When the two-minute silence falls on Remembrance Day, Lee Holmes will be standing with his own thoughts, remembering soldiers he served alongside who never came home from Afghanistan. For the 39-year-old sergeant with North Yorkshire Police, the annual act of remembrance is not an abstract ritual. It is personal.
Holmes spent six years in the British Army, joining at 21, and served with the Yorkshire Regiment on a deployment to Afghanistan between 2009 and 2010. He worked as a trainer and mentor with the Afghan National Army, a role he admits had its challenges. The patrols and operations on the ground, though, brought him close to quite a few of the soldiers he was advising.
What he carries from that tour, above all, is a day in 2010. Five months into the deployment, during an operation in Marjah in southern Afghanistan, an improvised explosive device detonated in a wall as his patrol passed.
He did not register what had happened straight away. “When I came to, there was a Welsh lad in a ditch to the side of me and he was shouting at me, going, ‘you’ve been hit, you need to get down’,” Holmes recalls. Only then did he look down and see his left arm sodden with blood, dripping onto the floor. “I was like, ‘oh dear, I have actually been hit’.” Fragments from the blast had torn into his left bicep.
He was flown to the field hospital at Camp Bastion for initial treatment, then repatriated to the UK, where he spent a week at Selly Oak hospital before being sent home to recover. Even then, surrounded in a ward by other wounded soldiers, his instinct was to downplay what he had been through. “I felt a little bit of a fraud to be honest,” he says. “My injuries compared to some of them were just nothing.”
He returned to work just two months before his unit left Afghanistan, and left the Army in 2013. The years that followed were not straightforward. “I could not really get the soldier mindset out of my head for a long time. It took me a long time to sort of get over that,” he says. He travelled and worked offshore in the oil industry before joining Cleveland Police, transferring to North Yorkshire two years later, where he now serves as a sergeant.
That move into policing, he says, was eased by what the forces had taught him. “You have got all the discipline and you do not mess about. We share a lot of the same values and standards. It is a uniformed discipline service.”
Holmes is candid about how difficult the return to civilian life can be for many who leave the military. “A lot of veterans are lost when they come back. It is very tough. I know people who still struggle,” he says.
He still thinks about the impact the war had on him, particularly the injury to his left arm, and about how close he came to worse. “It could have been a very different story. There was many other situations that were similar that fortunately I was not injured in, and I think about it a lot,” he says.
Looking back, he describes his time in Afghanistan as a period when he “got to be a proper soldier”. From the day he arrived at the gates in Catterick for training, the expectation was clear: “you will go to Afghan, this is what we are doing,” all the way until he left.
He is aware of the controversy surrounding the conflict and the manner in which it ended. “It does seem like all that work, and then it returned to as it was, but I do not see my time out there in a negative mindset,” he says. More than 450 British service personnel were killed in the war, but Holmes does not see their deaths as a “waste” and believes the military objectives were achieved. “We were there doing our job,” he says.
When he thinks about remembrance itself, he considers the “wider picture” and the “huge loss of life” on all sides and in all communities. “There was not a household in the country that was not affected in some capacity,” he says.
That belief has recently taken a practical form. Holmes campaigned for a memorial plaque at Eden Camp Modern History Museum near Malton, honouring police officers from North Yorkshire who enlisted and died while serving with the armed forces during wartime. He points out that even the chief constable of the Scarborough Constabulary during World War One had served in France for two years. “They went out and served and they potentially were not thought about in the same way as a regular soldier,” he says.
His reflections feature in coverage by the BBC, at https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm0rlevjkg4zo?xtor, with highlights from North Yorkshire also available to hear on BBC Sounds and the latest episode of Look North available to catch up on. For Holmes, the silence this Remembrance Day will hold all of it at once: the men who died, the communities left to grieve, and the length of a road that eventually led him from Marjah to a police warrant card in North Yorkshire.