Lance Corporal
Chris Nowell
I was injured in Afghanistan, where I was serving with The King’s Royal Hussars. On 28th September 2007, I woke up early, at about three in the morning. It’s getting light by then. It was nice and quiet until about eleven o’clock. Me and my mate Lux had to take over the front desk on sentry duty, and everyone on the other side of the compound was getting hammered by heavy fire for about an hour. Then we had a suicide bomber, a woman, come to the camp compound. It didn’t go off, so she got dropped and then Lux sorted her out.
Then all went quiet, so we were chilling out again. I remember I was reading a letter from my wife. It calms you down, so you can just get back on with it. That’s pretty much all I remember. And then, I don’t know how they did it, but an RPG [rocket- propelled grenade] came over the wall. I don’t remember it coming, but it hit the wall behind me. It didn’t hit me directly, luckily.
The next thing I remember, I was singing Liverpool songs in Birmingham hospital. I learnt that I’d been flown to Birmingham and been in an induced coma for about a week. I couldn’t see for about a month because my eyes were all swollen together. I don’t remember much of that time. But I remember the day I opened my eyes. My wife was with me, we were in a lift. And that was the first time I saw her.
I don’t remember what I was initially told about the extent of my injuries but my wife told me that they’d told her that I could be completely blind; it was just a case of wait and see. Later on they spoke to me and said you’ve had a piece of your brain removed, which is your visual cortex, which processes your sight. They explained that my sight wasn’t going to improve but it wasn’t going to get any worse. I can’t see anything with my right eye. With my left eye, it’s like a tunnel vision. If you imagine looking through binoculars, that’s what vision is like in my left eye.
In terms of my head injuries, I fractured my skull, which meant I had no skull on one side of my head for a year, which gave me a lot of headaches. Now I’ve got a titanium plate in my head. I’ve got two little lads, they don’t yet understand what happened to me. Luke, my oldest, has a look every now and then, but he’s not old enough to understand.
I’ve now been medically discharged from the Army. I’ve had a lot of rehabilitation support from Blind Veterans UK, they’ve looked after me. They taught me to use a long cane, I’d be lost without that. They taught me how to cook again, little things like using a knife. I also go to football every week. I’ve got a trip to Snowdon planned in September, that’s with Blind Veterans UK. I need something to keep busy, so that, and the garden and what have you, something to keep me busy.