Don't know if anyone recognises this officer or if any former or serving servicemen crossed paths, I recall some of the news footage when he took over from Bob Stewart in Bosnia. Seems he was fairly well regarded. PTSD and larium, another sad loss.
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/major-general-alastair-duncan-7xgj33fwj?shareToken=4bd5dac35c7b0085a8d4456a76ea2a07OBITUARY
Major-General Alastair Duncan
Quietly spoken British soldier who led UN missions to Bosnia and Sierra Leone but was later blighted by post-traumatic stress disorder
Alastair Duncan, pictured after completing peace-keeping duties in Bosnia in 1993, had been handpicked to command the UN mission because of his diplomatic skills
Records suggest that Major-General Alastair Duncan was the most senior British officer to suffer from the combined effects of operational post-traumatic stress disorder and the use of Lariam antimalaria tablets while on active service.
In 1993, while commanding a UN mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the Balkans conflict, Duncan first sustained brain trauma when his Warrior armoured vehicle was damaged by a roadside bomb. Years later, his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was found to have been aggravated by his being prescribed Lariam while on a UN peacekeeping mission in Sierra Leone in 2000.
Duncan suffered from disorientation, memory loss and mood swings. His wife Ellen said that any sudden noise could transport him back into combat mode. “One minute, he would be aggressive and the next he would be tearful and completely irrational,” she said. In 2013 he was sectioned under the Mental Health Act and confined in a secure mental facility. It was a tragic denouement to a distinguished military career.
Unstuffy, cool, self disciplined and possibly the first commanding officer to use a laptop, Duncan exemplified the best of British soldiering. He needed all of it in central Bosnia-Herzegovina, where his infantry battalion deployed under United Nations’ mandate in April 1993. Until that time the Bosnian-Croats and Muslims had fought alongside each other against the Bosnian-Serbs, but Croat suspicion that the Serbs and Muslims were about to strike an alliance led the Croats to turn on their former partners. Ninety-two civilians were massacred in the Muslim village of Ahmici. Duncan, the new commander of the United Nations Protection Force (Unprofor), helped to remove the charred remains of a family, including a three-month-old baby, who had been burnt alive in their home. “Someone told me I never smiled,” Duncan said. “It happened to be on the same day that I came across the remains of that family so I didn’t feel like smiling.
The commander of the previous British battalion, Lieutenant-Colonel Bob Stewart — Conservative MP for Beckenham since 2010 — used his exuberant personality to overcome the limitations of the ambiguously worded UN mandate for the Unprofor. UN HQ in New York required a more conciliatory approach. Duncan was the man for the job. His soldiers, predominantly from the Prince of Wales’s Own Regiment of Yorkshire and a squadron of the Light Dragoons, appreciated Duncan’s dry quips about the often absurdly dangerous situations they faced.
A Serb commander unsmilingly called him a ‘true professional’
The mission’s greatest challenge was the reasonable belief of the Bosnian-Croat and Muslim populations that the UN force was there to protect each community from attack, principally from the Bosnian-Serbs but also from each other. In fact, the security council mandate curtailed the force to the escorting and protection of humanitarian aid delivered by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
Duncan was caught in a three-cornered fight. Atrocities and counter-atrocities, sniping of civilians and the deliberate shelling of UN convoys continued. He ordered fire to be returned 69 times, killing an estimated 30 to 40 people. “If it blows up again between the Croats and the Muslims, a lot of people are going to be killed and we can’t give aid to dead people,” he said. “I’m not proud of killing people but it was necessary at the time.”
During the six-month deployment, 14 of his men were wounded, some seriously. On leaving, Duncan called on the local Bosnian-Serb commander to say goodbye. Regarding him unsmilingly, the Serb said: “I’ll say this for you Colonel Duncan, you are a true professional.” Duncan was awarded the DSO for his leadership. He left Bosnia convinced that the number of people killed would have been much higher without the UN mission in place.
Alastair David Arton Duncan was born in Norfolk in 1952 and educated at Uppingham and RMA Sandhurst. He was commissioned into the Prince of Wales’s Own Regiment of Yorkshire in 1973. As a young officer he played hockey for the army, served twice in Northern Ireland and was later selected as chief of staff of the 1st Infantry Brigade in England. Appointed to command 1st Prince of Wales’s Own in 1990, he took the battalion to Northern Ireland for a taxing six months tour of duty from May 1992, for which he was appointed OBE.
He was promoted to command the 19th Mechanized Brigade in Germany in 1995. During an inspection his brigadier upbraided him for the colour of the barrack stairwells. His commanding officer was stopped “mid-rocket” when Duncan quietly pointed out that it was the brigadier’s wife, who sat on the organising committee, who had chosen the colour.
After his appointment as director of Land Warfare in the MoD, Duncan was recalled for another UN assignment in 2000. The situation in Sierra Leone and the UN mission there had lapsed into chaos.
The conflict started when Revolutionary United Front (RUF) began a rebellion in the east of the country in 1991. The UN established a mission in Freetown in 1999, but the RUF kidnapped hundreds of lightly armed peacekeepers and renounced the ceasefire.
Unamsil (United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone) was increased in strength to 17,500 peacekeepers. Lieutenant- General Daniel Opande of Kenya was appointed to command the mission, with Brigadier Duncan as his chief of staff.
Over the first two years of its mandate, Unamsil disarmed thousands of rebels, rebuilt the police force and laid the foundations for the holding of presidential and parliamentary elections. In recognition of his work as chief of staff of Unamsil, Duncan was advanced to CBE in 2005.
He was appointed colonel of the Prince of Wales’s Own Regiment of Yorkshire in 2001 and promoted major-general to become the UK director-general of Training Support Command the same year.
However, he was disappointed that his assignment to Sierra Leone had taken him out of contention for a two-star command position and an offer of a senior civilian appointment with the Services Sound and Vision Corporation (SSVC) persuaded him to leave the army in 2005.
His marriage to his first wife Anita Keily ended in divorce in 1993. They had two sons: Thomas, who works in the fashion industry, and Edward, who has just emigrated to Australia. In 1995 he married Avril Walker, with whom he had a daughter, Arabella, who is reading Classics and Italian at Warwick university. They were divorced in 2008. Then he married Ellen Le Brun, the sister of his regimental colleague Colonel Charles Le Brun. She and his sons and daughter by the previous marriages all survive him.
Ellen Duncan has campaigned for a total ban on the prescription of Lariam to soldiers ever since her husband began suffering psychotic episodes four years ago. “It is fundamentally incompatible with soldiers on active service. It is the most vicious form of friendly fire,” she said. The drug was developed in the US in the mid-Seventies. Amid concerns about side-effects including anxiety, depression, even suicidal thoughts, it is no longer automatically prescribed to soldiers in the US, Canada and France.
She claimed that Lariam magnified her husband’s PTSD “a hundred times”. Describing its effect on him, she said: “He would say, ‘get out of the house, I’m not safe.’ Or he’d leave and go running when he felt the walls coming down . . . They took a brave and wonderful man and destroyed him.”
In May 2016 the defence select committee published a report recommending that Lariam should only be prescribed as “a last resort” and that proper risk assessments should be carried out to ensure that soldiers with conditions such as PTSD are not prescribed the drug. The result was some vindication after a brilliant military career had been cruelly curtailed.
Major-General Alastair Duncan, CBE, DSO, director-general of Training Support Command in 2005, was born on October 22, 1952. He died of a perforated ulcer on July 24, 2016, aged 63