Mom of UK wounded soldier says "We’ve had to fight for everything"

When will governments actually value the men and women willing to die for them? They wouldn't need to have wounds taken care of if they didn't serve so what's the problem?

We’ve had to fight for everything...
By Jo Davison
Published on Wednesday 5 October 2011 02:58

Every day for months, she had sat by the bedside of her unconscious soldier son, willing him to prove the doctors wrong.

His dreadful wounds, inflicted by a land mine just days before he was due to finish his tour of duty and fly home, were slowly mending.

Ben had suffered 37 injuries but the extent of the damage to his brain was still unknown.

Doctors had warned mother of three Diane Dernie her son would probably have no meaningful brain function, but she refused to believe them.

After all, he had come this far. And no other soldier had endured so many injuries and lived.

She thought the family’s prayers had been answered when, months into his recovery, he began to open his eyes. “But when I looked into them, it was so scary; there was absolutely nothing there,” she recalls.

Still, she clung to hope. And one day, when a nurse asked him to look over towards his mother, Diane watched his eyes move towards hers and for a moment, saw in them a glimpse of recognition.

Elated, she turned to the doctors. But they delivered a crushing blow. It meant nothing, they said. He could not have looked into her eyes – because they believed Ben was also blind.

For the first time since an Army official had arrived on her doorstep to tell her Ben had been severely injured on September 12 2006, Diane broke down and her thoughts turned to suicide.


She admits: “It was too much – the last blow. I thought there was nothing for Ben to carry on for.

“I decided I would end it for him, then take my own life because it wasn’t worth anything without him in it.”
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