How Serving in Afghanistan Left Me With PTSD

The war in Afghanistan was sold to the public by the U.S. and its Western allies as a painful but necessary measure to keep the world safe from Islamist terror.

But by the time of the U.S.’s sudden, chaotic withdrawal from the country in August 2021—following a 20-year conflict that cost an estimated 176,000 lives—it was clear that the war had ultimately been a costly exercise in futility. Significantly, that was a conclusion that had been reached much earlier by many of the soldiers who had risked their lives in its name.

For the latest episode of VICE’s Informer series (which you can watch below), we spoke to an anonymous former British soldier about his experiences in Afghanistan, which he said left him with long-term psychological impacts and severe disillusionment with his own government.

“It would ultimately be a waste of time,” said the veteran, who served in the British Army in Afghanistan from October 2007 to April 2008. “How it’s been portrayed back home was very much about the war on terrorism, and that no one was safe from the Taliban,” he said. “We were very much told that we were going out there to make a difference to the world and make it a safer place.” But the effort had utterly failed in the mission of bringing stability or democracy to Afghanistan.

The former soldier said he was deployed with no real understanding of what would await him. “I didn’t feel mentally prepared for it at all. Because we didn’t really fully understand what we were going out there to do,” he said. “We were entering into the modern-day Vietnam, effectively.”

He explained how his team had been briefed ahead of the deployment that their role would be guarding Camp Bastion, the large British Army airbase operating in Helmand province at the time. “But then when we got out there, things changed, and we were redeployed to other more kinetic areas,” he told VICE.

He said the mission was “very disorganized,” with soldiers at times not provided with the necessary supplies. “We were issued with shorts and T-shirts for a winter tour,” he said. “When we got out there we didn’t have enough body armor plates for our body armor. So we had the choice to put either a plate in front or a plate in the back.”

Some of his fellow soldiers would buy pieces of their own equipment rather than rely on gear provided by the military, he claimed, “because the kit that we were issued with was substandard at the time.” He added: “There were people living in ditches for four months wearing boots with [plastic shopping] bags wrapped around them because they weren’t waterproof.”

The asymmetrical nature of the conflict meant that a military victory was always unlikely in the long term. “You’re never going to win against a force that doesn’t wear uniforms, that plants IEDs, and a militia that knows the ground far better than us,” he said. “How would you ever know whether they were Taliban or whether they were just local villagers and farmers?” As a result, the 2021 withdrawal of U.S. forces, which resulted in the Taliban retaking the entire country, “didn’t come as much of a surprise,” he said.

The former soldier told of how his experiences had had a profound psychological impact on him. Like many fellow veterans, he has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, which means he frequently is in a state of “hypervigilance”—constantly on guard and scanning for potential dangers. He also struggled for a time with drugs and alcohol, which he views as having been a way of self-medicating in response to his trauma.

“I don’t think I know anyone who was out on my tour who isn’t impacted in some way, whether that’s with self-medicating with substances or alcohol abuse, or failed marriages,” he said. “That was the way to escape it I guess.”