Simon Weston Speaks with Civvy Street About the Upcoming Thirtieth Anniversary of the Start of the Falklands Conflict.

It’s now 30 years since the Falklands Conflict started. Do you try to forget what happened or do you try to keep it in your memory?

In all honesty, I don’t. It’s a case of ‘it happened’: it’s like a lot of things. It’s not what happens it’s what you do about it that counts. If you dwell on the past and if you dwell in the worst part of your life then that’s all you ever do: go back to the worst part of your life. That’s how depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder takes hold.

There’s an awful lot of accepting that things happen. The Americans sum it up in a simple little adage: ‘shit happens’. It’s blunt; it seems coarse but it encapsulates it all. It’s the way you’ve got to look at it. If something bad happens, it happens; don’t dwell on it forever, and that’s the way I look at it really. It was a terrible, terrible moment of my life but I don’t dwell on it. I don’t spend my whole time thinking ‘oh my goodness, why did this happen to me’? Why shouldn’t it happen to me? What makes me so special that it shouldn’t happen? There are accidents and incidents in life. You’re born with what you’re born with. For instance, you know that I was born with the God-given grace of being Welsh. It could have been so much worse: I could have been born English!

I’ve had to live with that Simon, sometimes it isn’t easy…
I love that sort of banter that we have. That sort of thing just helps you to trivialise what happened. Even though it’s not trivial and lots of other people have disabilities, whether it be congenital or an accident or whether it be by someone else’s design: It happens.

If I’d said that when you’d just received your injuries, I could have expected a slap right? What if I’d said, ‘bad luck mate, shit happens…’
People did. Of course they did. With Military people, they care; trust me. Military people care about their friends and their comrades more than you could ever possibly believe but they don’t know how to show emotions. They don’t stand there and cry for you. They just get up and give you two barrels of humour. It’s blunt and it’s dark but it’s their way of dealing with their sense of loss because there’s a huge amount of tragedy for those that aren’t injured as well. For those guys who feel guilty about surviving and feel a certain amount of remorse because they’ve lost their friends, they’ve lost their comrades and colleagues whether you get on with them or not. They still feel it. It’s all down to that. There’s no room within them at that point in time for huge dollops of sympathy or self-pitying. That happens in the quiet moments when you’re on your own when you’re away from everybody. Those guys have their own suffering to get through. That’s how we end up with so many people taking their own lives or in depression or getting into drink or drug fuelled crime and either ending up homeless or in prison.

I understand that you’ve met the man responsible for the air assault on the Sir Gallahad.
I wanted to meet him. Because when something horrible happens to you (people have been in car crashes or incidents where someone gets punched or someone gets hit with a bottle), you rarely get to actually meet the person that does these things. What you end up there is that when you try to go to sleep at night you go back, or you drift back to that moment or you wake up in the early hours and you start ruminating and cogitating through your mind and you end up with that person for whatever reason, in your mind. You just wonder, do they have life in their veins, are they a sociopath, are they a psychopath are they a complete nutcase that’s just going around causing mayhem and damage to other people?

When you have that in your mind you just wonder about it all the time. I wondered whether this guy was a demon, or a real human being. When I did meet him, he was just one of the most pleasant people you could ever hope to meet. He was doing his job but yes I ran the gambit of emotions when I met him at first. I didn’t know whether I was going to cry, whether I was going to shake his hand or whether I was going to kick him to death. I didn’t know any of these things until I met him. And then when I met him and I met his wife Graciella, Carlos was just such a nice guy.

Oddly, I hadn’t thought of him as human until I heard his name. Perhaps there’s another American expression we can use here: ‘closure’?
No. ‘Closure’ is something that’s very final and until people stop taking their lives over what happened in the Falklands I don’t know if we can ever have closure. As long as there are people with issues and problems that are caused by their service in the Falklands, there can’t be closure. Closure for me?: There’s no need for closure for me. I’ve done all the grieving I needed to do. Ultimately, people go to war and people die.

I learned something about doctors. Doctors have two rules they must understand about war. The first rule is that young people die. The second rule: there’s nothing you can do about rule number one. Even as a Soldier, Sailor, Airman or even as a Special Forces operative you need to learn that and have that understanding. Yes, you miss them and you care about them but you move on.  You have to move on. Some of those Special Forces guys can grieve for somebody who died 10 years ago and for no apparent reason burst into uncontrollable weeping fits. These things just happen. It’s because we’re human.

There must have been fearful repercussions from what you’ve seen and what you’ve been through. What’s the key difference between psychological pain and physical pain? How do you treat each? You can’t rub an ointment on your soul.
(Laughing) You can try lubricating it from the inside, that’s for sure. Huge amounts of us have tried that and have failed miserably. I don’t drink anymore. I probably will go back to it (socially) I’m sure. I’ve given up drinking for a while, purely and simply because I wasn’t enjoying it. It wasn’t doing me any good, I was just putting weight on and I just really felt that I wasn’t enjoying it, you know. The one joy of that is that it tells me that I’m not an alcoholic and that I don’t have an addictive personality. I can just pick it up or choose to leave it. The opportunities to drink are fast and furious for me.

The difference between physical pain and mental pain is that physical pain, to a degree, will come to an end. You can have strains and stresses and bad backs and sore necks and things like that, that are with you forever. On the whole the immediacy of pain that you suffer in its initial assault largely goes away and you’re able to control or manage it and get on with your life. There are more severe sources of pain though, and I understand when people say that that’s not true and say ‘I’ve had a bad back for 30 years’: I understand that but on the whole, from injuries received in conflict, physical pain generally eases.

With mental pain it can increase. Not outlandishly but day-by-day, year-by-year: depression, post traumatic stress, family anguish, all of those things can ramp up and as you know and they lead to some very, very unfortunate situations. You can get into drugs or drink, crime, end up in court and end up in jail. Then when you come out you’ve no family to come out to. There’s all manner of different things with mental illness. That’s why I believe so strongly that mental health is one of the most important things we must get right in this country, because if we don’t get mental health sorted we have the greatest debilitating disease to deal with. It is the greatest disability in the country, in the world even.

Why do so many ex-Forces personnel end up in a downward spiral?
There are lots of things. There isn’t just one thing because we’re all different; we’re all individuals. Different things hurt people differently. There are triggers that fire off PTSD for one person that wouldn’t trigger it for another. So you know PTSD is one thing that we’ve seen as a huge, huge problem. Things get out of control. They’re out of your (the Serviceperson’s) control. You look at any situation. It’s when things are beyond your control and when you’ve been trained to be in control, and this can affect civilian life where you have all the plans and all the aptitude but nobody gives you the opportunity. Because you never get the opportunity or you never quite sell yourself correctly or you just don’t have what is required at that point in time you’re out of control and you don’t have control of your life. Then you do what you do when you’ve got quiet time in the Military, which is going for a few bevvies with your friends. That can spiral right out of control.

Service-people are just people that are used to being on the go and are used to doing things. Service personnel are used to working five, six, seven, eight days a week continually, doing something different. It’s nothing to do a full morning’s work and then for someone just to say right; just unpacked your kit and you’re off to somewhere else for two days. You fly out, you fly back and you crack on with something else, you’re not given any time off for being away. You just get on with it and to come to Civvy Street where you know you may get a bit of part time work or you may just have full time work in a factory five days a week and you’re trying to resettle all the time… It doesn’t equate for a lot of Service-leavers. That’s why you find Service Personnel make good firemen, good ambulance workers and good nurses. They make good police officers; they make good truck drivers and train operatives. The reason being is that every day is different. Even though there’s a repetitive side to your job. When you’re in the Military there is always something new, there is always a new danger and there is always the element of surprise and those things are what they buy into. They enjoy belonging to a large but stable organisation that has the potential to blow up in their face in many ways. That’s why they thrive in those environments. That’s why they go off and become mine clearance experts. They go off and work in disaster areas, it’s because it’s in their nature. When all that goes you feel bereft and it’s a grieving process. You need a new sense of purpose and I think that gets lost somewhere.

What do we need to do to make things better for returning Personnel?
The first thing we need to do is to start resettling people earlier. If people are going to be leaving within two or three years, we need to start resettling people two or three years before they actually leave. We need to actually start preparing people for Civvy Street – getting them trained, getting them organised or giving them the opportunity to organise themselves more the point. When they arrive on Civvy Street they have to organise themselves. Nobody’s going to do it for them and it’s a very harsh world. It’s much harsher than being in the Military because, you know, despite having seen the whole battle and horrors of conflict, terrifying as they are you, when you arrive back on Civvy Street there’s nobody going to come and pick up the slack for you.

So when you get home its good if you’re as prepared as possible. The resettlement courses are much, much better than they used to be. I believe the best way to prepare anybody for Civvy Street is that if you’ve got a three year contract from the moment you join, the second you join you should specialise as Service People doing jobs but we also need to concentrate on what we are going to do with that person once he finishes. It’s not just good enough to say they’re going to join a different job because they’ve been living the lifestyle of a vocational environment, they need to have something for when they leave: something that makes them a viable proposition and valuable to somebody else, because they are valuable and they’re used to being valued. We need to find a different way to get these guys through transition especially if they’ve been in the Military for a long time. You can become quite institutionalised in the Military as well.

Many people are inspired by what you’ve managed to achieve over the past 30 years. What inspires you?
What inspires me..? My goodness: What inspires me? There are so many things that inspire me.

Let me guess: Shane Williams, Sam Warburton, Gareth Edwards…
They don’t inspire me; they just fill me with joy! They’re incredibly talented people but with the greatest will in the world you can work as hard as you like but you cannot train talent. Talent is forever. Those guys have got it and they’ve got a work ethic that I love.

I’m inspired by people who do things. I’ve got a daughter who went to boarding school. It was her choice but she struggled for the first term and she overcame that and she overcame all the problems she had about leaving home and the things that she encountered. She overcame all of that and now she’s the happiest girl in the world. She loves what she’s doing, she loves school and she loves coming home. I can’t think of somebody more inspiring then somebody who’s overcome all of those natural inhibitions and come out of their shell as such a strong leader.

I’m inspired by people that do things that make a difference. I pull out Tanni Grey-Thomson. There are people from ordinary walks of life out there that inspire me. There are all these adventurers. People get so wrapped up in Bear Grylls. Bear Grylls is an exciting character. What amuses me is that he climbs up a rock face and there’s a camera waiting for him when he gets there. Let me think about this… He’s only doing what he’s been trained to do. SAS guys and SBS guys and Special Forces the world over do these things day-in-day-out. He’s just a television star now and good luck to him.

I’m inspired by real people in the day-to-day who make a real difference in real people’s lives. People like Mother Theresa. She made a real difference. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for his beliefs. The man was a freedom fighter, and he sacrificed most of his life in jail for his beliefs.  He altered the course of life for so many people across the world. How inspirational is that?! But there are so many people we don’t even know about and we never get to hear about because we see our papers filled with celebrity, tabloid gossip. I stopped buying newspapers a long time ago because of it. I don’t want to know who’s had an affair with him or her. I’m not interested. I like people that do something special and that are truly inspirational characters who have no fear and you meet them on a daily basis and they do incredible things. If you’re ever going to be inspired by people, be inspired by those people who take part in their own communities. Ultimately they are our communities. We’ve got to take responsibility for ourselves. It’s all about self-belief and self worth. If you value yourself, then you’re OK.