Private
Jaco Van Gass
I was injured in Afghanistan in August 2009, serving in The Parachute Regiment. We’d just come off a very successful night-time operation and we were making our way back to the Helicopter Landing Site where we were going to get picked up. Then we got a message over the radio that movement had been spotted on our primary site. The helicopters weren’t happy to land there, but we always have a secondary one as a backup.
On our way to the second site, we came across a Taliban stronghold which was an old Afghan National Police checkpoint. We worked closely with the Afghan National Army, and we sent a section of them forward to warn these guys that we were coming through. At this point we couldn’t really verify whether they had any weapons. Whilst the ANA moved forward, they got in contact and quite a big firefight broke out.
The firefight lasted for roughly forty minutes, when at a certain point the enemy tried to outflank us and overrun us from the left side; it’s what we call a ‘shoot and scoot’. They just aim in a general direction and fire. Two RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] were fired from our left, the first one came over our heads and exploded in the distance, the second one was fired low.
With an RPG, there’s a trigger mechanism on the front of the nozzle of the warhead. It needs impact to explode, so if it’s got no impact, it will just bounce on and on. In the sight of our night vision goggles, I saw a flash coming my way, and in those couple of seconds, I just reacted on instinct and turned to my left-hand side. The bone in my arm was hard enough to initiate the RPG switch and triggered the warhead.
The explosion took off my left arm, and a third of my left thigh, and caused various shrapnel wound injuries to my left side. If I hadn’t reacted in the way I did, I probably would have been killed, as the RPG would have exploded on my ribs, smashing all my internal organs. So a couple of seconds of reaction saved my life.
I woke up roughly seven metres from my original position, as the blast threw me up in the air and threw me backwards. I was very confused. I didn’t feel any pain at that stage, it was really a daze of confusion. I didn’t realise I had been hit, I thought someone else had been hit. I could still hear my men around me, firing. All I thought about was getting back into the firefight, so I sat up and tried to hold my rifle again, but I couldn’t hold my rifle in the correct firing position. I tried twice and then I looked down. That’s when I realised I had lost my arm. I tried to radio for help, but my radio was on the side of the explosion so it was destroyed.
I started applying self-help—we carry emergency kit, and I tried putting on a tourniquet. Luckily one of the other guys was not too far from me. He crawled over and helped me apply the tourniquet and then radioed in for the medic. The medic came over and they started treating me. I was taken to a field hospital; I’m not sure of the details, I don’t know if it was Camp Bastion. It took roughly 32 minutes for them to pick us up. They came into what we call a hot LZ, a landing zone under fire. They landed in the middle of it and then got me casevac’d out, and everyone else as well.
I’d broken my ankle quite badly, and to be honest, that probably caused me the most pain. All I can remember of that night is saying, “My ankle, my ankle.” The boys were saying, “Jaco, your ankle’s fine, you’ve lost an arm, mate, that’s much more to worry about.” But I wasn’t worried about my arm, I was just saying, “Please, don’t touch my ankle, it’s so painful.” Most of my operations were carried out in theatre but within 36 hours I was back in the UK.
I was really confused when I came round in Selly Oak. The last clear memory I had was being in Afghanistan in the firefight. The next moment you’ve got your mum and all your family and your sisters all around you. The first obvious thing for me was their safety, I can remember so clearly thinking, “How in the world did they get into Afghanistan and are they safe?” They kept telling me I was in a hospital in Birmingham back in the UK, but it didn’t sink in, I kept thinking I was in Afghanistan.
But I came to know the extent of my injury pretty quickly. I knew I’d lost my arm. At that point, my family weren’t really sure if I realised what had happened. I think that was a really hard thing for them: to think who was going to break the news to me that I’d lost my arm. One day I woke up and they asked me how I felt. I said, ‘I feel like a bloke who’s just lost his arm’, kind of a little joke. I think there was a big sense of relief then—that I understood what had happened to me.
Initially, you’re still in the mindset of thinking, “I’ll just recover from it and be back on the frontline within a couple of months.” As time goes on, you actually realise how hard life is without an arm and how difficult it is to overcome day-to-day little jobs. I reckon it’s the small things that are the most difficult, though I do get along perfectly fine now. There are certain ways and means you can make your life so much easier.
I wanted to do the Arctic Expedition because I wanted to know what I was capable of doing, mentally and physically. Just because you’ve lost an arm, or whatever other injuries you might have, it doesn’t put you out of the equation of doing absolutely anything you want. It’s been a lifelong dream and I couldn’t think of a bigger challenge than going to the North Pole with the various injuries I have. Like I said, it’s finding your limits and knowing what you’re capable of doing.
When I was on the expedition, it did hit home how important it is and how great it is to have two arms. For instance, pulling up your jacket in forty-mile-an-hour winds while it’s minus 28 degrees, it’s totally different, or putting up a tent while it’s minus 40 degrees and not being able to help seven other blokes. Or, you might’ve spilt a bit of water the previous time you had some water out of your bottle and it’s frozen up, and you can’t open it up, so you need to get someone else to open it. That’s when you realise how difficult life is with one arm. But there are certain ways you learn to get around it – it’s like anything, you adapt to it.
It can be really hard to actually make peace with your injuries. Although I began the process of my recovery very quickly, a lot of the boys who have been injured might struggle with it. That’s also one of the main reasons that I volunteered to do this North Pole expedition – to raise the profile of the wounded, so others can see what we’ve done. But a challenge doesn’t have to be something as massive or as great as going to the North Pole. It might be something very common or very easy that you’re really struggling with, or you find yourself unable to do any more. We don’t want everyone to feel like they have to do the extreme stuff. But we want to inspire them—to get on their legs, or walk to the shop, or whatever the next step is in their recovery phase. That’s all we want to do—to inspire them.