Painting the Sand

by Kim Hughes GC

  But it wouldn’t be endless days of patrolling and firefights interspersed with mind-numbing boredom for everyone. Many of those who were going out to Afghan would never leave the safety of Bastion – only for R & R and their eventual flight home. They were as safe as houses. The main threat for those lucky arseholes was diarrhoea and sunstroke. You see, everyone had a different war in Afghan.

  Not surprisingly the flight was delayed by several hours – a bolt connecting the engine to the wing had rusted away; at least that was the rumour doing the rounds – and it meant another couple of hours sitting on our arses.

  Eventually we boarded, by rank order, which meant that I had a half-decent seat – the junior soldiers got what was left. I stuffed my body armour and helmet, which I’d need to wear on the last leg of the flight into Bastion, under my seat and tried to relax. Flight attendants dressed in flying suits handed out boxed packed lunches of cellophane-wrapped white-bread sandwiches and biscuits with dubious sell-by dates along with cans of cheap fizzy drink – no expense spared for the boys going off to war.

  The first leg took us to Cyprus, where the Tristar refuelled and took on some more passengers and from there we flew into some desert air base. The last leg was by Hercules directly into Bastion. The journey had taken close to eighteen hours and during the final stretch, the last hour into Bastion, we sweated our balls off wearing all our kit plus body armour and helmets. The aircraft stank of aviation fuel, bad breath and farts. Had the journey from Brize to Bastion been designed to be longer or more uncomfortable, the RAF could not have done a better job.

  The Herc landed with a thump. It’s huge, rear door slowly opened and seemed to suck in the hot, dusty desert air. Straight away I could smell it – that Afghan smell, a mixture of dirt and shit left to ripen in the sun, and it never left me, not for the whole six months.

  It was 2 a.m. local time but the base was as busy as a city in rush hour. Apache gunships were coming and going and several aircraft seemed to be landing all at the same time. The sky was inky-black but the base was illuminated by hundreds of bright floodlights. We saw other troops at the end of their tour waiting to board our aircraft to take them back home. They looked thin and haggard, and older than their years. They stared at us, faces revealing a mixture of contempt and pity but they said nothing. They were either too tired or simply couldn’t be arsed.

  A fleet of buses decked out Asian-style took us to a holding area where we were reunited with our kit. I was punch drunk with fatigue and my patience was wearing thin. Eventually we were driven to our new home, a large white, dust-filled tent with broken air conditioning, several stained cot-beds and a few dirty pillows. My team were silent, lost in their own thoughts – home never felt so far away. We had arrived.

  4

  How Did I Get Here?

  It was almost inevitable that I ended up serving in the Army. My brother was a soldier and so was my dad and I had acquired all of the necessary qualifications: an unhappy home life, lack of job prospects, academically weak and a love of guns and explosions.

  My childhood was pretty miserable probably because my parents split up when I was five and my mum remarried another soldier, a violent Scottish tosser who took a great deal of pleasure meting out his aggression on me and my mum. Looking back I think he couldn’t handle the fact that although he may have been something in the Army, in Civvy Street he was a nobody. After he left the Army we moved out of our service house and into a 1960s council estate in Telford called Woodside. If you lived in Woodside you had somehow failed, or that’s how it seemed to me.

  I think he resented having to provide for a wife and three children, who weren’t his own. He seemed to take a sadistic delight in physically abusing me. Like most kids I was a bit of a handful and if I was too naughty I got sent to my room where I would have to sit and wait for the inevitable beating. His heavy footsteps as he climbed the stairs would fill me with dread. He would enter my bedroom and say nothing, not a word, and then he’d lash out with a slap across the face. I’d fall to the floor too scared to get back up and wait for him to leave the room. Later, when the dust had settled and he’d gone to the pub, I’d come downstairs and get a cuddle from my mum. I adored her but I think she was probably scared of him as well.

  School should have provided some sort of refuge but it didn’t. I had somehow bluffed my way into the newly built Thomas Telford School, a technical college, full of really bright kids. The school required all potential applicants to undertake an interview, sit a few tests and talk about a particular book they liked. But I could barely read and the only book I ever owned was one about Sherlock Holmes. It was full of pictures of his tales and although I didn’t read any of the stories I was able to give a pretty decent account of the book based on what I had gathered from the pictures. Astonishingly, I passed the interview and got a place. My mum was over the moon but at the back of my mind I was terrified.

  On the day school was due to start it began to dawn on me that I was going to be at the bottom of the class. The walk to school on that wet and windy September morning was one of the hardest of my life. I don’t think I ever felt so lonely and vulnerable.

  By the time I arrived in my classroom, I was a wreck. My teacher was straight out of central casting. She looked ferocious, wore thick-rimmed glasses and had little time for the less-able members of her new class. She went around the room asking each boy or girl to introduce themselves. Then she came to me. I truly wanted the ground to open and swallow me up. ‘Kim, Kim Hughes,’ I stuttered. Rather than take pity on my obvious discomfort she told me to stand in front of the class and read a passage from a book. I slowly walked to the front of the classroom like someone facing a firing squad. Disaster loomed. The words on the page in front of me seemed meaningless and there were several I had never seen before. I started reading but immediately stumbled. The sniggering grew louder and the teacher walked across the room and stood behind me. Beads of sweat began to trickle down the side of my face. Every ten words or so I stumbled and ground to a halt, forcing the teacher to intervene and pronounce the word for me.

  I could have only been standing there for a few minutes but in that short time the damage was done. I sat down and wanted to cry. A boy leaned over. ‘What’s wrong with you? Can’t you read?’ I looked at him pleadingly. ‘I haven’t got my glasses with me.’ From that moment on I was the thick kid with the girl’s name.

  By the afternoon my humiliation was complete when all the kids in my class were told to queue for lunch and to have their dinner money ready.

  ‘I’ve got my lunch in my bag,’ I said. The teacher looked at me quizzically. ‘I’ve got a packed lunch.’

  My mum didn’t have much money and it was cheaper for her to make me sandwiches than to give me the £1.00 for a school lunch. The fact that I couldn’t afford school dinners was just more ammunition for the kids in my class.

  The bullying began on day one and continued for almost five years. Every now and again I’d go toe-to-toe with some arsehole who’d pushed the piss-taking just that bit too far. But as we got older the jibes became more sarcastic, more witty, more hurtful and I wanted out. By the age of sixteen, I was spotty, a bit overweight, bored and had begun knocking around with a real bunch of losers who drank or smoked weed.

  The Hughes family did not come from academic stock. As far as I’m aware we didn’t have a single A level to our name and neither I, my brother or sister were going to break the mould. And Telford in the 1990s was about as grim as life could be. Unemployment was high and job prospects were very low.

  My one escape from my violent stepfather, the school bullies and the drudgery of Telford was the Army Cadets. I loved every minute of it and looked forward to the training, shooting, the weekend camps and even the drill. No one cared whether I could read or write, or that I was overweight or even that my first name was Kim. When I put the uniform on I became a different person, I was a soldier, at least in my head I was. Cadets was my escape from my shitty home life,
it was the one place where I could be myself.

  My other passion was fireworks and one of my favourite times of the year was 5 November. I would spend money I had spent months saving buying as many different types of firework as I could afford. I would spend hours locked away in my bedroom, taking them apart to see how and why they went bang and what made all the different colours. I wanted to know why rockets exploded and why Roman candles fired balls of fire into the air. I once blew up my stepfather’s prized garden birdhouse after I emptied the contents of a couple of fireworks into a plastic cup, made a fuse and placed it inside. The explosion was far more violent than I had expected and I spent the rest of the day hammering the birdhouse back together.

  That was my life and I had no real burning desire to join the Army until I was in my final school year when one of the teachers asked how many children wanted to go on a school trip to France. Everyone’s hand, except mine, shot up. My mum didn’t have the money to pay for it and there was no way my stepfather was going to pay.

  The teacher moved around the class asking each pupil if they would be coming on the French trip.

  ‘Kim,’ the teacher said expecting me to say that I would be coming.

  ‘I won’t be coming,’ I replied.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’m going to join the Army.’

  Laughter broke out across the classroom as if none of the other kids believed me but I didn’t care. Right at that moment I had decided that school had taken me as far as it could and another life, full of excitement and travel, or so I thought, was on offer.

  That summer I sat my last exam, which I knew I had failed, got up out of my chair and left school for the last time. No longer would I have to suffer the daily humiliation of being the thickest in the class. No longer would I walk into that friendless classroom smelling of stale, watered-down disinfectant. I walked through the main gates out onto the road, turned and looked at my old school for one last time. It’s modern facade was already beginning to show the early signs of neglect, rubbish spun in a windy circle on the playground while the final bell of the day rang through the school. This was meant to be the place that prepared me for life but instead I spent five years feeling useless and undervalued. I felt a surge of anger rise up through my body. ‘Fuck you!’ I shouted for as loud and as long as my body could muster.

  In the sky the sun was shining brightly and for the first time in my life I felt truly free.

  The following morning I dragged my mum to the local Army recruitment office in Shrewsbury. I was sixteen and needed my parents’ consent to join up. The West Midlands was a fertile recruiting ground for the Army; prospects for the town’s population of disaffected, feckless youngsters, like me, were diminishing. The Army’s unofficial recruiting motto was ‘Join up and see the world’, but it could equally have been ‘We’ll take anyone’.

  A former shop on the town high street was the recruitment office; posters of young men driving tanks and throwing themselves around assault courses were displayed, along with pictures of soldiers scuba diving and sailing in glamorous locations. As I entered the office, a balding sergeant in his brown No.2 dress uniform appeared from behind a counter, wiping the remnants of a late breakfast, or early lunch, from his mouth.

  He was sweaty and red-faced, severely overweight and with no discernible neck. His fat, sausage-like fingers were nicotine-stained and his uniform was straining across his expansive girth. He introduced himself as sergeant something or other. ‘What can I do for you, son?’

  But before I could answer my mum said: ‘He’d like to join the Army.’

  ‘Oh, and why’s that?’

  ‘I want to learn a trade, travel, do something useful with my life,’ I fired back wanting to show that I knew my own mind.

  ‘Good – you can’t do better than join the Army. Look at me, twenty-two years’ service, leaving on a cushy number with a nice pension.’

  He said he had seen the world and loved every minute of his service life. His uniform bore a single medal ribbon indicating that his operational service had been restricted to Northern Ireland.

  ‘Any thoughts as to which outfit? You’ll want to be in a corps if you want a trade? Got any GCSEs?’

  I shook my head. As far as I was concerned the Army was the Army. It was my ticket out of Telford. I knew nothing about regiments or corps.

  ‘The Royal Logistic Corps needs people like you. Can you drive?’

  I shook my head again.

  ‘No matter, they’ll teach you. You’ll learn a trade, get your car and HGV licence for free. Every unit in the Army needs drivers. It will be a brilliant career and when you leave you can walk into a well-paid job as a lorry driver.’

  I needed no more convincing.

  A few more interviews were followed by a couple of familiarisation visits and by mid 1996 I was recruit 25053515 with Masters Troop, part of the Army Training Regiment at Pirbright Barracks in Surrey.

  Recruit training was everything I’d hoped for – the drill, fitness training, skill at arms. Our corporal instructors taught us how to wash, shave, clean our boots, iron our clothes and for the first time in my life I found something at which I seemed to excel. I felt as though I was growing in stature every day.

  But about three weeks into the course I started to feel homesick. I’d often wander the corridors of our barrack block at night, while everyone else was asleep, sometimes fighting back the tears and hoping that the homesickness would go away but instead it got worse with each passing day. I felt lost, alone and trapped. I wasn’t bullied, the NCO instructors weren’t exactly friendly but neither were they unpleasant. The problem was with me.

  In week three of basic training one of the other recruits mentioned something called PVR – Premature Voluntary Release. It’s like a Monopoly get-out-of-jail card for recruits – play it and the Army have to let you go. Before I knew it I was back home with my mum.

  Mum gave me a massive hug as I walked in through the front door. My stepfather just looked at me with utter disdain and said nothing. I expected no sympathy from him and received none. I was happy to be home but my future in Telford, the arsehole of the world as far as I was concerned, looked bleak. Over the next six months, I drifted from job to job, working as a manual labourer on building sites for a while before ending up with an apprenticeship at a robotics factory but I was soon bored. More bored than I could have possibly imagined.

  Then, one morning I woke up and I decided right then to rejoin.

  The following day I was back in the same recruitment office – a different sergeant, who viewed me with deep suspicion even though it was 1997 and the Army was supposedly struggling for recruits.

  ‘Why should we take you back?’ the recruiting sergeant said when I asked to rejoin. ‘We gave you one chance and you threw it back in our faces. We can’t afford passengers, we need people with commitment. If you can’t hack a few weeks in recruit training how are you going to hack it on the front line when you go to war?’

  He was being overdramatic but he was right of course. I managed to convince him and others along the way during the application process and within a few months I was back in the Army. This time I was prepared and up for it.

  Back at Pirbright I had a bit of a head start on the other recruits and found the first fourteen weeks of basic training easier than most. I was ahead with drill, the weapon training and the discipline – second time around I really embraced the whole challenge and the time flew by.

  The Army is an easy target for critics who claim it takes uneducated men and women who can’t do anything else and turns them into killers. There’s probably some element of truth in that but what the Army also does is offer everybody an equal chance. It doesn’t care where you come from, whether you have an accent or what sort of home life you’ve had. It doesn’t discriminate or prejudge. The Army will offer you a career, teach you a trade, help you get qualifications but it expects a lot back in return. Ultimately, the Army expects you to
fight and if necessary die for your country and every single one of us who made it to our pass-out parade knew and accepted the terms and conditions. For many of us, becoming a professional soldier was the only thing we had ever really achieved and for the first time in my life I think my mum was truly proud of me.

  Following the pass-out parade, I had a bit of leave and was posted to Princess Royal Barracks in Surrey, the infamous holding unit for members of the Royal Logistic Corps. Deepcut was effectively a transit camp where soldiers still in training were posted for a few weeks or months while they waited for a vacancy on a course. Deepcut was a miserable place and very badly managed at that time. There was no sense of esprit de corps and a heavy air of depression and disorganisation hung over the place. I spent several weeks at the barracks before completing the next phase of my training – driving courses.

  For someone heading into the RLC, I showed no real flair as a driver. I failed my car test three times and my HGV another three times – in fact I failed on so many occasions that I was kicked off the course and had to do a resit from the beginning. After finally completing my basic licences I was sent to the Defence School of Transport in Leconfield, Yorkshire, for my conversion training to military vehicles, where you can learn to drive just about any vehicle in the Army, before I was posted to 13 Transport Squadron, part of 8 Transport Regiment, located at Marne Barracks, near Catterick in Yorkshire.