Pull Up a Sand Bag
Simon sat across from me in a prefab office that smelled faintly of instant coffee and diesel fumes from the loading bay next door. His CV was decent... Royal Marines, multiple tours, the kind of operational experience that should’ve made this a formality. Static security on an e-commerce site. Nights, weekends, the occasional drunk trying to hop a fence. Not exactly Helmand.
I asked him the standard questions. How he felt he fit the brief. What his qualifications were. Whether he had his SIA licence sorted or if we needed to facilitate that. He answered like he’d done this before, which he probably had. Competent. Professional. Box-ticking his way through it.
Then I asked him something else... can’t even remember what now. Something about availability, or notice period, or why he wanted the role. And he stopped.
Not dramatically. He didn’t break down or get angry or walk out. He just... stopped. Looked at the CV between us like it belonged to someone else. Then he said it.
“I need this right now. Just for a bit. Until I can go back.”
Not if he could go back. Not maybe one day. Until.
I put my pen down.
We both knew what he meant. The “grey net”... private security firms operating in places where the rules were different, and the pay reflected the risk. Conflict zones. Protection details. The kind of work where your Royal Marines background wasn’t just relevant, it was the entire point. The kind of work that felt real in a way that guarding pallets of trainers in Leicestershire never would.
But he couldn’t go back yet. Wrong timing, wrong contracts, wrong headspace... something. So he needed this. A placeholder. Somewhere to be that wasn’t home, wasn’t the pub, wasn’t sitting in a flat trying to convince himself that this was what normal looked like now.
I didn’t ask him why he needed to go back. I already knew. Same reason half the lads I employed knew. Because civvy street doesn’t make sense when you’ve spent years in places where everything mattered, and nothing was safe. Because the skills that kept you alive out there make you restless here. Because “transition” is a word people use when they’ve never had to do it.
I hired him. Obviously. He was overqualified for the job, and we both knew he wouldn’t stay long. But that wasn’t the point. The point was the mutual understanding... I could offer him something to do until he could get back to where he needed to be. And he could offer me someone who’d show up, do the work, and not ask stupid questions about why the wages were what they were.
He lasted four months. Then he got a call, packed his kit, and disappeared to somewhere that probably wasn’t on the news but should’ve been.
I never saw him again.
But I’ve seen a hundred versions of him since. In that same prefab office, in pubs, on building sites, working doors, driving trucks. Men who’d done things that mattered in places that were trying to kill them, now trying to work out how to exist in a world that wanted them to care about shift patterns and health and safety briefings.
Some of them make it back. Some of them don’t. Some of them spend the rest of their lives looking for the next flight out, the next contract, the next place where they feel like themselves again.
And some of them never stop pulling up that sandbag, trying to explain to people who weren’t there what it was actually like.
This is one of those conversations.
The Flights
I recognised what Simon was carrying because I’d seen it before. Years before. When I was the one processing the flights out.
RAF Police, early days of the Iraq War. My job wasn’t glamorous. I wasn’t kicking doors or running convoys. I was an admin. Paperwork. Manifests. Making sure everyone who was supposed to be on the plane was actually on the plane, with the right kit, the right documentation, the right head on their shoulders.
Except you can’t check for that last bit, can you?
Most of them were fine. Nervous, maybe. Cracking jokes that weren’t funny. Chain-smoking outside the terminal. The usual pre-deployment energy... half adrenaline, half dread, all of it shoved down where it couldn’t interfere with the job.
But some of them weren’t fine.
I remember one flight. Can’t tell you the exact date, but I can tell you what the air felt like. Heavy. Too warm. That specific kind of tension you get when everyone knows what’s coming but no one’s saying it out loud.
The lads were boarding. Kit bags, body armour, that blank expression people get when they’re going through the motions. And then I heard it.
A Warrant Officer. Senior bloke. The kind who’s supposed to hold it together, supposed to be the steady hand when everyone else is losing theirs. He was on the plane already, standing in the aisle, and he was shouting.
Not barking orders. Not giving a pep talk.
Shouting.
“We are all going to die!”
Not once. Multiple times. Loud enough that everyone on the tarmac could hear it. Loud enough that the lads still boarding froze. Loud enough that I had to make a decision about whether to step onto that aircraft and do something about it, or let it play out and hope someone else handled it.
I didn’t step on. Someone else did. Don’t know who. Don’t know what they said. But eventually it stopped, the doors closed, and the plane took off.
I stood there afterwards, clipboard in hand, watching it disappear into the grey, and I remember thinking: What do you do with that?
Not just him. All of them. The ones who heard it. The ones who were already scared and now had confirmation that even the senior ranks were fracturing. How do you process people for war when war is already inside them before they’ve even landed?
You don’t. You just... keep going. Sign the manifests. Check the lists. Send them off. Do it again tomorrow.
But it stays with you.
Not because it was the worst thing I saw. It wasn’t. Not even close. But because it was the first time, I realised that the machinery doesn’t stop for people breaking. It just absorbs them and keeps moving. And your job, my job, was to keep feeding it.
Some of those lads came back. Some didn’t. Some came back different. And years later, when I was running that security company, hiring blokes like Simon who needed “just a bit” before they could go back out... I’d think about that Warrant Officer sometimes.
Wonder if he ever made it home. Wonder if he ever stopped shouting.
The Weight That Doesn’t Leave
The Warrant Officer was loud. Obvious. The kind of breakdown you can point to and say, “There. That’s the problem.”
But most of it wasn’t like that.
Most of it was quiet.
The suicide was quiet.
I won’t tell you his name. Don’t think that’s fair on him or anyone who knew him. But I’ll tell you what I remember.
He was fine. Or he seemed fine. Which is a stupid thing to say in hindsight, because clearly he wasn’t, but at the time... he was functioning. Showed up. Did his job. Didn’t cause problems. The kind of bloke who just got on with it.
Until he didn’t.
I wasn’t there when it happened. No one was. That’s usually how it goes, isn’t it? The ones who really mean it make sure no one can stop them.
What I remember is the aftermath. Not the scene... I didn’t see that. But the silence. The way information moved through the unit was like a shockwave, and then just... stopped. No one knew what to say. No one knew what they were supposed to feel. Angry? Sad? Guilty?
All of it, probably.
There’s always someone who carries it worse than the others. Someone who spoke to him the day before. Someone who saw him in the corridor and didn’t stop. Someone who thinks, If I’d just asked, if I’d just noticed, if I’d just...
But you can’t carry that for someone else. You can’t unpick what was already breaking inside them. And the worst part? The machinery doesn’t stop for it.
There’s a debrief. Maybe some counselling is offered, if you want it. A moment of silence at the next parade. And then it’s back to work. Because the flights still need processing. The rotations still need managing. The war doesn’t pause because one lad couldn’t take it anymore.
So you shove it down. Same place as everything else. And you keep going.
Then there were the IEDs.
Random. That’s the word that stays with me. Not the explosions themselves, but the randomness of it.
You could do everything right... follow procedure, stay alert, keep your discipline... and still die. Wrong road. Wrong time. Wrong stretch of dirt that looked like every other stretch of dirt.
The threat wasn’t something you could outsmart or outwork. It was just... there. Ambient. Like the weather.
And that does something to you.
It rewires your nervous system. You stop relaxing. Ever. Because relaxing is what gets you killed. So you stay sharp. Stay scanning. Stay ready.
Which is fine when you’re in theatre. That’s what you’re supposed to do.
But then you come home.
And your brain doesn’t know the difference.
You’re in Tesco, and you’re checking exits. You’re driving, and you’re watching the verges for disturbances. You’re at a family barbecue, and you can’t sit with your back to the garden because what if.
People think it’s paranoia. It’s not. It’s training. A survival instinct that got baked in so deep you can’t turn it off even when you don’t need it anymore.
Except... do you not need it anymore? Or are you just pretending civvy street is safe because everyone else is pretending?
I’ve watched lads try to explain this to partners, to parents, to mates who never served. Watched them get frustrated when the response is, “But you’re home now. You’re safe.”
Are they, though?
Because the IED isn’t just the one that went off in Basra. It’s the one in their head that keeps ticking. The one that says, You survived by accident. And accidents run out.
And then there’s the other stuff. The domestic chaos that no one talks about because it’s not “operational.”
The drinking. The fights. The marriages that collapse under the weight of someone who came back but didn’t really come back.
I saw it in married quarters. In the gym. In the bars just outside the base, where everyone went to forget.
Blokes who couldn’t sit still. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t explain why they were angry all the time or why they’d rather be anywhere but home.
Partners are trying to hold it together. Kids walking on eggshells. The kind of slow-motion disintegration that doesn’t make the news because it’s not dramatic enough.
But it’s everywhere.
Alcoholism isn’t a side effect. It’s a strategy. It’s how you get your brain to shut up for a few hours. How do you blur the edges of everything that won’t stop replaying? How do you make it through another day of pretending you’re fine when you’re absolutely not?
And the worst part? Everyone knows. But no one says anything. Because if you say it out loud, then it becomes a problem. And problems require solutions. And solutions require admitting that the machinery broke you.
So you don’t say it. You just... drink. And hope it doesn’t get so bad that someone has to step in.
Sometimes it does.
This is the bit people don’t understand about transition.
They think it’s about jobs. CVs. Learning to wear a suit and talk about “transferable skills.”
But it’s not.
It’s about learning to exist in a world that doesn’t make sense anymore. Where nothing feels urgent. Where the rules are different, and everyone’s pretending that’s normal.
It’s about carrying weight that no one else can see, in a place where no one knows how to ask if you’re OK without it sounding like pity.
It’s about lads like Simon, sitting in a prefab office, telling me they just need “a bit” before they can go back to the only place that ever felt real.
Because this... civvy street, peacetime, whatever you want to call it... this isn’t real. Not to them.
Real is the flight out. The Warrant Officer is shouting. The IED you didn’t see. The silence after the suicide. The drink that helps you sleep. The next contract. The next deployment. The next thing that matters.
And if you’ve never lived in that world, you’ll never understand why some people spend the rest of their lives trying to get back to it.
The Grey Net
By the time I was running the security company, I’d stopped being surprised by CVs like Simon’s.
Ex-military. Multiple tours. Operational experience in places most people couldn’t point to on a map. Skills that sounded impressive on paper but were completely useless for 90% of civilian jobs.
What do you do with someone who’s been trained to operate in hostile environments, make split-second life-or-death decisions, and stay calm under fire... when the job on offer is standing outside a shopping centre checking bags?
You can’t. It doesn’t work. The skills don’t translate, and the person doesn’t fit.
But the grey net... that’s where they did fit.
Private security firms. Close protection. Convoy escorts. Site security in places where “site security” meant carrying weapons and hoping you didn’t have to use them. The kind of work that existed in the gap between military and civilian, legal and... not quite illegal, but definitely not clean.
It wasn’t advertised in the JobCentre. You found out about it through mates. Someone you served with who’d gone over, come back with cash, and was heading out again. A whispered conversation in a pub. A recruiter who knew exactly what to look for in a CV and didn’t care about the gaps or the vague explanations.
The money was good. Better than good, if you were willing to go to the right places. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. Somalia. Anywhere there was conflict, there was demand. Oil companies needed to be protected. NGOs needed escorts. Governments needed deniable assets who could do things soldiers couldn’t officially do anymore.
And the lads? They needed it.
Not just the money, though that helped. They needed the purpose. The structure. The clarity of knowing what the job was and why it mattered.
Civvy street doesn’t give you that. Civvy street gives you performance reviews and team-building exercises, and managers who’ve never done anything that mattered are asking you to “action” things in a “timely manner.”
The grey net gave you a rifle, a vest, and a reason to get up in the morning.
I hired a lot of them.
Some were transient, like Simon. Just passing through on their way to the next contract. Needed a few months of work to keep the money flowing, to keep busy, to avoid sitting still long enough to think too hard about things.
Others stayed longer. Either because they couldn’t get back out, or because they were trying to stay out. Trying to make it work here, in the boring, safe, inexplicable world where nothing ever happened.
But you could always tell which ones were going to leave.
They’d get restless. Start checking their phones more. Go quiet when certain topics came up. And then one day they’d hand in their notice, pack their kit, and vanish.
Sometimes I’d hear from them. A message months later from a number I didn’t recognise, telling me they were in Baghdad or Kabul or somewhere I’d never heard of. Sometimes I wouldn’t. Just... gone.
And I never judged them for it.
Because I understood.
The grey net wasn’t just a job. It was a lifeline. A place where the skills they’d been given actually meant something. Where the weight they carried wasn’t a burden, it was an asset, where they could be the version of themselves that made sense, instead of the broken, restless, out-of-place version that civvy street demanded.
But here’s the thing no one talks about.
The grey net takes as much as it gives.
The money’s good until it isn’t. The purpose is real until someone you worked with doesn’t come home. The clarity is sharp until you realise you’re doing things that don’t have a flag or a chain of command or any kind of accountability beyond “the client wants it done.”
And the longer you’re in it, the harder it is to leave.
Not because you can’t. You can always leave. But because leaving means coming back to the place that never made sense in the first place. The place where no one understands why you went, or what you did, or why you’d ever want to go back.
I watched lads cycle through it. Out for six months. Back for three. Out again. Back again. Each time a little more hollowed out. A little less sure of who they were when they weren’t operational.
Some of them eventually stopped coming back.
Not because they died, though some did. But because they just... stayed. Found a company that would keep them on rotation. Found a version of themselves that only existed out there and decided that was enough.
I don’t know if that’s sad or pragmatic. Maybe both.
The ethics of it... I thought about that a lot.
Was I helping these lads by giving them a placeholder job? Or was I enabling them to keep running toward something that was going to chew them up eventually?
Was the grey net a solution, or just another way of avoiding the real problem... that we don’t know how to bring people back from war? That we train them, deploy them, use them up, and then act surprised when they can’t just slot back into normality like nothing happened?
I don’t have an answer.
What I do know is this: the lads I hired weren’t broken. They were adapted. Adapted to a world most people will never see and can’t understand. And when you bring someone adapted to chaos back into order, they don’t fit.
The grey net was where they could keep being adapted. Where the chaos was still there, still made sense, still needed them.
And if that meant they never fully came home... well, maybe home wasn’t a place they were supposed to get back to anyway.
Simon got his call. I don’t know where he went. Don’t know if he’s still out there, or if he eventually found a way to stop.
But I think about him sometimes. About all of them.
The ones who sat across from me in that prefab office, telling me they just needed a bit of time before they could go back.
The ones who kept going back until there was nothing left to come home to.
The ones who found a version of normal that worked for them, even if it looked nothing like anyone else’s normal.
And the ones who didn’t make it. One way or another.
Because the grey net isn’t a safety net. It’s a holding pattern. A place to be when you can’t be anywhere else.
And for some people, that’s enough.
For others, it’s everything.
Pull Up a Sand Bag
There’s a ritual to it, you know. Pulling up a sandbag.
It’s not just about sitting down. It’s about the decision to sit down. The acknowledgement that what’s about to be said needs time, needs weight, needs the kind of space you can’t give it standing up or walking past.
You find something... a sandbag, a crate, an upturned bucket, doesn’t matter. You drag it over. You sit. And the other person knows. This is it. We’re doing this now.
I’ve pulled up a lot of sandbags over the years. Literally, back in the RAF. Metaphorically, in prefab offices and pubs and car parks after shifts. Sometimes I was the one talking. Sometimes I was the one listening.
But the ritual’s the same.
You sit. You talk. You say the things you can’t say anywhere else, to anyone else. And when it’s done, you get up, and you carry on.
Except... It’s never really done, is it?
The Warrant Officer shouting about death on that plane. The lad who took his own life. The randomness of the IEDs. The drinking, the fights, the slow collapse of things that should’ve held. Simon was sitting across from me, telling me he just needed a bit of time before he could go back.
None of it’s resolved. None of it’s fixed. It just... is.
And maybe that’s the point.
Maybe the sandbag isn’t about finding answers. It’s about bearing witness. Acknowledging that this happened, that it mattered, that it left a mark.
Because the alternative is pretending it didn’t. Pretending that people who’ve been to those places and done those things can just slot back into normal like nothing happened. Pretending that “transition” is a process with a clear beginning, middle, and end, instead of a permanent state of not quite fitting anywhere.
And that’s bollocks.
I don’t have a neat conclusion for this. I don’t have a solution or a call to action or three key takeaways.
What I have is this:
If you’ve been there... if you’ve processed the flights, carried the weight, worked the grey net, or loved someone who has... you already know what I’m talking about. And if you haven’t, I can’t explain it in a way that’ll make you truly understand.
But I can tell you what I’ve learned.
The lads who came through my office, the ones who needed “just a bit” before they could go back... they weren’t broken. They were adapted. And the world they were adapted to doesn’t exist in civvy street. So they either find a way to keep existing in that world, through the grey net or something like it, or they spend the rest of their lives trying to reconcile two versions of themselves that can’t both be real at the same time.
Some of them manage it. Find a way to be both. Find a partner who gets it, a job that doesn’t feel like a joke, a version of normal that doesn’t require them to pretend the other stuff never happened.
But a lot of them don’t.
And we act surprised. We talk about mental health and support systems and transition programmes like they’re the answer. And maybe they help, for some people. But they’re not the answer. Because the question isn’t “How do we fix these people?” The question is “How do we exist in a world that creates people like this and then doesn’t know what to do with them?”
And I don’t think we’ve figured that out yet.
So.
Pull up a sandbag.
Sit down.
Listen to the stories. The messy, unresolved, uncomfortable stories. The ones about Warrant Officers losing it and lads who didn’t make it and the randomness of survival and the grey net that swallows people whole.
Don’t try to fix them. Don’t offer solutions or platitudes or “have you tried yoga?”
Just... listen.
Because sometimes that’s all the sandbag is for.
A place to say it out loud. To someone who won’t look away.
And then you get up, and you carry on.
Because that’s what you do.
Until Next Time
Brilliant piece. The grey net framing is spot on becuase it captures how those skills become both an asset and a trap once civvy street fails to make sense. I rememberworking security briefly and seeing that same restlessness in guys who'd been deployed. Theres something deeply uncomfortable about calling it a "holding pattern" when for some people its literally the only place they still feel functional.