22/08/2026
Robert McAllister
Interviewed and photographed by Brian Anderson
Robert McAllister was still a teenager when he pulled on the uniform of the Royal Highland Fusiliers. He couldn't have known then what the army would ask of him first.
In December 1988, McAllister was among the soldiers sent into Lockerbie in the aftermath of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing — called not to fight, but to search the frozen Scottish fields and rooftops for the dead. What he saw there never fully left him. It was a young man's introduction to the cost of violence, long before he understood the weight of what he was carrying.
The years that followed took him further from home — into Afghanistan, into Iraq — tours that layered new memories over old ones. He came back each time changed a little more, a little quieter, carrying things most people never have to hold.
In this portrait and interview for Naked City, McAllister speaks plainly about what he witnessed and what it cost him — the training that prepared him for combat but not for grief, the images that surface without warning years later, and the slow, unglamorous work of learning to live alongside them. His is not a story of easy resolution. It's an honest account of what service asks of ordinary young men, and what they carry home when the uniform comes off.
