Distortion
SOME RELIGIONS HAVE A RITUAL which is only undertaken in the most extreme of circumstances. If a member of a family or of the community is considered to have so offended against it that an ordinary punishment is not considered enough, then an anathema is pronounced and that person is declared dead. A full funeral ceremony is conducted in their absence, the loss is mourned, and from that moment on they become a non-living entity, an ex-person.
Back then, I kept thinking about that ritual. What must it be like for that person, the anathematised, to see the very fact of themselves disowned? Who would do that to someone, and what could anyone have done that was terrible enough to deserve it? The trouble was, I already knew. There I was, in the middle of London, banished. And in this self-imposed exile there was no contact with the outside world – or no meaningful contact, anyway. There was no sustenance or softness, only a wintry survival.
At the time I thought that the best way of dealing with it all was just to pretend it didn’t hurt. Physically speaking, that was true – hearing loss didn’t hurt at all. Emotionally speaking, it was a different matter. Even so, I still believed I could get through this with nothing but coffee and strong will. It took me a phenomenally long time to realise that the things I thought were helping me to survive were the same things that were pulling me down, but I certainly wasn’t going to drop any of them until I was backed so far up against the wall I had no choice but to put my hands up and surrender. Everything that I had held to – the strength, the endurance, the belief that I was alone – turned out to be wrong. Blissfully wrong. ‘Why didn’t you ask before?’ said my friends, as soon as I did. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, light-headed. ‘I really don’t know.’ ‘Come here,’ they said. ‘And give us a hug.’
After that, things became a lot easier. There’s something very powerful in that game-over moment and even if I did blunder around for a while trying to figure out how to find the right sort of help, at least I’d asked for it and at least I finally knew I needed it. Perhaps the biggest thing was to stop the habit of hurling myself towards the things that most scared me, and to cure myself of the belief that if I just stopped being lazy I could hear as well as the rest of the world. I had found people who gave me the tools I needed to reconstruct myself. If darkness worked slowly then love, it turned out, worked at the speed of light. And, once I started working for a photographic lab, I found one of the keys to dealing with deafness hiding there in plain sight.
More than a decade later when I started researching sound and its effect on the military I kept meeting people who reminded me of that time. Up until then I suppose I’d been aware that soldiering required a lot of exposure to potentially deafening weaponry, but I hadn’t realised the depth and extent of hearing loss or its wider psychological impact. These men had fought and won and bore the scars, and now all the things they’d fought for – the chance to have an ordinary family life or to sit peacefully at the head of their table – had been granted, but with the power of connection withdrawn. They could be in the room, they could see their children’s futures taking place in front of them, but they couldn’t make contact and they couldn’t radio for assistance. They had been banished. Their past might have been explosive, but oh my God, how much worse was their present.
They were also terrible at asking for help – trained not to ask for it, in fact. That was what Queen and Country had told them to do: just shut up and take it.
I knew I hadn’t gone through anything like their experience, so it seemed a bit presumptuous to superimpose anything of my own understanding. But somewhere through all those doing-fines and didn’t-hurts, I always seemed to hear the echo of a brutal grief.
FROM THE MOMENT in the seventeenth century when gunpowder was introduced, hearing loss in the military has been a problem. Medical records from the American Civil War show that around a third of soldiers were deafened, two world wars made the issue bigger, and the introduction of the jet engine in the 1950s turned it into something approaching an epidemic. Guns and gunpowder are loud, but bombs, mortars, missiles, tanks, Typhoons, Vulcans and Harriers are sensationally loud.
Hearing’s ‘pain threshold’ is around 120 dBs and a sound pressure wave of 150 dBs or above has the potential to burst the eardrum. If you were to stand with naked ears close to, let’s say, a Eurofighter Typhoon preparing for take-off, it wouldn’t just be loud to the point of excruciation but potentially loud enough to cause damage to the bones of the middle ear. Sound is pressure, which means the higher the volume, the greater the impact of that pressure on the body. An armoured personnel carrier can hit 110 dBs, a mortar fired at close quarters is about 190 dBs, the round of an M16 assault rifle firing is around 158 dBs, and the flight deck of an operational aircraft carrier can reach 125 dBs. No one, in other words, has ever invented a quiet way to blow things up.
The irony, of course, is that soldiering often requires great acuity of hearing. Survival may occasionally depend on being able to hear the click of a bolt or identify the alarm call of a bird. You need to be able to hear the enemy before the enemy hears you. But when you’re not running around in jungles playing hide-and-seek with people doing their best to kill you quietly, you’re in places where they’re trying to do it as noisily as possible. When things do kick off and suddenly there’s guns and bullets and explosions and noise so loud it does things to your vision, it’s also vital to be able to hear the sudden exclamation from the person next to you because if you can’t respond to an order, then there’s a good chance that you’re not going to live for very long. So you’re expected to be in situations where your hearing is tuned to an almost musical level of discrimination, and then to be able to withstand the full bone-rattling impact of war. In both situations, conventional hearing protection isn’t merely useless, it may well be actively counterproductive. Which means that, for as long as war has been loud, the army’s choice has been either ear defenders or self-defence. Deaf, or dead: the choice is yours.
For a long time, the issue was either ignored or understated. Deafness was regarded as part of the job – an occupational hazard like PTSD or the clap. You joined the army, you got your hearing shot off. Besides, of all the possible injuries or disabilities caused by military service, NIHL (noise-induced hearing loss) seemed relatively mild. It wasn’t like losing a limb. There wasn’t blood, or grief, or whatever horrible thing happened to your insides when your best mate died beside you. Hearing just snuck off silently in the middle of the night or exchanged itself for tinnitus’s empty fizz. Nobody saw it happen, nobody mourned its loss. Troubling, but on the one-to-ten scale of military horror, pretty low on the list.
And, despite the evident correlation between loud bangs and hearing loss, the armed forces remained reluctant to acknowledge the issue. Partly that’s because deafness and tinnitus are the two most prevalent service-related disabilities, and thus the potential implications of large-scale NIHL compensation claims are too terrible to contemplate. Even at current levels, disability payments to veterans in the USA for hearing loss and tinnitus are well over $1 billion a year. What it would be like if the true number of deafened veterans came forward to claim, nobody knew, and nobody wanted to know. By the Ministry of Defence’s own estimate, things were not much better in Britain. Up to February 2016, 12,622 claims for NIHL compensation had been brought against the MoD, 9,388 of which were successful. A 2014 response to a Freedom of Information request said that of the 156,220 personnel serving at the time, 3,980 had been diagnosed with some form of hearing loss, though the same response admits that the figures represent at best ‘a minimum burden of ill-health’. For 756 of those individuals, their hearing loss was severe enough to warrant their discharge from the service.
The MoD’s assessment is, in all probability, a radical underestimate. A 2008 study in the USA suggests that more than half – 51.8 per cent – of personnel still serving at the time had moderate to severe hearing loss. During the first year of the war in Iraq, ‘an average of one soldier a day was medically evacuated for complaints related to hearing loss’. That’s a lot of soldiers, and a lot to lose.
But you have to look quite hard to find the long-term emotional consequences of all that loss. The military chat forums offer plenty of conversations about the practicalities of audiological testing or army pension arrangements: who pays what for how much loss, etc. But underneath that runs a quieter hum of private pain. Front-line soldiers worrying about being downgraded to support roles, older vets beached in zero-hours civilian jobs wondering if they can retrospectively claim for compensation years after they left. ‘I refuse to wear hearing aids at work as it’s embarrassing’ … ‘Damned ear defenders don’t defend much when putting a few dozen rounds through the Scorpion’s 76mm’ … ‘Unless you can blag another hearing test with a “friendly” medic, your fooked [sic]’.
Nobody likes it. Nobody wants to admit how much they don’t like it. And, just as with PTSD, nobody wants to point out that the qualities needed for a job in the armed forces are the reverse of the qualities needed to cope best with deafness. The whole point about being in the military is that you’re supposed to be fierce, strong, a dutiful team player, someone who’s capable of putting aside their own emotions and individuality for the sake of the greater whole. So how’s that compatible with someone who has to ask five times for the way to the toilets?
The trouble is that there’s collusion on both sides. If, let’s say, you’re training to be a fighter pilot and you’re one of the fortunate few who has spent the four years and £4 million necessary to complete that training and you then wake up one day with the absolute knowledge that you’re going deaf, what then? Annual medical tests were only made compulsory for all British service personnel in 2008, and even now hearing tests aren’t conducted by a specialist. In the past it was up to the individual themselves to have a long hard chat with their own conscience and make the decision to report the problem. Once they’d done so, and depending on the extent of their hearing loss, there was a strong chance that they would either be withdrawn from service completely or demoted to a non-flying role. Or they could make the decision to keep quiet, keep the job, and risk the lives of everyone around them by mishearing a command or blanking a crucial auditory clue.
From the forces’ point of view there was also a vested interest in making the best of each case, not just because of the compensation issue but because of the resources they’d already invested in each individual. Though the MoD is bound by the same Noise at Work regulations as every other employer in the UK, they also have trouble recruiting and keeping staff, which means they can always theoretically argue that getting rid of trained individuals just because they’re having a spot of trouble with high frequencies is a very inefficient use of taxpayers’ money. Thus army doctors had several good reasons for downplaying a hearing loss diagnosis and soldiers were generally left to make the decision themselves.
All of which is really quite alarming. After all, if your commanding officer yells, ‘Fire! Fire at the large scary thing over there!’ and you hear nothing but a vague itching in your earphones, then either the scary thing fires back at you or you fire at the not-scarey thing in the other direction, thus potentially causing both a tragic meaningless death and a major geopolitical incident. It’s not so improbable: a 2008 study in the USA found a significant difference between the response times among tank crewmen who hadn’t heard a command properly and those who had. Among those who had been able to hear a command to engage a target, 94 per cent had hit the right one. Of those who hadn’t been able to hear the command, 41 per cent had hit the right one. Which means 59 per cent hit the wrong object. Or person. Or people.
Attempts to improve the situation have produced mixed results. It wasn’t until large numbers of service personnel reported problems after both world wars that the MoD began considering the question of protection. If recruits were having trouble with their hearing, they suggested, then perhaps they could try cotton wool. Or maybe cotton wool moistened with Vaseline. Or sticking their fingers in their ears. When large numbers of soldiers in the Irish Army brought cases against the Department of Defence between 1999 and 2002, some reported that they had been forced to improvise their own ear plugs out of the filters on cigarettes.
During the war in Afghanistan the US army introduced the combat arms earplug which blocks loud-impact sounds but lets through soft fluctuating sound such as voices. In theory, all personnel were supposed to use it. In practice, it was shunned for being too expensive (at $6 a pair), and for the usual situational-awareness reasons.
In Britain, the Personal Interfaced Hearing Protection (PIHP) was introduced to all those serving in Afghanistan. When later surveyed it turned out that only 4 per cent of those who responded were using them. Another study found that, among flight deck crews, four-fif ths were either not wearing earplugs or wearing them wrongly, and one double-sided model so puzzled its users they just chopped it in half, thus rendering it marginally less useful than nothing at all.
SOMEHOW GENERAL SIR PETER DE LA BILLIÈRE, KCB, KBE, DSO, MC, managed to be right there at all the crucial moments of the late twentieth century. Born in 1934, he endured a childhood which sounds truly grim – father killed during World War II, mother incapacitated by an accident, escaped from a fire at his prep school aged ten, joined the army as soon as legally possible. Having worked his way up the ranks in Korea, Borneo and Malaya, he was recruited to the SAS in 1956, presided over the Iranian embassy siege in 1980, stayed on to sort out the Falklands after the war, and was appointed Commander-in-Chief of British Forces during the first Gulf War. Opinions on his legacy are divided – some hold him up as the godfather of the modern SAS, others say his biggest victories lay in advancing his own cause – but either way, he has certainly stacked up an impressive range of medals and awards throughout his service. Military Cross in 1959 with an extra bar a few years later, Distinguished Service Order in 1976, Commander of the US’s Legion of Merit in 1993. ‘Not particularly bright,’ said a high-ranking colleague who had served alongside him, ‘but definitely the bravest man I’ve ever met.’
Sir Peter is just how you’d expect a very distinguished army general to be: large, formal, faintly menacing, a deep, roary-drawly voice. His wife Bridget is friendly but shy, small in both height and speech, as if she’s spent so long taking the full weight of Sir Peter’s extremely strong personality on her shoulders that she has somehow got smaller along the way. For the interview we walk over to a separate building with better acoustics, an old piggery which has been converted into a games room and snug. ‘Do you like it?’ he asked. ‘It’s our grandchild trap.’
Sir Peter has been dealing with deafness for much of his life. He had always been colour blind, but by the time he was leading patrols in Aden in his late twenties it was clear that his hearing had begun to degenerate.
At the time, they were out in the jungle fighting an unseen enemy. ‘And of course if you’re on a patrol, you need to be able to hear the slightest sound before the person making it hears you. And you’d use light signals – or in those days you did: red and green lights fired from these things called Vari-Lites.’ The signals were relatively simple – something along the lines of red for withdraw, green for advance, though since he couldn’t discriminate between the two colours he was unable to interpret their message. He enlisted the services of a signaller called Geordie Low and between them they devised a set of simple codes, allowing Sir Peter to circumvent both the hearing problem and the colour blindness. ‘The noise was the real issue. I had a system with him, and as far as I remember it now, it was one tap on the shoulder for a noise, two for red and three for green, or something like that, so that he didn’t have to talk to me on patrol. You don’t want to start having discussions if you’re creeping around in the dark on the side of the mountain with a lot of other people creeping around against you.’
Back in Britain three years later in 1967, he was promoted to the rank of major and sent to staff college at Camberley. Taken out of the battlefield and into the tutorial room, Sir Peter found himself encountering a different problem. ‘[The deafness] was damaging my ability to take in lectures, which was embarrassing because then I couldn’t respond to them properly at the academic level that they expected. I couldn’t hear or I misheard, which was in a way even more dangerous because you answer what you think you’ve heard, which isn’t necessarily the answer that they are looking for. Anyway, I got so fed up with this it forced me to go and complain about it to see if I could get something done. Not out of a sense of duty but because I wanted a doctor to do something so I bloody well could hear. It was just irritating. And out of that came the fact that I was deaf – to the point where they downgraded me. I mean, I was thirty-six, that’s the end of your career, really.’
Sir Peter appealed. ‘I was in headquarters, I was running things, and I didn’t need the fine-tuned hearing that I needed when I was younger, leading patrols or listening out for enemy movements at night in the jungle or in the desert or whatever. I argued that at that age it didn’t matter, which to some extent it didn’t because one was more into giving orders than receiving them. But of course it did matter.’ Either way, he won the point. As he writes in his memoirs, ‘My appeal was accepted, on condition that I would take a special test every three years … and, whether by good luck or good management, I contrived to be abroad every time the date came round.’
After that Sir Peter continued to rise, first in Special Forces and then at the Special Air Service. He played a key role in the Iranian embassy siege of 1980 whilst serving as Director of the SAS. How was deafness affecting him at the time of the siege? ‘I was in the Cabinet Office briefing and advising other senior politicians and police officers rather than at the scene of the incident. The people at the scene of the incident who were the ones who suffered noise exposure would have been [the rank of] major downwards. After the rank of lieutenant colonel, I was promoted out of deafness, if you see what I mean, because I would have been in more senior appointments, and therefore more managerial and farther back from the front line where the firing is.’
At that stage, was everyone of higher rank deaf? ‘Yes. Yes.’ So it was pervasive? ‘Yes. Everybody in the army of my generation who went to war and fired weapons had some degree of deafness. Well, I say everybody, but a very high percentage. And bearing in mind that there was inadequate or no hearing protection – cotton wool or something like that – deafness was quite generally accepted in the latter stages of an army life.’ Were there other senior officers in the same position as you? ‘Yes.’
So how did he deal with things during the Falklands and the Gulf? ‘Well, that’s a good point because there would be very critical meetings and I would have to make decisions, requiring a full understanding of what was being said in order to come to the right decision which people’s lives might depend on. And so once again you come back to two things: telling people who are sitting around talking with you that your hearing is not good and asking them to make sure you’ve heard, and – most important, really – having an officer or people with you who are aware of your disability and who will be listening out for you and who will notice from your behavioural pattern or from the answer that you give that you haven’t heard something and put you right.’
Would the RAF or the army allow someone deafened to continue flying or operate a tank? ‘The more senior you become, the more experienced you become, the less your level of hearing impairment will impact on your employability. So there’s a balance coming into play – it’s never all in your favour as a deaf person, but it mitigates a deteriorating situation.’ Which is interesting, given that the implication is the more senior you are, the less you actually need to listen.
Sir Peter has been retired for many years. His hearing has continued to degenerate steadily, and he now also has tinnitus. After leaving the army he went first into banking, and then writing, starting with his own autobiography, Looking for Trouble. He found it; the book prompted a row over his (very discreet) revelations about a service famed for secrecy. Several other books followed, and for a time Sir Peter took on a new role as a public speaker. That too proved tricky. When speaking at book festivals or big events he would almost always be unable to hear questions from the audience, and took to having someone sitting next to him to relay questions directly to him.
‘What I was terrified of was misunderstanding and giving the wrong answer. You see, the trouble is, it’s not just a question of hearing what you say, I anticipate not hearing subconsciously. And so I’m more concerned about trying to hear you than about what you’re asking me.’ It’s a feeling familiar to anyone who’s losing their hearing; you end up so preoccupied with trying to grab a handful of words and stuff them down your ears that you forget about their meaning. You’re working so hard to hear that you’re unable to listen.’
As he points out, as hearing gradually slips away, there’s a strong probability it takes your social life with it. First of all he stopped going to the theatre – ‘I’d just go to sleep – there’s no point, I can’t hear, I’d miss far too much of it.’ Then he found that he couldn’t hear church services, then concerts became pointless, then he stopped going to dinner parties. Finally even family dinners became tricky. His grandchildren are still young, and, ‘Oh, it’s very annoying, it’s one of the most annoying things of all, because I can’t hear children’s voices – either the pitch or the volume – and so I try to join in around the table or sit here listening to them, and find that I can’t hear them. I keep asking them and I feel more embarrassed about being deaf in front of my grandchildren than I do amongst my contemporaries. They’re very good and understanding about it now because they know about it, but it does mean I drop out of the conversation completely and I stop trying to listen in the end. So if there’s a conversation going on at lunch around the table, I’ll drop out.’
He changed his car to something much quieter, he soundproofed the barn, he stopped answering the phone. ‘So in the end you say, well, why bother to go out? It’s all such an effort, it’s embarrassing other people, I don’t get much out of it, I’d rather stay at home. So you stay in the grandchild trap.’ So the danger is that it becomes isolating? ‘Yes. Exactly that, exactly that. It does. And the thing is, you don’t realise. I’ve been very busy until about three years ago, and I suddenly realised, yes, it is isolating … I’m tremendously reliant on Bridget, and she doesn’t help really when she talks in a quiet voice and more often to the Aga than to me, but at least she isn’t surprised when I haven’t heard and keep asking for repetition.’
He probably wouldn’t go to a restaurant now. ‘Because I know I won’t be able to hear what’s being said, and it subconsciously makes one antisocial, sub-social. I don’t want to move out of this house where I can hear everything and I know where I am. And so I don’t want to go on holidays, so poor old Bridget doesn’t get holidays unless she bullies me. And that’s the way it impacts on me – it makes you a recluse.’
Does he have friends in a similar situation? ‘Yes. Particularly service friends. Some quite seriously bad.’ And is their experience similar? ‘Yes, I think it probably is. I mean, you don’t go out to talk deafness, and the chances are if you’re able to talk deafness to somebody, then you know them pretty well anyway, so it isn’t the sort of issue to talk about very much: “Yes, I’m deaf, yes, you’re deaf; bloody nuisance, isn’t it?” You know, and there’s an end of it. They understand it, and you understand them.’
If someone gave him his hearing back tomorrow, what would it change? ‘Well, I’d really enjoy being able to hear birds which I can’t hear at all and which everybody else can – they talk about them. A couple of days ago, Bridget said, “Oh, I heard the birds this morning.” I’d love that. It would give me great enjoyment to be able to hear my children, and they would be delighted not to have to shout at me the whole time, and of course bring me into the conversation which they don’t bother too much about because they know I can’t hear them. I don’t mean in a nasty way – “He can’t hear, so we’re talking to everyone else except him. And if he can hear, well, that’s fine.” It would take a lot of pressure out of life, I think. But you don’t think about these things now because they’re not possible, so why bother?’
OLIVER HEADLEY* is a former bomb disposal expert with the Royal Ordnance Corps who was later seconded to Special Forces and retired a decade ago. He’d been suggested as a good person to speak to, so I emailed him and arranged to meet in a Home Counties pub. He’s heavyset with dark hair, wraparound glasses and a striped shirt with the collar turned up. His eyes aren’t blank but they’re not warm either. There’s something there, but it’s very far back. He speaks with a very particular inflection, throwing his statements down like a provocation, like the show of cards that ends the game – There. Done. Bang – though maybe it’s just the way you talk when everyone expects you to have an answer even when you don’t.
Like most soldiers he spent a lot of time in planes. In Chinooks, noise levels could reach 120 dBs, and though he and the rest of the crew would be wearing helmets fitted with intercoms (ICs), the helmets were designed to protect their heads, not look after their hearing. If they wanted hearing protection while they were on ground operations, Headley says, they bought their own.
Not that it got much use because it seemed like every time they needed it on, they had to take it off. ‘You can’t operate sometimes when you have hearing protection on. Especially when you’re on live operations, say. I mean, it’s far more important to communicate than to protect your hearing, especially when things are going …’ He pauses, searching for a polite form of words. ‘ … Yeah. Pretty Pete Tong, you know? Because if you’ve got someone with double hearing protection, you can’t communicate with them, so the only way to get his attention is to stick your rifle butt in his head and get his attention that way, or physically grab hold of him – this is not what you need to be doing. You need to be able to communicate, and that means a lot of screaming, a lot of shouting. So a lot of the time, we operated without any hearing protection whatsoever.’
Headley retired a decade ago. Does he think things are still the same?
‘Yes. Absolutely. Because if you start screwing around doing that sort of thing, you’re going to end up getting killed. Or badly wounded. Or the other guys are going to do that. So, you know, it’s a trade-off – hearing suffering, or coming back intact? It’s a no-brainer, really. And this is what happens, and this is what has always happened, and this is what will always happen in the future.’
Does the MoD understand that soldiers have a conflict between doing their job and protecting their hearing? ‘Their attitude is just the same as it’s always been. They’re very unhelpful. They do not accept that, well, hang on, there’s a necessity to communicate on operations. And they’ll just weave their way out of it. They don’t recognise tinnitus because you can’t prove it. When I went to the veterans’ agency about it, they said, “You can’t prove tinnitus, so you can’t claim.” And that’s the reality of it.’ It’s ‘hysterical deafness’ all over again.
How much do they accept people continuing to serve with severe hearing loss?
‘If the medical officer finds that you should be justifiably downgraded, you are downgraded immediately, and you’re suspended from operations like that.’ He clicks his fingers. ‘So a lot of the guys over the years, myself included, have covered up injuries because we didn’t want to be removed from operations.’
How do you cover things up?
‘It’s not that difficult to bluff a hearing test if you know how to do it. Which I’ve done in the past. You bluff it by speaking to someone who’s had the test and asking them, “OK, so in between each tone, what’s the time gap?” “Oh, round about fifteen seconds.” So every fifteen seconds, you just keep hitting the button.’ He chuckles. ‘Guys who are in the Special Forces are cunning buggers by definition, and if they can’t find a way to bluff the hearing test, they shouldn’t really be there.’
‘So basically you’ve got a bunch of deaf …’
‘I wouldn’t say a bunch, no, you’ve got people who are adversely affected by things who are keeping things quiet or they are manipulating the system in order to continue on operations, yeah, sure.’
With the tacit consent of the MoD?
‘We are expendable. Everyone is expendable.’
In his case the damage was partly caused by the noise from helicopters, and partly from thousands and thousands of rounds of ammunition let off at close quarters, and from explosives. ‘A rifle bullet typically when it leaves the muzzle is travelling at say seven to eight hundred metres a second, right? High explosive, when it detonates, is detonating at 8,500 metres a second. There’s a massive difference there, and it’s extremely shocking to the hearing, and to the cavities of the body when you’re in a room and it’s going off.’
Immediately after you’re exposed to that kind of shock, what do you feel?
‘OK, well, a high-explosive shock wave attacks the cavities of the body. So the cavities of the body are the thorax, the abdomen and the cranium, and the shock wave passes through it. And you feel it hit you as it goes through the cavities of the body. And when you’re in a building, it can be very incapacitating. In fact we use it as a weapon. Special Forces would use high explosives to go through a wall, but they would use more than is necessary to breach the hole in order to use the over-pressure on the bad guys inside to incapacitate them before they go in.’
So they would be physically wiped out?
‘It depends on the amount of explosive used. To take that door off’ – he points to the flimsy pine door between the pub lounge and the bar – ‘you don’t need much explosive just to cut through it. What we’d call a single strand of det cord – detonating cord. But if that went bang, it would be terribly painful, terribly shocking for you, and you would feel the shock wave. But if there were bad guys on the other side of that door I would use maybe ten strands of det cord, which is massive overkill, but it would definitely bugger them up inside before we went through the door. And when you’re doing this kind of stuff live on operations you don’t use the formula that is mathematically proven to cut that door with explosives – you use the P Formula, which is P for Plenty, in order to get the desired effect on whoever is on the other side.’
Overkill, literally?
‘Massive, yeah. And when you’re breaching a wall, you use massive overkill before you go in, absolutely. And you are in close proximity to this, and the shock wave – I mean, you’ve been exposed to it for so long, you know what’s coming, but it’s still shocking every time it goes off.’
What does that do to you psychologically?
‘Hmmff. Nothing.’ An intake of breath. ‘No, nothing at all. Psychologically, absolutely not. What, you mean using explosives?’
Yes – that kind of physical shock.
‘Oh, you just get used to it.’
OK, what does it do to you the first time, then?
‘Well, it’s just a shock – it doesn’t do anything to you psychologically. It’s just, “OK, that was different.” And you just get used to it. To the point where you don’t even jump. When you’re going through a building and you’re blowing door after door after door day after day, week after week, month after month, you just become immune to it. You know it’s going to go bang, you know the shock wave is going to hit you, yeah – but it’s no problem, provided you’re not too close to it and the explosives aren’t big enough to really affect you.’
Silence. He takes a sip of water.
What are you now?
‘I’m retired. I’m a fisherman and a hunter. That’s what I am now.’
How does that time in the forces affect your present life?
‘In lots of ways really.’ He’s reflective, quiet. ‘I suppose you can’t help being shaped and moulded into certain ways having spent so long in and operated at the levels I’ve operated at. And I suppose seeing what I’ve seen. But beyond that, I really don’t want to get into it.’
OK. How do you feel about the military now?
‘Oh, I wish I’d been a dentist, I really do.’
AS HEADLEY POINTS OUT, the military have now turned their enforced expertise in very loud noises into weapons in their own right. In addition to techniques such as waterboarding, which became notorious during the Iraq war, the US military still legally uses so-called ‘white torture’ as part of its arsenal of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’. Considered to be more ‘humane’ than traditional physical forms, no-touch techniques include the use of ‘futility music’ to confuse and disorientate a prisoner psychologically and to break down their resistance before interrogation.
The British used loud and continuous noise as one of the ‘five techniques’ of interrogation against IRA suspects until the practice was ruled ‘degrading and inhuman’ by the European Court of Human Rights in 1976 and outlawed. Some time later the Americans picked up the five-techniques idea, using it first in Vietnam and then against the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. But the use of futility music really came into its own during the Iraq war. Just as during the 1960s and 1970s the CIA had experimented with various stimulants and hallucinogens, so they now tried to do the same thing by so overloading or depriving a detainee’s senses that their hold on reality loosened. And they discovered that the use of music – or its opposite, white noise – cuts straight to the core. Half the point of music is to override logic, and the other half is to draw out an emotional response. Expose Arabic detainees – some of whom are not used to Western music – to uber-American rock at extreme volume and the effect is, literally, torture.
In 2014, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued a report on the ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ favoured by the CIA during the War on Terror. The report found that ‘Conditions at CIA detention sites were poor, and were especially bleak early in the program. CIA detainees at the COBALT detention facility were kept in complete darkness and constantly shackled in isolated cells with loud noise or music and only a bucket to use for human waste.’
A British citizen, Shafiq Rasul, who was held in 2003 at Guantanamo Bay while suspected of affiliation to Al-Qaeda, would be left chained in his cell with music playing on a loop at extreme volume for twelve hours a day. In a 2006 interview for the magazine SPIN, he explained its effects. ‘It just starts playing with you,’ he says. ‘Even if you were shouting, the music was too loud – nobody would be able to hear you. You’re there for hours and hours, and they’re constantly playing the same music. All that builds up. You start hallucinating.’ A year later, he was released without charge, evidence having emerged that in 2000 he was not, as the authorities claimed, hanging out with Osama bin Laden plotting the 9/11 attacks, but at college in the UK with a part-time job at Curry’s.
Because the playlist at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay apparently included not only heavy metal (Led Zeppelin, Rage Against the Machine, Metallica) but Britney Spears and Barney the Purple Dinosaur, the idea of using music to break the will of a detainee was somehow seen as funny. It wasn’t. The long-term use of any sound above 85–90 dBs can damage hearing, whether it’s birdsong or Black Sabbath. A prisoner’s body might heal after physical torture but their mind probably won’t, and, once damaged, their hearing would be gone for good.
Despite the protests of several groups and individuals whose music has been used in this way – Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails tried to take the US army to court – and the findings of the Senate Committee that no useful intelligence had resulted from the use of white noise, it remains a legal technique in the USA.
So what does Headley know about white torture?
‘White noise? For interrogation? It’s not extreme in any form. It’s like a crackling, a static. Crrrrrr, like you used to get with old-fashioned wireless sets when you twiddled the dial and it went between radio channels. There would be the crackling, until you got on to the next channel. That’s just what white noise is – it’s just turned up, there’s nothing extreme about it.’
What do you use it for?
A pause, a calibration.
‘You would use it to psychologically wear people down in an interrogation setting, so they’d be blindfolded probably and maybe even in a stress position where they’d remain for days on end, and you’ll expose them to the white noise. But it’s not painful to the hearing.’
So it’s not ramped up to a level which is physically painful?
‘No. Never in my experience, no.’
And what’s the effect of white noise over a prolonged period?
‘It just wears them down. It’s just a psychological tool to … you know, deprive someone of sleep, detach them from the surroundings that they perceive themselves to be in. It’s to remove them from any form of comfort zone and to put them in a place where you want them to be psychologically to subject them to various interrogation techniques.’
And does it work?
‘Um. Because of rules and regulations, you can’t apply’ – a chuckle – ‘the sort of interrogation techniques that would be most effective. Rules and regulations stipulate that you’re only allowed to carry out interrogation in a certain fashion and white noise is a part of that, but it’s not cranked up to a point that is painful for the person who is in receipt of all this.’
And if rules and regulations didn’t exist, it would be?
‘If we could interrogate people in … um, the way that would be most effective, we would get a lot more out of them. And things would be a damn sight more uncomfortable for them.’ He holds my gaze steady. Another silence.
So you would break them down quicker?
‘You’d break them down a lot more quickly and you would get a lot more accurate information out of them in a shorter time-frame. Definitely. So when you hear about all this stuff that went on in Iraq and Afghanistan, the media have just hyped it all up. And as I say, it’s the same with white noise or music or anything like that. It can be repetitive, it can be unpleasant or it can be damn painful if it’s really cranked up, but in my experience it’s never done like that.’
So you used music as well?
‘Yeah, I mean … So if we had personnel – whoever they were – deploying, part of that pre-deployment training would be to prepare them for how to handle the situation if they were taken hostage. It’s not Arabic music, if you like, it’s extremist, insurgent’s music which they would listen to, which is extremely religiously orientated if they’re from their faith. So the Western students would be bombarded with this for days and nights on end. Constantly. Not white noise. Because the insurgents don’t use white noise.’
So you use religious music?
‘Yes. You use religious music. From their side – we don’t use any genteel choir singing or anything like that, it would be extremist stuff that the terrorists listen to.’
The discussion of it I’ve seen in the media is about the use of heavy metal, etc., against Muslim suspects because it comes from a different world view and because it’s hammering an alien Western message …
‘… that they hate anyway, and it just pisses them off. And it’s done to get a reaction. Or it’s done to wear them down. Sure.’
But it’s not done at painful levels – the point is to be relentless, not to destroy hearing?
‘In my experience, no. No.’
So you use sound as a weapon yourselves, plus you’re exposed to it on a continual basis yourselves …
‘It’s not used as a weapon, it’s used as a tool. Very different things.’
Headley’s account is of a world in which all the good things in life – the tastes, sounds, sights, smells and sensations, the human connections – are twisted down into something dark. Listening to him, I’m torn between revulsion and sorrow. If he and the army have used cruelty against others, then surely they have used that cruelty threefold on themselves. It reminds me of his description of those pressure waves.
Bang! The first time you feel something. Then you feel nothing.
What do you know?
Nothing.
What does this mean?
Nothing.
What do you feel?
Nothing.
What do you feel?
Nothing. I feel nothing at all.
I don’t believe you.
* Oliver Headley is a pseudonym.