Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Lions betrayed by donkeys

When our boys come home, hundreds of them will end up on the street: Mary Wakefield talks to neglected victims of war

Don’t be silly,’ said my learned Tory friend Bruce, leaning across a plate of foie gras and peering at me over the top of his glasses. ‘It doesn’t matter whether they find any weapons of mass destruction; the war on Iraq was justified because it was fun. Our boys were getting bored; they needed a bit of a gallop.’

It looked, from the newspaper photographs, as though Bruce might be right. Covered in tribal face-paint and with skulls daubed on their helmets, our boys and America’s went whooping off in their tanks and planes. Cities fell, civilians looted, and patriots like Bruce knocked back a few bottles of port in celebration.

What happens to the heroes when they come home is a matter of less interest to military enthusiasts. It is a fact that hundreds of the squaddies whose progress we followed on 24-hour news channels will suffer trauma-related psychosis, and thousands will find life as a civilian so baffling and infuriating that they will end up homeless.

As a 35-year-old warrant officer in charge of a field surgical team in the Falklands, Michael Sterba had what Bruce would call a good long gallop. After landing on the beach in Ajax Bay in April 1982, he set up a makeshift hospital in an old freezer plant and started treating casualties. ‘People were being blown to bits,’ he says, his pale-blue eyes urgent. ‘We had to deal with an awful lot of wounded Argentinians as well, but we were coping OK until suddenly, with no warning, four 1,000lb bombs hit the building. The place was filled with dust, confusion and body parts. The building was on fire and now contained an unexploded bomb. My animal instincts shouted at me, “Get out! Get out!”, but my training kept me there. We went to work, operating on people, treating the wounded, all the while thinking, “Is this how it ends?”‘

Michael and I are sitting opposite each other outside on a sunny afternoon at Tyrwhitt House, the Combat Stress treatment centre for ex-servicemen in Leatherhead.

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