Gen Sanders, who has completed tours in Kosovo, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan, said: “I was depressed, I was low, there were periods of time when I had suicidal thoughts, and it took me a good chunk of time to begin to come back from that on the back of a very violent tour.
“I found myself obsessing about experiences on the tour, dwelling too much on photographs, on video clips, on letters, replaying in my mind what happened.
“So I was drawn back down into the experiences on that tour and the memories from it. But in a way that was dark and obsessive.