Many books and films have had themes of action heroes haunted by their past, but now we have our own Hawkesbury tale written by a former combat medic with the RAAF.
While Grose Wold man BJ Compton would never describe himself as an action hero, he is certainly haunted by his past, and has written a compelling novel based on his real-life experiences in many war zones, which left him with post traumatic stress disorder.
He wrote the e-book ‘Black Dog singing in the dead of night’, which is narrated by a dog picked up as a stray by the combat medic main character, as part of his own therapy. Mr Compton’s last job in the Defence Forces was as a nursing officer at the RAAF Hospital at Richmond.
”I loved my time n the RAAF,” he said. “It was just the ghost memories prevented me from being deployable, which is what I joined to do.”
The 50-year-old Yorkshireman began his career in the RAF in England, but came to Australia in 2004 and joined our Air Force.
His PTSD accumulated over time from the many war or disaster zones he’d worked in. Despite the trauma of patching up terribly wounded people, he said he became addicted to going away to those places “and it gets to a point where that’s all you do,” he said.
“It’s addictive – the adrenaline rush, the teamwork, the importance of the job.”
His first and possibly most traumatic overseas trip was as a frontline combat medic to Sierra Leone in west Africa in 2001. It was near the end of that country’s civil war, which had run for most of the 90s. More than 50,000 people died in that war, but it was the mutilated, not the dead that haunt him.
“To stop people voting they chopped off their arms,” he said. “To vote you needed to provide a fingerprint. There were tens of thousands of them – babies, children, everyone.”
Then in 2003 he was deployed to Iraq. “We were with the Brits for the bombing of Basra [in Iraq],” he said, saying they were treating very mangled patients with blast wounds from artillery.
“The threat there was of chemical warfare so we were in respirators for the first month,” he said. “A lot of people got claustrophobia from wearing them as they suck to your face to make them airtight.” He was OK with them though.
In 2004 he was sent to Banda Aceh after the tsunami but incredibly the RAAF team was kicked out by the government after two weeks because they didn’t have visas.
Numerous trips to war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan followed and he would often accompany patients during their medivac to German hospitals from there.
His development of PTSD was something he didn’t see coming. The first inkling was when “one of the warrant officers said I should get checked out”.
However he wasn’t actually diagnosed until a year after his last deployment.
He said his symptoms were being in a state of hypervigilance, being anxious, and only sleeping a couple of hours a night for around two years.
“I didn’t really notice. I really was oblivious of my symptoms. I got pneumonia in 2010 and the high temperatures caused hallucinations.” He thinks that’s what really set it off.
“Everything was under control until I got pneumonia. I was off work for three to four weeks. I went back to work and was more reclusive than normal and wasn’t able to cope with my workload. I couldn’t focus.”
He raised the red flag himself and saw a civilian psychologist who said he had PTSD and referred him to a RAAF psychiatrist. “I was treated for about a year on reduced duties but it didn’t really help. Then I was medically discharged in 2011.
“I had nine months off then went to work as a medic on an oil rig.” He threw that in after two years as helicopters were how you got there and back, which would trigger flashbacks. In 2014 he had to take a year off.
He now has a safety officer job in the Hawkesbury which he’s held since July and is happy there. “The guys here are really supportive.”
He said writing the book has helped most of all in starting to put the past behind him.
“It was part of my own therapy, instead of taking anti-psychotic medications,” he said. “They would zombify you out, make you numb. I went to Bunnings one day with my wife and paid for my stuff – but then I wanted to pay again – and again – and again. I just stood there for 20 minutes.”
So what was going through his head at that point.?
“Nothing! Cotton wool! Wind! Those drugs are just an easy way to handle people. It’s a chemical restraint rather than a physical restraint.
“When I finished the book, it was like ‘it’s all been said, it’s out in the open now’. I started to get more sleep – I’m sleeping around five hours now. I used to get nightmares a lot; now it’s a lot less. I have a feeling of it being more controlled.
“It’s still there and there are things that trigger it. When you’ve seen dead kids, blown-up buildings and mutilations….I don’t like to tell people at a barbecue that it reminds me of burning flesh.”
He said shopping malls aren’t good, due to their sensory overload. “I can walk around Richmond Marketplace now, but if I have to go to Castle Towers or Penrith, I’ll go really early when there’s no-one there and get in and get out.”
He said he’s learnt to control his thoughts to some extent and talks himself through things when he starts to get unreasonable thoughts. “I’ll tell myself that no, that person walking towards me doesn’t have a bomb.”
He said his wife has always been very supportive though was very upset when she read his book, “as I’ve never talked about it [his experiences]”. She hadn’t known what he’d been through.
He would like to get his book out there for two reasons. He feels it will give people an insight into and understanding of what our military personnel go through; and also 10 per cent of profits go to Soldier On, which supports miltiary personnel who have been physically or psychologically affected by their service - and which continues to help him.
“We meet in Windsor every fortnight for a coffee and a chat. The meetings would get me out of the house [before he got his current job].” About four or five veterans come along to the meetings and they also go on social events together.
After what his experiences have done to him, what would he say if he was able to give his young self some advice before embarking on his career? In hindsight would he have followed a different career?
“I’ve loved it. I’ve enjoyed it – serving your country and working with your colleagues, it’s addictive, but I’d say you need to offload what you’ve experienced regularly instead of bottling it up. I think then it wouldn’t get so bad.”
His book is available at www.smashwords.com/books/view/664143 or Amazon at /www.amazon.com.au/Black-Dog-Singing-Dead-Night-ebook/dp/B01LRXCQGY.