TRAPPED IN HELL BY THE TALIBAN

ON SATURDAY, in the first of two extracts from a gripping new book, we told the story of Coldstream Guards captain Mark Evans and his blood-soaked struggle to stay alive in the face of relentless Taliban assaults on his Afghan outpost. Today, he describes

HER name was Sophie, a work-hard, play-hard kind of girl and no stranger to hedonistic excess. The perfect combination — or so I thought — to help me escape the horrors I’d seen while fighting for my life in the killing fields of Afghanistan.

Sophie had great showbusiness contacts, and one night she took me to a television awards ceremony. I watched as Ross Kemp, the former East-Enders star, was lauded for a series of documentaries he’d made when embedded with British forces in Helmand.

He had been out there at the same time as me. Everyone applauded but all I could think was: ‘He’s been in Afghanistan for just three weeks and thinks he can tell us how it was out there. F*** him. And f*** the Army.’

A clip began to play. Familiar images flickered across the screen. The desert at dawn, men lying flat in the dust as bullets winged past. The whump-whump-whump of a helicopter overhead.

The audience whooped and clapped their appreciation for the daring filmmaker. But inside my head a film was playing of my own experience, when a British Apache helicopter accidentally strafed my men.

The floor beneath me in the hut where we were sheltering was slick with blood and the walls shook as the world exploded. The screams of the wounded filled my brain.

Faintly, through the blood and the dust in my mind, I could make out Sophie’s face, shock and concern etched in her expression. I flailed in my seat before staggering out. When Sophie came to find me, she said I’d looked as if I was having a stroke.

The truth was that the playback in my head was on a continuous loop.

Whenever my mind wandered, it was filled with the sights and sounds of war: the terrible seven-week siege I’d endured at the Afghan village of Nad Ali, watching my comrades die around me — and the dread we felt when the RAF declared a Code Black and refused to give us air support because of the dangers.

I needed a drink. I always seemed to. The world made a lot more sense when I was drunk. I could see more clearly. When I was sober there was too much noise, too much going on inside my head.

Sophie eventually dumped me. ‘You’re out of control,’ she told me. ‘You need help and I don’t want to be dragged into your world.’ She was right — but it was so hard to admit to myself that I was falling apart.

I had survived my close encounters with the Taliban, but now I was back home there was an even tougher war to fight — the war inside my head.

I know now that I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, which makes it hard for you to experience emotion — any emotion. I’d never been one for commitment, but in the months after I returned from Afghanistan, women came and went at an alarming rate.

You can get a lot of mileage with some girls when you tell them you’re fresh back from war, and I helped myself to more than my share.

Not that I remember much about them. That was because of the amount of booze I was getting through to slow down my thoughts, which if left unchecked would instantly deposit me right back in the nightmare of Helmand.

None of these liaisons lasted. When I started a seduction, I genuinely wanted to reach out to another human and hopefully find some measure of understanding, but there was always a gap I couldn’t bridge.

By the time we reached the bedroom, I was zoning out, never listening to the murmured words from the pillow next to me. My behaviour was bad — I knew this but didn’t care.

As a captain in the Coldstream Guards with soldiers under my command, I’d had enough of taking responsibility for others and now it was all about number one.

I felt guilty afterwards, but it never stopped me going out and doing it all again. Of course, there were even more nights when I passed out alone in drunken oblivion and, frankly, that was fine with me, too.

But that’s what happens when you’ve been to war — as I and hundreds of other British veterans like me from Iraq and Afghanistan are discovering. For politicians, generals and the public, the battles are over, the fighting now history. But for us it goes on.

I’d be walking down Oxford Street in London just staring at the ground, searching the pavement for roadside bombs, or I’d be scanning the horizon for potential enemy positions, mentally noting what cover was available should we be attacked.

Habits developed in Afghanistan were deeply ingrained. I was in the National Gallery with Steph, an old university friend, when a woman wearing a hijab came and stood next to me. A scream bubbled up inside me. I was certain she was going to kill us and I recoiled from the explosion I felt sure was coming.

I grabbed Steph by the arm, marching her away without explanation. Not surprisingly, she was shocked and pretty frightened. Shortly after, I was supervising some sixth-formers on an Army course for potential recruits. This included letting them loose on a weapons simulator. With the first volley of pretend fire I couldn’t stop myself. I hit the deck.

I slowly got to my feet and saw a sergeant, also just back from Afghanistan, picking himself up from the floor, too. We caught one another’s eye and smiled in embarrassment.

I knew that if I hadn’t developed speedy reactions like that then I might well be dead. But now I was constantly re-living being blown up.

All kinds of things could set it off — the view through the windscreen of a car, or the smell of bitumen being laid on a road, and I would be transported back to a terrible mine blast in the desert under our vehicle, and me scrabbling to get clear of the wreckage while my injured driver screamed his head off.

Strangely, it was my grandmother I confessed my problems to, at my grandad’s funeral. ‘I’ve been worried about you these past few months,’ she told me. ‘You’ve not been yourself.’

I blurted out the truth for the first time. ‘ I’ve not been fine since Afghanistan. Things happened to me over there and I can’t stop thinking about them. I want to forget, but I can’t.’

She placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘I thought so,’ she said. ‘Your grandad was the same when he came back from India after World War II. He’d wake up in the night screaming.

‘He wouldn’t tell me what he’d been dreaming about or what had happened to him in the war. He’d just go out into his allotment for hours on end. He wanted to be on his own.’ ‘Did he have any help?’ I asked. ‘ Oh, no,’ she said. ‘That didn’t happen in our day. Every second person was going through the same thing. It wasn’t done to talk about it. People just got on.’

‘I think I might need some help, Grandma. I’m thinking about going to see a doctor.’

‘Quite right, too,’ she said. ‘Good for you.’

‘Don’t you think I should just get on with it, the way Grandad did?’

‘Of course not. That was 60 years ago. I hope the world’s moved on. If you’ve got a problem, get it fixed.’ I was amazed by her pragmatism.

She dumped me, saying: You’re out of control I was convinced the woman in a hijab would kill us