels" was to devise a family safety plan by agreeing a code word, such as "scramble." On hearing it, the children would know to rush to the front door so their mother could rapidly remove them to a prearranged sanctuary, at a friend or relative's house. It helped to keep a packed bag handy and a list of emergency numbers. Sue also advised women to ensure that dangerous items such as medication or knives were kept in one place so they could easily grab them on their way out. Though I was not admitted to the discussion page, a member called Faye sent me a post she had written. She had fallen in love with her soldier husband when they were both still teenagers. Fifteen years later, he had been diagnosed with PTSD sustained while serving in Kosovo, and his explosive bouts of anger had begun to make her feel like she was living in a war zone.

"Through sickness and in health! I meant every word!" she posted. "What if the sickness is a rage redder than red that tears thru our house, our home leaving a trail of devastation and terror! How many more times do I have to work through tears trying to stop shaking as I fold clothes or wash up? I'm done! I'm tired!"

Later, she explained, she had devised strategies for coping with her husband's anger—including leaving a red bath mitt on the back-door handle as a warning to her children that their father was cooling off in his den in the garden, which was equipped with a punchbag, and was not to be disturbed.

Though the Combat PTSD Angels Facebook group sometimes served as an echo chamber of wearyingly similar complaints about the latest outrages committed by "OHs," short for "other halves," its members provided each other with a source of comfort that friends with no experience of military marriages could rarely offer. Almost a year after our first meeting, Sue confided something of the sense of the loneliness she had felt as Joe's condition worsened.

"At the very beginning of our PTSD journey, it was soul-destroying. I felt so abandoned, I felt so alone, I felt like I was the only person on the planet who was dealing with this," she said. "I'd lost contact with most of our military friends at that point, I was surrounded by our civilian friends who had less clue about PTSD than I did. Unless they had prior experience with mental health issues, their response was generally: 'You don't need that, leave him.'"

Sue has a tattoo on her forearm of an English rose stem entwined with a Scottish thistle – a symbol of her determination to preserve her marriage even in what she called the "harsh soil" of Joe's illness. She quietly resolved to do whatever it might take.

"You either cope, or you sit in a corner rocking yourself somewhere, or you 'do one', which is what 99 percent of spouses do with PTSD—they leave them, they don't understand," Sue said. "I had two choices: Educate myself, forewarn and forearm myself as much as I could, or watch my marriage crumble. And I wasn't having it."

I was curious to know how representative Sue's experience might be, and asked her whether I could attend one of the monthly meetings she organised in Liverpool—usually strictly only for carers. "I'll have a chat with some of the girls and see if anyone's interested in meeting you," Sue said. "Don't take it personally if they say no." Some days later she sent me a Facebook message. I had received an invite to the first of three of the gatherings I would attend of Combat PTSD Angels.

Based in London, Matthew Green appears regularly as a commentator on BBC News and World Service radio, and has written for publications such as Newsweek and the Literary Review. This is an extract from Aftershock: The Untold Story of Surviving Peace (Portobello Books, 2015)

@Matthew__Green