Left hand/right hand? I was slightly reminded of the plot of Hopjoy was Here, the first of the Flaxborough Chronicles, where the somewhat baffling reason for the eponymous spy living in a small Lincolnshire market town sharing a house with a tobacconist was that "Security, you see, is just a matter of placing fielders." (It later turns out that the large Baskerville-style research establishment Hopjoy's been placed there to guard was shut down by the relevant ministry a dozen years previously but no-one - least of all the spies who were benefitting from large salaries and expenses for guarding it - bothered to tip off the MI5 brass.)

Of course, no-one's allowed to have PTSD in Forest, otherwise the idea that someone who's had a "good" war (with sufficient action to win the DSO and bar) might just be fancying a couple of years doing nothing in particular to get over it wouldn't come as such a shock that it needs to be explained away.