Goodbye big brother.

 

My brother died just before new year.  He was only 14 months older than me, and died from a heart attack, so from a self-preservation perspective alone that is pretty worrying.

I got a call from his work early one morning to say that he had not weighed in for work, so I had the unenviable task of going to his house to check up on him.  After a few access issues, I found him collapsed and plainly dead for some time on his kitchen floor.  In later life he wasn’t the fittest of people since he exercised little.  He also chain smoked, which probably didn’t help him either.  There were reasons for his withdrawal from the world which I will write of later, but still, I was not expecting this.  ☹

My brother came in two distinct versions during his life, and I can place the cause of the change between these two fairly accurately.  From an early age he wanted to join the army, so while still in his teens, and as soon as he could break free of our parent’s expectations of what made a good job, he joined up.  He was always a lot more strait laced than I was. 

As a child of the 60’s I could never understand this infatuation with the armed forces and as I gravitated towards CND and other protest movements, many conflicts erupted when he came home on leave.  I remember him needling me about my appearance when he came home after his basic training, ending with him uttering the immortal words, “Watch it, I could kill you with my bare hands”.  That fight ended with him in a headlock, barely able to breathe.  Suffice it to say that in those days, we were not close.

The army did do some good things for him though.  Having grown up in a seaside town, we spent a lot of our childhood time messing about in boats.  His more formalised notions of life led him to join a local yacht club, where he learned to sail.  He was good at it too and raced in two-person, GP class dinghies.  The world championship for these was in Dublin one year and he and his crew partner were selected to compete.  To say that he was proud of this would be a gross understatement, but sporting stardom unfortunately eluded him when early in the competition, his glasses went overboard and sank to the bottom of Dublin Bay.  Unable to see, they hadn’t a hope.

In the army all this was put right, and he was able to gain his yacht master’s qualifications with them.  He even ended up sailing R&R parties on army yachts in the Mediterranean, and on trips around the west coast of Scotland.  With travel around Europe and getting paid to sail in places like this, he must have been in his element.

Now the bad bit.  Those with a forces background will know that during the troubles here in Northern Ireland, people from here did not have to serve in this god forsaken province.  I think that my brother’s one big mistake was that he volunteered to come back to serve here.

Being from Northern Ireland, he was assumed to have local knowledge and ended up working with army intelligence.  I know that he did covert surveillance, and that for a time, he worked with the bomb squad, but he didn’t talk much about these things.  He must have been involved with some pretty gruesome stuff.  He had friends and colleagues who were bombed and shot too.  Like many, he drank heavily during this period and his character was changing.

I am convinced that he had PTSD, although he was never diagnosed or treated.  He married, but that didn’t last, and when his Ex made visitation rights to their son awkward for him, he didn’t even fight it, and they lost contact.  In fact, avoiding any form of conflict became the norm for him.  He just couldn’t handle it in private or in public.  I and a few others persevered with him throughout, persuading him occasionally to go out rather than simply sitting watching telly and smoking his brains out, but he was obviously a lost cause.

I know a number of people who were in the army and who have fought in various conflicts from the Falkland’s to Iraq and Afghanistan.  The number who now suffer from mental health issues as a result is way, way above any societal norm that you can think of, yet the support that is available is virtually non-existent.  The army really should do more to fix some of the issues that it has created.