The Last 10 Seconds

He was six years older than me and, growing up, I’m not ashamed to say I worshipped him. He’d always take time to play football with me or take me fishing, and knowing he was always there as a protective influence was one of the reasons I was confident enough to take on, and make enemies of, the playground bullies.

While I always wanted to be a police officer, John’s burning ambition was to join the army, and after his A-levels, that was exactly what he did. I’ll always remember the day of his passing-out parade at Sandhurst to celebrate the end of his officer training. The pride on the faces of my mum and dad as he marched past us; the excitement I felt as a thirteen-year-old boy, waving my Union Jack flag and seeing the Queen for the first time as she inspected the parade; the family photos of the four of us together afterwards, with John pristine in his uniform – photos that would grace the walls and mantelpieces of our home for years afterwards.

We were all scared when he did his tour of Northern Ireland. At that time, in the tail-end of the 1980s, it was still a very dangerous place for British troops, with bomb attacks a regular occurrence. But he came back unscathed with tales to tell of street riots, tense patrols in the bandit country of South Armagh, and hours of mind-numbing boredom stuck on base waiting for something to happen.

And then, in August 1990, Saddam Hussein’s forces invaded Kuwait and the Gulf War began. John was one of forty-five thousand British troops sent out to help liberate the country, along with half a million others from a wide coalition of countries, and I remember him being excited at the prospect of finally seeing some real action. My mum was worried about him. She didn’t want him to go, but on his last visit home before he went he’d put a big protective arm around her and told her not to worry. He’d then shaken hands with my dad and me, and headed out the door with a final wave goodbye.

When the ground war broke out at last in February 1991, it was one of the biggest mismatches in history. The Iraqi army was routed and Allied casualties were minimal. Unfortunately, they included members of John’s unit, whose armoured personnel carrier was targeted by mistake by an American A10 war plane. John survived the attack, unlike six of his colleagues, but he suffered serious burns to his face and body, and lost three of the fingers on his left hand. He spent two months in hospital, and when they first removed his bandages, Mum fainted. He was unrecognizable, his face a cruel tangle of scar tissue. Even I flinched, and had to fight back tears.

At twenty-one, John was invalided out of the army. Extensive plastic surgery and skin grafts helped to improve his appearance, but the mental scars proved harder to heal. He became withdrawn and depressed, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition I don’t think was even recognized at the time. He argued constantly with Mum and Dad, and ended up moving to a small flat in north London where he lived alone, preferring not to venture out so he couldn’t be seen.

But the thing about John was that he was a fighter, and, though it took a long time and a number of setbacks, including an arrest for drunk and disorderly and assault after a row in a pub when someone made a disparaging comment about his face, he slowly began to come out of his shell and get his life back together. He even got himself a job in a second-hand bookshop, which he was really enjoying. I’d just joined the Met as a trainee based out of Holborn, and had moved down from the family home in Herefordshire, so I often used to visit him. We’d go for drinks together in the pubs near his flat, and I was impressed at how he was turning his life around. He was even talking about running the London Marathon to raise money for an ex-services charity.

But he never got the chance, because a few weeks later he was dead.

It happened one lunchtime. John had just finished his morning shift at the bookshop and was walking down the high street to pick up a sandwich when he walked straight into an armed robbery. Two masked men armed with shotguns were holding up a cash delivery van outside a NatWest Bank branch. As they forced the two security guards to their knees, and ran to their getaway car, where a driver was waiting with the engine running, John sprang into action and gave chase, rugby-tackling one of them.

It was a crazy move, but just the kind of one John would make. He was like me in that respect. He never liked to see the bad guys get away with their crimes. And he’d always been recklessly brave, even more so, I suspect, since his injuries, because now he had a point to prove, and this was just the opportunity for the glory he’d always craved, yet had never quite attained.