Billy Fraser's house in Larkhall, Lanarkshire, bears testimony to two things; his love of his country and his devotion to duty. Outside, on a makeshift flagpole, a Union Jack flies at full sail. Beneath it is another flag, this one bearing the symbol of the Black Watch; the regiment's motto, Nemo Me Impune Lacessit – no-one provokes me with impunity - has been stencilled beneath it. It's been six months now since Lt Fraser left active duty, but he retains a deep affection for his time in the armed forces.

Billy Fraser lives alone, since his wife and children left. They didn't like life in Lanarkshire, preferring Dundee, and Billy Fraser's behaviour became so erratic after he returned they felt they had no choice but to leave. One of a number of British Army personnel in this town, he is out of work and surviving primarily on the state's meagre handouts and on the charity and goodwill of locals, of whom there are many in sympathy with his plight. Billy lives a sad and difficult life for the most part, most notably in the evenings. Nightmares are frequent, just one of a number of symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

He speaks about them frankly; Billy Fraser is a direct man, a man not afraid to speak his mind. He is scared only to close his eyes, as the things he has seen and heard come back to haunt him, again and again and again. Life has not been easy since the horrible night which sent him on this downward spiral, but he faces it with courage and conviction, and speaks about it with a still-fresh anger. He knows he and his fellow soldiers could have been spared their ordeal, had the powers-that-be gotten the simple things right.

"I still feel bitter," Fraser said, "of course I do. The brass knew we were going in there totally unprepared. They knew we hadn't been adequately trained for this; there were videos we could have watched, reports we could have read. It's not like this sort of thing hadn't happened before ...... there was a similar night the month prior to it. We could have been briefed on what to expect. Instead, they sent us in there with nothing but each other for backup. It was a disgrace."

Fraser's frustration is shared by many in his unit. One soldier who did not wish to be named said "It's the scariest night I have ever experienced in all my years as a serving soldier. Nothing else has even come close. It was terrifying."

Fraser and his fellow soldiers have been accused by some of over-hyping the effects of that night, perhaps in a bid to squeeze compensation from the MOD, and he treats the people who level this accusation with the full force of his contempt. "I think these people are scum," he said. "They have no way of knowing what it's like to be in the frontline at a moment when the whole world seems to be coming down around your ears. They have never experienced the dread, the terror, seeing your life flash before your eyes, seeing your fellow soldiers reduced to tears by it. They've never suffered the way we have. Until they've been there, I would suggest these people keep their mouths shut."

Helmand Province, in Afghanistan, is a place which holds many dark memories for Billy Fraser and his fellow soldiers. It was in Helmand that the tension became too much, that he cracked under the pressure, and the innocuous surroundings under which it happened made it far worse to endure.

"I had been out with the squad all day," he said, "and it had been a serious one. We were tabbing just south of Nad e-Ali, and we'd come under fire. Two of the lads were lightly wounded, but we got out okay. I never minded combat; we'd been given good training, and responded well under even the most intense fire. The people who have said myself and the others cracked under the pressure of operations just don't have a clue. We'd seen our forward operating base attacked, had IED's go off all around us, lost friends and colleagues ...... this stuff hardly affected me. I'd been trained for that. Losing mates, yeah, nothing gets you over that, but in civilian life you deal with it, and in the military it's part of the job description. I mourned, yeah, but I never cracked. That sort of pressure is different ...... it's hard to explain. What I'm saying is, it wasn't combat that broke me."

Fraser's record seems to bear this out. It was his second full tour in Afghanistan, after a spell in Iraq, and despite being on the sharp end of some of the fiercest battles in both theatres of combat, Fraser felt confident and sure in the thick of things. His commanding officers spoke highly of him, one calling him "the hammer of our battalion. He was the toughest man I ever saw under fire."

It is ironic, then, perhaps, that Billy Fraser first broke when he was back in the base, at Camp Bastion, not whilst he was out in the field. He was sitting alone in his barracks room when, to describe his own words, he "felt the most intense panic I'd ever felt in my life. It was suffocating. I couldn't breathe. I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes, and tried to block it out, but it just grew more intense. I heard later PTSD can fully hit you months after an event, that small symptoms you didn't connect before suddenly take on a new significance."

Indeed, when looking back, Billy Fraser saw a clear pattern in the development of his symptoms, from increased feelings of nervousness – which he had put down to naturally heightened awareness at a time when British forces were under increasing attack – to frequent headaches and muscle cramps, which had been constant for weeks. He put these down to simple fatigue; it was only when taken as an aggregate of symptoms he realised something more had been going on the whole time, and sought the proper treatment.

His panic attack of that night was the first, but not the last, in the six hellish months that followed, but no-one around him made the connection until the fateful Sunday which changed his life. He speaks about it now as if it were yesterday; the memory is fresh in his mind.

"There were a dozen of us listening to the radio; it was the last Celtic – Rangers match of the season. A couple of the lads had their Rangers tops on, a couple wore Celtic scarves and hats ...... it was a mixed bag, really. Even Sandy, from Inverness, was up for it. The league wasn't even close, of course ....... Keane had been running riot, but the game was important nonetheless, as Rangers were chasing second spot and needed a win to keep pace with Aberdeen, who had won 3-1 the previous day. As a big Rangers man, I usually felt tense before games, but the tension that day was like nothing I'd ever known ..... I couldn't explain it."

In the 42nd minute, with Celtic already a Robbie Keane goal to the good, a corner kick from the right hand side, from young Nial McGinn, was floated into the box. Marc Antoine Fortune went up for it, but Lee McCulloch got their first, trying to head it past for a corner. Unfortunately, the ball whistled into the back of the net; it was the second time that season he'd scored an own-goal.

"Something happened to me then," Fraser recollects, "and it happened so quickly none of the lads could believe it. I just lost it. I started to bawl. They asked me if I was okay, but I was utterly inconsolable. It was like black, black depression. In my minds eye I replayed the goal, over and over again, but it wasn't that goal, but his other one, his first one, the one in the Champions League, at Ibrox, and the more I remembered about that night the worse it got. It was later, when I contacted some of the other lads who'd been with me for that, I realised how many of them had suffered similar symptoms. Some broke sooner, some later; one guy even cracked up in his local pub back in Glasgow, at the exact moment I did. But all traced their condition back to that awful, unforgettable night."

Like most events that trigger PTSD, the intensity of the shock was probably the root cause. Fraser and his colleagues broke under the strain of a night which started innocently, even perfectly.

"To walk into a place like that, and be treated like heroes, it was something else. It was akin to those early days when the Iraqi's treated the coalition troops as if we were liberators. To be feted like that, it's something I will always cherish. And to make such a great start, to have such a promising beginning, well we couldn't have asked for more, really. But from that moment on, the tension started to grow, until I could feel it, wrapped around me. Every second that passed seemed to ramp it up even more. The sounds of the baying crowd, growing angrier, all around us ..... at one point I could feel my hands flexing, as if itching for the comfort and security of my rifle. I've never felt so on edge."

At first, it was, to borrow army language, a perfect operation.

"Tactically, I thought the approach was over-defensive," Fraser says. "We were on home turf, and the opposition wasn't that strong. I felt we should have been far more aggressive, but no-one could complain when we started so well. And for the damage to be inflicted by one of their own ...... it showed the pressure they were under, and at that point we thought they'd simply collapse. But they didn't. They got over it. The boy who'd made the mistake for them, he rallied. They all did. And before long, they were swamping us."

Fraser visibly shudders, and blanches, at the memory of it.

"Our strike-force was simply over-matched by defenders. They couldn't get as much as a clean shot, let alone putting one on target. The Op-For (opposing force) had their approach just right; it was obvious they'd studied up on us, knew our weaknesses, and when they made their tactical switch, shuffling personnel, early you just sensed they could smell blood in the air. We were there for the taking. It wasn't even going to be close."

His bitterness grows as he talks about the fiasco weeks before which had seemed to darkly hint at that night's unfolding massacre. Looking back, the obvious signs of danger were all there – but they had been ludicrously downplayed by everyone, even the media, who seemed scared to admit the scale of what they had seen, for fear, perhaps, of upsetting their hosts.

"A few weeks before, our boys had taken a similar beating, but that had come against a far more advanced group. What lulled all of us into such a false sense of security was the brass, and the press, telling us that it hadn't been so bad, that we had looked far better on the night, that we'd been hit by some real sucker punches and been denied proper support from the officials. Instead of watching videos of that defeat, instead of studying our history books and reading about our record on that particular playing field, against that calibre of foreign opposition, we were allowed to become complacent. We were told it would be easy, that the Op-For were the underdogs, that we were a more formidable force than the previous defeat had suggested. And we believed it."

With so much at stake, under-estimating the opposition proved costly. By the time the hour mark had been reached the roof had fallen in, and what made it worse was the impact of what military personnel call "blue on blue" – in layman's terms, they were undone by friendly fire.

"To have one blue-on-blue incident during something like this was terrible enough, and traumatic. To have two was just horrendous. We all felt sorry for the lads involved, that was the first impression anyway, but let's face it, big Lee should never have been put in a spot like that in the first place. There's only one person to blame for it, and that's the man in charge. Lee was simply overmatched that night. Everyone knew it before we started. Why was he put there? Why was it allowed to happen the way it did? That question has yet to be answered, and the media, they couldn't have cared less. Afterwards, at the press conference, they asked the brass just one question. One question. It made us all sick."

The media's shockingly inept response, in the aftermath of that night, is not the only thing that rankles Fraser and the others who suffered so much that evening. What bothers them most are attempts to send he and his fellow soldiers back to the same ground again, next year, in an effort to recover their position and reputation. It is a plan which leaves his shocked.

"I feel terrible for anyone put in that spot," Fraser said. "My nightmares about that night have only gotten worse. How the brass can be so callous as to want to put other young squaddies through that ........ it chills my blood. It's bad enough we have to endure the horror of war, but what we witnessed, what we suffered, what we were made to go through that night should never have to be repeated again, by any serving soldier in any army."

PTSD is a terrible condition, and watching Billy Fraser struggle with it's effects is terrible and sad. This once proud man was ruthlessly cut down, not by enemy fire, which he withstood with courage and skill, but by the demons in his own mind, demons which have never allowed him to escape the traumatic night of October 20th 2009, when he and his fellow soldiers witnessed the awful Massacre of Ibrox Stadium, when nearly 37,000 were systematically tortured and their men literally slaughtered by a weaker opposing force who they had been expected to deal with easily and without fuss.

"Ibrox was the scariest experience of my life," he says, with that characteristic honesty and conviction. "I hope I never have to go through anything like it again. If I could offer advice to any serving soldier in the army it would be to avoid that place at all costs, on pain of death. Go to Afghanistan, go to Iran, serve your country with distinction and don't be afraid. The enemy there is nothing compared to what I saw that night. I would serve on the front line any day of the week. If I was fit enough, I'd sign up for another tour in Helmand tomorrow. But not in a million years would I go back to Ibrox again."

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