Our friend Billy came back from Afghanistan rather earlier than planned. A Scots Royal Marine, he was on patrol in Sangin province when his Jackal armoured car hit a roadside bomb and was blown apart. Both his legs have been badly broken, but he has been told he is not going to lose them. “I'm definitely going to enroll in the Paralympics,” he joked from Selly Oak, the military hospital in Birmingham where all our serious casualties go. The reality is that months of long and painful recuperation lie ahead of him. As to the long-term mental effect, that can only be guessed at.
As Lance Corporal Johnson Beharry, VC, pointed out so forcibly at the weekend, the war wounded returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, however well cared for initially, are too often left to fend for themselves later - the forgotten victims of an endless conflict. Beharry was hailed for his bravery, but the scars may be with him for life. “I am learning to live with it,” he said. “Everyone experiences combat stress differently. But we are all linked, we all suffer the same problem in different ways.” His charge was that the Ministry of Defence provides inadequate aftercare - he called it “disgraceful”. But perhaps too he meant that for every soldier who dies there are others whose suffering we hear little about.
The death of a soldier in Afghanistan or Iraq is still accorded a mention on the news. The statistics about the wounded are buried. You can find them on the Ministry of Defence's website. But they do not command the headlines. Death is different. British soldiers killed in action - 148 of them now, since 2001 - are returned home with full military honours. Flags fly at half-mast, and the Union Flag is draped over the coffins as they are carried in a slow march off the plane at Brize Norton.
For the war wounded, however, there is no recognition. Anyone who flies back from Kandahar in one of the RAF's cavernous Tristar planes is only too aware of the stretchers and the hospital equipment they carry in what would otherwise be the first- class section. The figures, in so far as they can be interpreted, suggest that the standard army calculation of seven wounded to every soldier killed is, in the case of Afghanistan, more or less accurate. Between 2006 and 2009, when 138 servicemen were killed, 573 military and civilian personnel were categorised as wounded in action. Of these, 71 were classified as “very seriously injured”, which means that their lives were in danger and that they may well have lost limbs or been blinded; 94 were “seriously injured,” which meant that, while there was cause for concern, there was no imminent danger to “life or reason”. A further 1,289 were taken to field hospitals with disease or non-battle injuries. Beyond that, we rely on occasional parliamentary questions - such as the one last year that revealed that there were 50 amputations between April 2006 and August 2008. There was no information on those suffering from combat stress.
The MoD argues that to give out anything more specific is to run the risk of identifying individual soldiers. There is, it says, no suggestion of covering up the reality lest it damage morale and recruitment. And yet, for anyone attempting to make sense of the war, its purpose and its cost, the picture with which we are presented is wholly inadequate. We are denied the essential backcloth of combat, the long-term cost to our troops of a war that gets harder by the day.
Lance Corporal Beharry was complaining that the treatment of the mentally affected is left to voluntary organisations. The MoD denies that. We cannot judge who is right unless we are told more about the sacrifice and the suffering that will, in the end, be the most enduring legacy of the Afghan venture. Not just the long, painful weeks in hospital, the prosthetic limbs, the blinding and the scarring, but the battle of the mind, the aftermath of shock and stress that any soldier may confront. Yesterday, Combat Stress, the charity that looks after servicemen and women suffering from the trauma of war, said that among those it cares for are some who endure the mental effects of war 14 years after the battles they fought.
There are two additional barriers to this kind of detail. The first is the media, which find the grim and long-term suffering of the wounded less compelling than the instant shock of death. The second is the troops themselves. Their natural disposition is to make light of the scars of battle - to laugh off the danger and play down the wounds. When I was in Helmand province I talked to several Scottish soldiers who had been inside vehicles that had driven over roadside bombs. Their accounts of how they survived were hair-raising, but passed on as a joke, or with dismissive modesty.
The time has come for them to be allowed to tell us more of the reality of war - and for us to be prepared to listen. If there is a justification for what we are doing in Afghanistan, and I think there is, then we need to be able to debate it with the full facts at our command. Lance Corporal Beharry has been brave enough to lift the curtain on his own suffering. We should demand to know more of the others. If we sense that we are not being told the whole truth, we will suspect the worst. And that is to hand a propaganda victory to the enemy we are meant to be defeating.
Magnus Linklater