Corporal
Simon Brown
I was injured on my second tour of Iraq, on 6th December 2006. My job as a vehicle mechanic with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers was to go out and rescue other vehicles, whether they had broken down or were stranded. It was kind of like the AA in Basra. I’ll be honest, I was more nervous about it than I ever had been on previous deployments to Iraq and elsewhere. The UK had had some pretty bad tours and the number of casualties had added up. I think it was that knowledge of what was actually happening out there that made me more concerned.
The day it happened started out like a normal routine day. I got up early, had breakfast, did the morning briefings and then we went out. There were two vehicles, and me and a Junior Commander literally flipped a coin to see who went with which patrol. I won the coin toss and said, “I’ll go with these vehicles as they’re a bit newer.” I was the senior mechanic, so the idea was, if anything went wrong, I’d probably be in a better position to do something about it than the junior mechanic. He went out with the vehicles that he was more comfortable with.
The day was as easygoing as a patrol in Iraq goes—it’s very difficult to explain unless you’ve been there. We were just going round and checking things out, and we got to an area called Al Kiblah in Southern Basra. When we got there, there was something not right in the air. We deployed some of the Infantry to go and have a quick look around, and sure enough things weren’t quite right. We found a weapons cache in the back of a car, and there were a couple of people there who had been flagged up by Intelligence, who we needed to have a quick chat with.
They didn’t like the fact that we’d caught them and so it kicked off. It was just like any other contact really. It seems strange to say any other contact, but once you’ve been under fire a couple of times, you kind of acclimatise to it. So it kicked off and we subdued the enemy and things were starting to calm down and go back to normal. But as we went to extract the vehicle behind us, it didn’t move and I got the shout saying the vehicle had broken down.
At that point, the insurgents realised what had happened and thought they’d have a bit of a turkey shoot. They really started laying down some fire. There were six people in that vehicle and they were all in British uniform. I couldn’t leave them in that situation, so I took my crew back and we hooked up their vehicle to ours.
After that was done, I climbed back onto my vehicle and, as I dropped down into the turret, the driver said he couldn’t see anything through the periscope because of all the dust that had been stirred up. He did the right thing in alerting me to that and not just attempting to drive, because there’s drains either side of the road, there’s cars in the road and all sorts of stuff going on. It just wasn’t safe—the worst thing that could have happened was my vehicle towing another one and going into a hole and then you’ve got two vehicles and nine people in trouble. So I said no worries and put my head out of the top of the vehicle and said “Clear, go go go” and as I dropped my head down, I felt this smash on the side of my face. The only way I can describe it is like being hit by an iron bar. The bullet hit me on my left cheek, went through my nose and came out of my right cheek.
At the time, I didn’t realise how badly hurt I was. I felt the impact, I dropped down into the vehicle, I could feel the blood on my thighs, it was really burning. That’s one thing I’ll always remember, the heat of the fluid on my legs. I realised I must be bleeding a lot because it felt like so much. That’s when things started getting a bit weird for me. Fortunately, because I wasn’t knocked out by the bullet, I was able to treat myself for 25 minutes. I had to put my thumb in my mouth to hold my palate up, so that I could breathe, and then I tried to bandage up my face, which apparently I did a really bad job of, the medic told me later on. I’d like to see him try and bandage up his own face. I tried to keep calm rather than panic and make the situation worse than it needed to be. One of the lucky things was that I actually didn’t realise how badly hurt I was. I seriously thought, couple of stitches, couple of weeks in hospital chatting up the nurses, and then I’d be back out doing my job. Obviously I was very, very wrong.
When we got back to the medical centre 25 minutes later at Basrah Palace, I actually climbed out of the vehicle and I remember a big cheer going up. All that anyone knew was that I’d been shot in the head, and they were expecting the worst. At that point, a medic came and grabbed me as I got off the vehicle, and I panicked and knocked him out. Three more then grabbed me. I was put on a stretcher and strapped on it. At that point I think I was crying for morphine, but because I had a head wound, I couldn’t have it. So they pumped me full of other drugs and put me into an induced coma.
I woke up seventeen days later in Birmingham to a doctor using lots of big words to tell me that I’d lost my left eye and that there wasn’t much hope for any sight in my right eye. It was really strange when I woke up and got the news of what had happened, because when I was in the coma, I heard things going on. I remembered hearing someone say I was blind, and I thought, “No, I’m not blind, I’m fine.” Obviously it was because my mind was playing out things in itself, so, in my mind, I could see. Then to get, “No, you are actually blind…”
The world just fell out from under me. I sat there thinking, “What’s the point?” I was a soldier, I was someone who was proud, who was strong and independent, who looked after other people. And all of a sudden, I’ve just been told I’m going to be looked after for the rest of my life because I’m disabled. My naivety about disability meant that I linked the word disabled with useless. Obviously I’ve been proven wrong now, but at that time, I thought, “What is the point?”
I was in a lot of pain because of the amount of work that had been done to my injuries. The swelling was immense—my mum told me that when she first saw me, my head was like a medicine ball. I’d had a metal frame screwed into my skull, which wasn’t very comfortable. I think looking back now, there was a lot more self-inflicted pain than there was actual pain. I felt so low that the pain was probably as much imagined than it was real. It was tough thinking there isn’t much point in carrying on. I wished I was dead and that they’d done the job properly.
One of the things I thought about was how I’d take my own life. I had a guard on my bed, and I couldn’t really do or see anything. I thought about taking an overdose of medication. But I got that notion knocked out of me quite quickly by the news that a couple of friends had been killed. And all of a sudden, it was the kick up the arse that I needed, to say, you know what, I’m still here. I might not be in one piece but I’m still here. And I’m sure that if they were lying in the hospital bed and I was laid in a morgue, they wouldn’t be feeling sorry for themselves, so I’ve got no right to. That was the impetus for me to go, it’s not the best hand in the world, but I’m still at the table. Their sacrifice brought it home. I didn’t have the right to insult their memory by wasting the fact I’d been given another chance. So that was my impetus, my turning point to try and focus on what I’d kept and not what I’d lost.
I think that once I’d got that into my head, my acceptance came: that this is it, this is what you’ve got, get on with it, and I started looking at what I had and not what I didn’t have. Once you’ve come to terms with it, then you can adapt. You’ll never adapt while you’re always hoping for something better. That was all within the first four weeks of waking up. Life became a lot more bearable quite quickly then.
As I said, I was shot on 6th December 2006. I left hospital at the end of January. I’d retained twenty per cent vision in my eye, and when you balance twenty per cent vision against no vision, it’s absolutely fantastic. It’s like looking through frosted glass, everything is fuzzy but I’d rather have fuzzy than nothing. For the first couple of weeks, I sat at home with no confidence—I had the spirit but no confidence to do anything. I got used to being different. I had plenty of time to sit and think about my new life and how it was going to go.
I was with my family, who were massively supportive but at times were a little too supportive. They wouldn’t give me the space I needed to try and build myself back up and get better. I’d go to make a cup of tea and they’d be pushing me out of the way to do it for me. When you think your life has ended, you’d be amazed how much difference little victories like making your own cup of tea make.
I used to play for a rugby team back home and they came round to see how I was getting on. Once I’d got to a certain stage of recovery, they’d come round and kidnap me and take me out for a few beers. Then they’d leave me on the floor drunk for my Dad to deal with—they’d knock on the door and run away. That was another big step for me because it suddenly reminded me that to them I was still Si Brown, I wasn’t anyone different. And if they couldn’t see me as a different person, then what right did I have to believe I was a different person?
Unfortunately my grandma then passed away. She’d been terminally ill with lung cancer before I was deployed to Iraq. The family did me a huge favour by letting me buy her house at a fair price. It was a house that was already adapted because my grandma was elderly, and because I’d been visiting the house my entire life, I knew it inside out. So that was another step towards independence: I was actually living in my own place and doing my own thing and moving forward.
A lot of people laugh at this but I taught myself responsibility because I got a cat. It seems silly but by having something to look after, I had to go and get food, I had to make sure she was safe and looked after and things like that. And then because I had to go and buy cat food, I decided I might as well buy myself some proper food rather than takeaways. And all these little things just added up as a whole. Before I knew it, I was making massive steps and finding myself in places I never expected to be and doing things I never expected to do. All of a sudden I found the confidence not to be ashamed of the scars or be embarrassed about the way I looked but to hold my head up high.
I kind of twigged early on that there wasn’t much use for a blind mechanic in the Army. I looked at an admin role with the Forces but when it all came round, I didn’t want to be in the uniform if I couldn’t do the job of a soldier. I came to terms with that within eighteen months to two years, which relatively speaking is quite quick to accept something like that. I started looking at what I wanted to do instead.
One of the things I was interested in was teaching so I went to college and did a qualification. I did some voluntary work with an organisation that worked with disadvantaged and disengaged children. I enjoyed it but I was very restricted because of my transport situation. We’d go away for things like the Duke of Edinburgh Award, but without being able to drive, I was restricted with what I could do and where I could go. I found that too containing. So I just looked at other avenues. So I just looked at other avenues. I tried to put as many strings to my bow as I could to give myself options for after I was discharged from the Army, which happened in 2010.
Then this opportunity came along with the organisation that I work for now, Blind Veterans UK. They wanted me to go and speak to people to try and convince them that it was a good idea to get some rehab off my organisation. I found I was quite good at that, as I’ve rebuilt my life in under six years. And if I can do it, anyone can do it. What a great job to go out helping people in situations like mine. You’ve got these guys who have got the world at their fingertips, and all of a sudden, it’s been taken off them. I was 28 when I got hurt, I had quite a bit of life experience—for a soldier, that’s middle-aged. These young lads and ladies that are getting hurt now, they’re eighteen, nineteen, twenty. They’ve got to look at sixty or seventy years of their lives living with what’s happened. I think for them, the biggest challenge is trying to see a future.
I feel that, every time I get up and go to work, I am doing something good again with my life. It’s a funny thing because I lost my career in the Army and I thought everything was over. But I look back at the last six and a half years, and I think I’m probably a better person now than I was before I got injured, because of the opportunities I’ve had, the things I’ve done, the people I’ve helped and what I’m actually doing with my life now.
I still now go through reconstructive surgery. I’ve had fourteen operations to date, probably 120 hours under the knife. I’ve still got at least another two to go to rebuild my nose and do a few other bits and pieces. It’s difficult to be honest, every time you do a surgery, you think you’ve got over a barrier and then something goes wrong and you’re not at the stage where you hoped you’d be. But the way I see recovery is
like this: you have to do this in order to then do that, and then eventually it falls into place. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, you separate the edges, the middle, the bits that are sky and the bits that are grass. That seems to take forever but when you start putting the pieces together, because of all of the effort you put in before, it kind of goes together better.
For me, I finally feel like the pieces are getting put in so that I can start to move on. I can start to actually look at the end of the tunnel, because for a long time—forgive the pun—I feel like I’ve been walking in the dark, without being able to see the light at the end of the tunnel or know what’s coming next. But now, I feel that I’m getting somewhere.