Chris Thrall links veteran suicide to trauma and Northern Ireland prosecutions

Former Royal Marine Chris Thrall has described how childhood trauma, complex PTSD and the after-effects of military service shaped his life and his work on veterans' issues. In a broadcast interview, he said he reached a point where he could not go lower, and that his time in the Royal Marines was probably the proudest moment of his life. He joined at 18 from what he called a damaged background, and was living in a Renault 12 when he went to the recruiting office.

He said service delayed rather than healed trauma. At 19 he was on active service during the Northern Ireland conflict and witnessed a fatality. He recalled being told it was an unfortunate incident and being sent out again because the men were Royal Marines. The trauma, he said, catches up when personnel enter civvy street, when the negative voice returns and old wounds, including an absent father, come back.

He took a message about complex PTSD to the summit of Everest in May. He argued that understanding why so many people in the veterans community die by suicide requires looking at the whole holistic picture. Many veterans, he said, joined up from challenging backgrounds, and that pattern is not new.

On Northern Ireland, he said it was awful to see veterans in their 70s hounded almost literally to death, naming Dennis Hutchings. He asked why IRA soldiers were released from prison after the Good Friday Agreement while veterans were pursued years later. He said young troops were not politically or emotionally aware, were told who the bad guys were, and had to make split-second decisions in Belfast. They were trained to fire back and kill, he added, so a knock on the door decades later and the risk of court was a wicked thing to do.

Thrall described three steps in his recovery: leaving the past behind as an identity, looking at those who harmed him as a child and seeing generational trauma, and choosing empathy over resentment. He said the past does not exist and yesterday is irrelevant. He decided to be grateful for life because many of his friends had died in horrendous circumstances, including one who jumped from a building onto a spiked fence and others killed while surfing on a train in Thailand. He decided to take action and described a spiritual experience, which he linked to the Holy Spirit. He now uses a podcast and three memoirs to encourage others to see light at the end of the tunnel.

The host, Lee Anderson, strongly supported his account, saying there was no difficulty for him in the argument that veterans should be left alone. The interview ended with a lighter segment in which Thrall tried to pull a pint and named his partner Jenny and his son Haz as the guests he would want at home.