‘Stuff starts to get real, real quick,’ recalls former US Marine, Tyler Flanigan. An Iraqi sniper had just shot out the tyres of his truck and a key member of his team had been killed. ‘We were sitting ducks.’ ‘I couldn’t easily name a single day in Iraq that I wasn’t shot at or didn’t have something explode next to me,’ says his fellow US Marine veteran, Nigel McCourry.

Combat experience is hard to forget. Civilian life offers daily triggers that throw you back down ‘IED alley’, reliving the flailing feeling of being blown up and the horror of gathering friends’ body parts in bags.

These former US Marines discussed their trauma in the documentary Dead Dog on the Left . It chronicles their journey through the no-man’s land of complex PTSD, which in turn triggered alcoholism and suicida

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