Baptism of fire

November last year was the 10th Anniversary of my brother's death and on a family weekend to remember Nick, his father-in-law reminded me that I hadn't read Andy McNab's autobiography Seven Troop. Military memoirs are not my preferred reading but the interest with this book is that Seven Troop, the Troop to which McNab was assigned on joining the SAS, included Frank Collins who, once he had left the SAS and become an Anglican minister, became a great friend of Nick.

They met, I think, when Nick contacted Frank after he had read an article about Frank in The Mirror. They had their army backgrounds in common and shared interests in outward bound activities and Christian ministry. These all came together in 1998 when Nick set up the first expedition by the Aston Community Youth Project to Uganda. Frank was also part of the team that went on the expedition and enabled 17 young people from Birmingham to visit Uganda and climb Mount Elgon. The expedition was a life-changing experience for many of those young people and also led to the establishment of the charity now known as Rejuvenate Worldwide.

Frank was an great encourager of the young people, as one of the young people said at the time, "I want to thank Frank Collins for pushing me on each day when I wanted to just stop ... He's a great guy. You can have great fun with him and he can be serious too." This quality of Frank's can also be sensed in one of the short speeches that he gave as the group were climbing Mount Elgon: "It's been a great time. A time to talk and learn from one other. A time to grow. We're all learning. We're learning as we go. None of us are experts. We're all finding out as we go along. A real broadening experience. We're all learning from it."

"Let's keep on climbing mountains guys. The rest of our lives right, all the way up," was his comment as the group celebrated reaching the summit of Mount Elgon.

Frank's autobiography Baptism of Fire had come out the year before and had changed his life in more ways than anyone realised at the time. Writing the book meant that Frank had to leave his role as chaplain to 5 Airborne Brigade leaving him without a clear sense of direction. Then, as McNab notes in Seven Troop, "Not a day went by without a flood of fan mail and more requests to speak about his experiences than he knew how to handle." The pressure of high profile Christian ministry can be immense because you are expected by those contacting you to respond to all their requests (if you don't, you are letting down your Lord) and because of expectations that you maintain high standards in your personal and family life as that is what is considered honouring to the Lord. When Frank felt that he was possibly in danger of failing in relation to these things he ended his life, commiting suicide on 16th June 1999.

McNab has said that as "7 Troop, was never more than 12-strong, so we knew each other very well. Frank Collins and Nish Bruce were a bit older than me and they became my heroes." This, despite Frank's regular attempts to convert McNab to Christianity. McNab writes that he admired Frank for "getting himself involved in a lot of kids' suport groups" where "He would take them canoeing or walking in the hills, anything to show them there was more to life than nicking cars or frightening old ladies."

Ultimately, however, he thought that none of this filled the vacuum in Frank's life that resulted from leaving the SAS. He looked around at the "weird collection of people" at his funeral - "friends from his evangelical, happy-clappy days, from the clergy college, prayer groups, the cathedral lads down the road, the kids and youth groups he'd helped - and listens to "speaker after speaker say great things about him," but all he could think was, 'what a waste'; "The Church had never filled the vacuum."

McNab puts the suicide of Collins (and Nish Bruce), two of his closest friends, to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Dr Gordon Turnbull, then an RAF psychiatrist, and now one of the world's leading experts on PTSD, explains it very simply: a normal reaction to an abnormal experience. Symptoms include flashbacks, nightmares, high anxiety, severe mood swings, hyper-alertness, violent and aggressive outbursts, lack of concentration, sexual dysfunction and depression, and an inability to readjust to ordinary life.

McNab's explanation understandably highlights the military experience which is familiar to him and plays down the significance of the Christian experience to which he does not relate. Frank's life and death were complex and PTSD was no doubt a part of what led to his suicide. However, the pressure that he must have felt as he suddenly became a high profile Christian with a personal life that he felt was disintegrating must also have been a significant factor in the choices he made and leaves the Church with questions to be answered that are, as yet, essentially unexplored.

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Violent Femmes - Used To Be.