LOSING JAMES: A MOTHER'S STORY by Caroline Jane Munday: The war ended years ago...but my grief is still raw

WEDNESDAY, October 15, 2008, began as an ordinary morning for mother-of-five Caroline Munday, working at Parcelforce near Coventry Airport. She did not expect to find herself on her knees in the depot’s car park at 4.30 that afternoon, screaming a ‘loud, strong, and alien scream, like an animal in pain’.

Her sister Nicky had called her at 4.25pm, asking her to come straight to her house after work, rather than going on her planned date with her boyfriend. ‘I need to see you, Cal. Just come home.’ It didn’t take long for Caroline to deduce from Nicky’s tone of voice what must have happened.

Caroline’s beloved son, Trooper James Munday of the Household Cavalry Regiment, who’d had his 21st birthday just a fortnight earlier, had been killed in action in Afghanistan that morning. The vehicle he was driving, a ‘Jackal’, had been blown up by an Improvised Explosive Device.

Caroline and her family’s waking nightmare began. Her account of what happened in the ensuing days, weeks and months is terrifying: a visceral evocation of what it’s like to lose a child.

Don’t expect fine writing in the C. S. Lewis A Grief Observed mode. But almost because of that – because it’s the raw outpourings of a mother in unimaginable (or perhaps all too imaginable) emotional pain – it actually has great power.

If every mother of all the soldiers who died in the First and Second World Wars experienced the grief Caroline felt and still feels – and there’s no doubt they did – the universe seems inadequate to support that immeasurable weight. ‘You haven’t got to go,’ Caroline said to James before the tour. But he said: ‘See, Mum, I have my brothers at home but I also have my brothers in the Army. We’re like a chain, and if I don’t go, a link in that chain will be broken.’

He set his heart on fighting for Queen and Country, and returning to receive his medal on the Parade Ground at Windsor. And he was about to come home when the fatal explosion happened.

He was in the final four weeks of the tour, during which he’d ‘served with distinction’. Caroline was counting down the days to ‘party time’, when they could celebrate his safe return and his 21st birthday. A report was sent to the family by Major Will Bartle- Jones, the commander of his ‘D’ Squadron – a deeply kind man who looked after the family initially and did all he could to help them – describing the events leading up to James’s death. It doesn’t give one much faith in Army procurement.

The first vehicles the squadron was given were clapped-out tanks that had ‘been on two previous tours and were totally exhausted in terms of fight-ability’. Out of 34 vehicles, 30 ‘suffered a major assembly failure’.

THE squadron then switched to ‘the Jackal’, an off-road vehicle with wheels rather than tracks, brilliant for getting around quickly, but with a few fatal flaws: it ‘lacked surveillance capability’, was not well armoured, and, as the soldiers discovered, the driver sat right above the steering wheel, which ‘funnelled’ any explosion.

Trying to comprehend this was just one aspect of Caroline’s nightmare. Her way of coping with the unbearable image of her son dying from ‘blast injuries’ was to put herself in a ‘protective bubble’ – a mechanism for coping with emotional agony. Inside it, she felt safely numb, as if watching the tragedy from the outside. Occasionally, the ‘bubble’ burst, and she was rocked by pain.

Grief is pretty public if you’re the mother of a deceased soldier. There are endless civic and military events beside war memorials. Lining up at RAF Lyneham with the family, waiting in her best black coat for James’s repatriation, she admits, ‘I felt a little bit of excitement – how mad was that? I don’t know, perhaps after all the prep, I was waiting for my 6ft 2in of gorgeous soldier to walk off the plane, bag over his shoulder.’

YES, you would subconsciously think that, knowing that your son was ‘coming home’. Seeing the physical coffin, she says, ‘I felt robbed’. Receiving James’s cap, belt and flag, plus the medals he was going to be given on the parade ground, seemed like ‘a poor exchange’.

At those moments, and so many others, the truth assaulted her as if for the first time. She wasn’t sure if she could face seeing James inside his coffin in the chapel of rest. But she heard his voice: ‘Mum, you haven’t kissed me goodnight.’ So she went, and was glad she did.

His face looked beatific. She gave him a final kiss on the lips: ‘The smacker I’d promised him.’ Then, horrifically, there was a new addition to the mental torture she’d have to deal with. She discovered that her son, when he was first repatriated inside the coffin, was in the exact state he’d been in at the moment of death, ‘covered in filth and dust’ – and, for some strange reason, not wearing trousers, although he did still have his boots on with the laces tied.

The Army system is that post-mortems are done back in the UK, at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. Discovering her son, who was particularly careful about being wellturned-out, was in that filthy and semi-naked state inside the coffin as he was carried out from the plane to the hearse was a shock.

She tried to find out why his trousers were off. It would be understandable if he’d still been alive after the explosion. Medics might have needed to cut them open to check for injuries. But she’d been told he’d died instantly. She wrote to her MP, who wrote to the Secretary of State for Defence, for answers.

No one could quite remember how, or when, the trousers had been removed. But the effect of her insistent letters was that a new rule came into force: ‘I am now assured,’ the Minister of State for the Armed Forces wrote to her, ‘that bodies cannot be returned naked to the UK.

From now on the deceased are shrouded in an appropriate manner before being placed in the casket.’ None of this brought her beloved James back. Even now, she writes, she’s still in her bubble.

Facing reality ‘still has the power to strip my breath away’. A memorial bench beside James’s grave expresses the feelings of Caroline, and perhaps all parents of deceased soldiers: ‘Through our tears our pride shines bright.'