Helen Gray's son Chris was 3,500 miles away when he died, but she knows – second by second – what happened at the end of his 19-year-old life. She has seen the last things he saw and witnessed the desperate attempts to pull him back from the brink as he lay dying.
All this Helen knows because the final moments of Chris's life were captured on film. Frame by frame, Helen has watched her son die.
There are some frames that are still too painful to watch. But she knows what happens even in those because her husband, Paul, Chris's father, has seen all the footage, and told her everything she needs to know. It was harrowing, he says, but he knew he had to do it. He watches it still, sometimes, on his own, late at night. "The strange thing is," he says, "that even though you know how it ends, you watch it with a bit of you desperately hoping that this time, things will turn out differently."
Chris Gray died in Afghanistan, in a town called Now Zad. A private in the 1st battalion of the Royal Anglian Regiment, his posting there was his first taste of action. "But there's no need to worry, Mum," he told Helen, in a letter written soon after he arrived. "There's fuck all happening here." And he finished: "Loads of love, Chris."
Helen was thrilled to get the letter. It was 13 April 2007, just four weeks since she'd last seen her son, who had managed to get home for Mother's Day days before leaving for Afghanistan. Helen and Paul had always known how keen their son was to join the army, but they had never allowed worries about his safety to overwhelm them. "Except that, on that last day when we drove him back to base in Surrey, I remember saying to Paul, after we'd said goodbye, 'we're going to lose him ...'" says Helen, through her tears. "And I said, no, we're not," says Paul. "Because that's all you can say, isn't it?"
On the day Helen received the letter and read her son's reassurances that he was safe, Chris was already dead. "I went off to work," she remembers. "Then Paul's mother, who was living with us, turned up at the shop. I was just telling everyone I'd had a letter from Chris, and suddenly my mother-in-law was telling me there was a man from the army who'd come to the house, and wanted to talk to us."
Helen knew straightaway what that meant. "I freaked," she says. "I went back to the house, and I said to this guy: you're a fraudster. Our Chris isn't dead. He can't be."
But he was. Ten days later, Helen and Paul – and Chris's sister Kate, then 17, and his brothers, Liam, then 11, and Nathan, then seven – stood on the tarmac at RAF Lyneham as Chris's body was carried from a plane. "Nothing can prepare you for the loss of your child," says Helen. "It's every mother's worst nightmare."
"Everything about those days was sickening," says Paul. "The whole thing was just unbelievably awful."
Nothing, of course, could soften the blow for the Grays: the one sliver of comfort was that Chris had died instantly. "The army liaison officer, who was sent to us that first night, said his wound – the bullet had gone through a gap in his body armour, and pierced both his lungs and his heart – wasn't survivable," says Paul. "He assured us he'd been dead when he hit the ground."
Then, a few weeks later, a letter arrived that was to plunge Helen into despair. It came from Chris's platoon commander, Bjorn Rose; it was sent with the best of intentions, and in the hope of providing the Grays with every scrap of information they could possibly want about Chris's death.
But the shocking news was that, just after Chris had been shot, he'd been declared a "T1" – a casualty rather than a death. "I couldn't believe it," says Helen. "I couldn't read any more of it – this was different from everything we'd been told. I couldn't take it in."
Desperate for the truth, Helen and Paul asked Chris's platoon comrades what they recalled. "It maybe sounds strange how much you need to know," says Helen. "But it feels as though it's the final thing you can do for your child, to piece together the jigsaw so you know everything about his death. I needed to know every detail – and I desperately needed to know whether he'd died instantly or not."
Then came news that would deliver the Grays, once and for all, the information they needed. "We heard there was a film," says Paul. "It had been shot on another soldier's helmet-cam – lots of the soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq have them. My instinct was to want to protect Helen from what it would show. Equally, I knew we had to watch it. I knew I had to watch it, for both of us."
Paul phoned the soldier who had taken the film and asked for a copy. "Watching it meant I saw everything Chris saw that day, and I heard the moment a voice shouts 'Man down', when Chris was hit," he says. "But what I could also see, very clearly, was that Chris had been dead from the moment he hit the ground. His mates battled to save him, because they desperately wanted it not to be true … and then he was evacuated by helicopter to a field hospital, and again the medics worked on him, hoping against hope.
"I said to Helen: he was gone, love. Because he was. And that's what we both needed to know."
The footage from those moments – now incorporated into a new BBC series, Our War, which tells the story of a decade's fighting in Afghanistan through the films the soldiers have shot themselves – make shocking viewing for anyone, let alone Chris's bereaved parents. There's something almost mundane about the way the soldiers weave their way through the long grass and abandoned buildings of Now Zad, before the shots are fired.
The film contains appalling horrors that must pierce Helen's heart: like the fact that, as his colleagues rush to get him away from the area where he's been shot, they keep dropping him from the makeshift stretcher they're using. "It's almost unbearable," says Helen. "That's my child, and he's been hit by a bullet, and they keep dropping him on the ground again and again ..."
One revelation from the film that has helped, Helen says, is the discovery that Chris's death was caused by a random bullet from a Taliban gunman. "He wasn't picked out by a sniper, and that's something I couldn't have coped with. To think that someone had taken aim at Chris and fired to kill him ... that would have been the worst thing. It's strange what makes a difference, but it's so much better to know that it was just chance that it was him who died. I'd hate to think that someone had picked him out to be shot." The Grays have moved back to Ratby near Leicester, the village where Helen grew up and where they lived when their children were younger. When Chris died they were based in Cheshire – but his loss, says Helen, made her yearn to return to her roots. She's glad to be back in the countryside Chris knew and loved, and where his childhood friends still live. She likes to remember his childhood, the happy times. "I used to watch him playing combat games on his computer, and his character would be zapped and get straight back up again. I'd say to him: 'If that happens to you, you know you won't just be able to get up again don't you?'. And he'd say, 'Mum, It's not going to happen.'"
She wears his silver ID disc every day, on a chain round her neck – he was wearing it when he died. "I'll never take it off – it's a little bit of Chris that's with me every day," she says. "Four years on, I still have terrible days – days when the grief is so bad it physically hurts my whole body. But there are better days, too."
The other children, of course, are a reason to carry on. Recently Katie, now 22, got engaged to Chris's best friend, Matt Duffy, a soldier in his platoon and one of the people who was with him on the last day of his life. Meanwhile, Liam is doing his GCSEs, and Nathan, well, says Helen, the truth is that Nathan worshipped Chris. And now he wants to be just like him. He wants to join the army.
How could she bear it? How could she let another of her children become a soldier? "It was Chris's passion – it was all he wanted to do," she says. "I couldn't have stopped him – that's not what you do as a parent, stifle your child's dreams. If Nathan wants to do it, he'll do it – just as Chris did."
All she can hope is that, when the films from Nathan's battles come to be played, they have a different ending from this one.
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