UK soldier committed suicide while on leave from Afghanistan

The soldier who took his own life while on leave from Afghanistan
The Independent
JONATHAN OWEN
SUNDAY 20 JANUARY 2013

Just two years after his friend William Aldridge, 18, was fatally wounded in an IED explosion in Afghanistan, becoming the youngest British soldier to die there, Rifleman Allan Arnold took his own life. The 20-year-old was on leave and staying with his sister Abigail, 23, in Cirencester, when he was found dead.

She recalls the last thing he ever said to her: “‘Don’t lock the door as I will be coming straight back, I’ll see you in a bit’. Allan was walking someone home who had had too much to drink and he knew how much I hated leaving my front door unlocked when I was going to bed.”

But he never came back and was later found hanging from a tree on the edge of Cirencester.

But Allan returned from Afghanistan “a broken man, a man who had traumatic flashbacks that on one occasion had resulted in hospitalisation, and he barely slept for the fear of ‘going back there’.”

Her brother started drinking heavily and “barely talked about his tour, only when he was drunk and of a certain state of mind. Even then he spoke more of his guilt about surviving and being uninjured than of what actually happened. He’d said a couple of times that it should have been him who had died not his mates. It was hard hearing this, and equally as hard seeing him cry over a hallucination of his mate William Aldridge - whom Allan said was standing in our family kitchen smiling and looking at him.”
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