Patrick Hennessey

by The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time;Fighting Wars

  The fun should have evaporated in the hot grief and anger we felt, but I knew deep down the two were inextricably linked. The buzz of getting out was in the danger and its startling unpredictability. We reserved our anger for the officious pricks who tried to bollock us for wearing incorrect headdress on the training range, but we wanted to get back out. Charging broad daylight this time down the Iraqi highways, running the traffic into the hard shoulder with nervous deployment of the laser-aiming dot to keep the suspicious-looking locals a safe distance, escorting enormous vulnerable convoys of water and other essentials, we tried not to think about the guys who had been blown up. I was glad to be on top-cover, whizzing past the shell of Chemical Ali’s palace—the only thing higher than one storey in the Mad Max wasteland of rusting twisted metal that still lined the infamous Basrah road. Down on the Kuwaiti border the kids ran to the sides of the road to wave enthusiastically, which gave us a brief shot of euphoria until we slowed down at the entrance to the US camp and crawled past poignant long lines of ripped-up Humvee carcasses waiting to be shipped back to the States.

  We rode back up sat on the huge boxes of Gatorade we stole from the awesomely stocked US Camp Navistar, but were far from comfortable as thoughts turned to the ceremony we were rushing back for. Sunset and the slow march of the draped coffins, the powerful low dirge of the Fijians muttering their own mourning hymns in baritone line and powerful bass response, which dignified even the muffled epiphany of someone fainting as we waited for the chopper to come in and the gratuitously mating dragonflies that hovered around the padre while heads were bowed in silent reflection.

  The 112th and 113th soldiers to die in Iraq began their journey home, and no one wanted to watch war DVDs on stag that night.

  So we got The OC box-set instead and played paper scissors stone to determine who had to go between episodes and check on the detainees.

  It was strange to think that the IED attacks on our guys were probably being planned and coordinated by the very guys we had in the DTDF. Twice a week as per Red Cross guidelines we held visiting afternoons when hordes of relatives trooped in with cake and watermelon, and we’d keep a close eye on the heavy-bearded bastards whose ‘families’ always consisted of tight huddles of young men in black. Perhaps, if the tables had been turned, we’d have sat in tight circles with incarcerated friends in Wormwood Scrubs plotting death on the occupying oppressors, but I liked to think we’d have fought a little fairer.

  Fairer certainly than the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). The Iranian-backed SCIRI were murdering people in Basrah in horrifying numbers and then, just as the French Open started and we were looking forward to watching a little tennis during our long shifts, the news came down from Baghdad that the fledgling Iraqi tennis team—training for a qualifying slot in the Davis Cup and the national rehabilitation of international sport—had all been ‘executed’ by the side of the court they were practising on. Despite repeated warnings—so the SCIRI said—they had continued to train in shorts.

  Things like that fired us up, made us glad to be out ‘defending freedom’ for the few minutes it took us to wonder what freedom we were defending sitting in Shaibah arguing over whether or not rap was the most appropriate soundtrack to this particular war. Jarhead was right, everybody needed to move on from the whole Vietnam-rock thing, and it seemed to us that the rampant consumerism of gangsta rap struck a chord with our little oil war, so we cruised the airfield in our own hummer blasting out Big Pun and the Terror Squad and Busta and scaring the hell out of the Danes, who thought it was a drive-by.

  Mostly the guys just got on with things, grumbling and purging with the caustic humour which is the right and duty of every soldier but only really getting angry when the camps were plunged into silent darkness by the sporadic crashing of the generators and we couldn’t watch the World Cup.

  Having to stumble around the dimly lit base, the oil flares brighter than ever on the night horizon and everyone with glow sticks in their pockets like an off-key rave, eerily silent with the generators which we hadn’t heard when they were going down and stifling hot with no air-con and water, was tolerable. What wasn’t was the occasional roar from the other side of the camp, which meant someone had power somewhere and was watching Peter Crouch miss another bicycle kick.

  The really dedicated football hooligans were forced to reassess their tactics the night Iran lost to Mexico, and the really disgruntled districts of Basrah erupted in running gun battles. Millwall—Leeds had nothing on that. Perhaps the locals were just worried that Shaibah had suddenly become a sea of patriotic English flags—free from tabloid newspapers stuck to windscreens of vehicles, huge towels on sale in the NAAFI draped bright over the tent entrances. The locally employed civilians who emptied the portaloos by day and adjusted the mortar fire on to the base by night must have thought we were about to launch our own grand offensive, march straight across the desert and on to the Holy Land under our crusading banners of St George.

  When the football wasn’t on we would climb to the top of the water tower and sit looking out at the desert, the candle-flickering oil flares and the distant shimmer of Basrah in the north and Kuwait City in the south. Legs dangling over the sheer drop and the slight anxiety atop the weakened rusting structure a sort of methadone for the adrenaline junkies who couldn’t get out on patrol, we would chill with Cokes as if we’d climbed high enough to get above the bullshit and politics of camp and the confusion and frustration of the tour.

  If we were lucky we’d chopper up to Basrah City on Kafkaesque missions taking our detainees to ‘trial’, holding them in the lion den of what had been the zoo in the Shaat Al-Arab Hotel while we waited for the Warrior tanks which would taxi us to court and marvelling at what was left of the once-glitzy hotel, the bullet-pockmarked marble and glitzy chandeliers supported by sandbags and barbed wire.

  From the back of the sweltering Warriors, clanging with the odd brick thrown but no one really stupid enough to take on the 30mm cannon and the bored and trigger-happy PWRR, we got a through-the-slit glimpse of ‘the Venice of the Middle East’; long queues for petrol marshalled and abused by the fat Iraqi police, more donkeys than cars on the roads (one even pulling an ancient cart loaded high with TVs through the rubble-strewn, Bruegel-meets-Warhol streets). Outside houses and in markets the looted bathroom fittings of Saddam’s palaces were for sale, and outside the court itself, beneath a towering papier-mâché purple dinosaur which gave the whole thing a surreal theme-park vibe, someone optimistically flogging a jet ski—welcome to Disneyland Basrah. Once in court we’d argue with the bullying policemen who wanted the detainees handed over to them so they could head out back and administer their own Glock 9mm to the back of the head justice. Nervous stand-offs with our supposed allies; former Ba’athists who’d slipped under the radar and kept their moustaches spitting rancid breath in our faces and the tables now strangely turned as the terrified detainees clung to the imperialist infidels for protection from their own countrymen. Farcical process trials in which guys we knew were guilty were confirmed as being guilty by Iraqi judges so they could return with us to continue indefinitely in the same cells we’d got them out of at the crack of dawn that very morning.

  What the fuck did we do all summer?

  After a couple of months we moved to Baghdad. Most soldiers who served a tour in Northern Ireland never fired their weapon; that’s probably true by now of Iraq as well. The Southern Desert had its moments, but the only footage of rifles firing we’d be able to put in our video montages was taken on the range.

  The early thrill of just getting out on patrol, getting mortared, riding top-cover, the early lessons of losing comrades and living out of stinking tents with the same thirty guys for company, days that lost all meaning, weeks measured in snatched units of tanning and banter with the Reading Club, playing politics with the Secretary of State and the Red Cross in our little prison, playing Rumpole with our detainees and charging round Basrah in the Warriors
, riding Snatch up and down the deadly motorways and lying nights in the hard sand poised like coiled springs on ambush—all this was for real. We’d always wanted to do these things ‘for real’; no one ever promised for real would involve pulling the trigger.

  Even so, Shaibah became my default impression of being on ops. From what I could gather from the company commanders it had more in common with Northern Ireland than we might, at first, have thought: fatigue and boredom, frustrating stags and the occasional tense moment, maybe slightly more tanning. Perhaps wherever you go first is what you judge everything else by, perhaps the guys whose first tour was in the Falklands found everything else tedious and comfy by comparison. But I liked to think there was something more fundamental, that Shaibah was ‘ordinary’ because there was still something else ‘extraordinary’ out there, something that would test us in ways that, for all the adventure, Southern Iraq hadn’t. Something like Baghdad.

  It helped that Baghdad was where everyone’s attention was focused, where the Americans took casualties in days that we took in bad weeks.

  Baghdad was going to be the real deal.

  A Tale of Two Cities

  It starts just as we’d want with a twisting, gut-wrench big-dipper drop into Baghdad airport and everyone on edge because the threat is that much higher so the sweat might be the heat but it might be the fear and either way distant thoughts of humid London not-quite-the-world-record-hottest-day are banished.

  Then there’s no doubt about the sweat on the helicopter ride from the airport to LZ Washington, the landing zone in the heart of the infamous Green Zone. On the Pumas it’s just raw, wide-eyed fear and admiration for the pilots as they dart like wasps too too low and too too fast over the city, spitting out chaff in all directions as we prayed that the incoming flashes were an illusion not the Katyusha rockets being fired at your noisy, hulking, flying metal whirligig coffin by schoolkids on their lunch break that they probably are.

  The strange thing about Baghdad wasn’t the danger, it was the familiarity. The Southern Desert and its sprawling camp was as unfamiliar as it was hostile. Baghdad was a city of roughly six million souls, plenty of green spaces with a winding river and a skyline marked by religious buildings and the memorials of past glories and bygone wars. We hadn’t known it, but we knew Baghdad all along.

  And suddenly being in uniform in what you could discern was someone’s town, someone’s home, made it all the more startling when the cigarette-warm nights are punctuated by the music of automatic fire and sirens and boom. Double-taking as we drive through because every other public building has had the j-dam treatment and lies wounded on the streets—lavish, jerry-built, marble-façade palaces spilling their brick guts in rubble into the road, hideous open architectural wounds exposing their very innards and everywhere everywhere EVERYWHERE you look everyone has guns guns GUNS.

  It was exciting because the names and images were familiar and the chaos felt like history happening. This was the sack of Rome, Saigon in ’75, Beirut when we were toddlers, Berlin when the wall came down, and we were slap bang in the middle of it. The CIA Little Bird helicopters whirring overhead, the traffic all up-armoured Humvees and every uniform you can imagine—seemed like everyone wanted a piece of the action.

  Even the first night the bangs were just out of sight and the shots only just across the river. The RAF crew as we’d landed had capitulated to the yankeeism that’s everywhere and played The Killers over the C130 intercom, and it was still playing in my head, ‘Boy, one day you’ll be a man’, as we drank in the city for the first time through the open chopper doors, thinking what difference will it make sitting on my hands but I’m going to do it anyway. I couldn’t resist a little yee ha!

  The night I arrived we sat out playing bridge on the lawns of Maude House, drinking in the irony that the Americans lived in Saddam’s former palace and we lived in his son’s former brothel, starting just fractionally with each bang and pop that punctuated the heavy evening. The commanding officer had come up on a visit, so we couldn’t crack out the port I’d smuggled past the RAF in a shampoo bottle, but the Stilton—a request from the general himself—was delicious.

  After the cards, I wandered round the little camp, too wired to sleep, catching up with the guys on stag. In Shaibah we’d had our ups and downs and little excitements and little frustrations, but we’d been looking forward to this. For three weeks in London I’d marched and lashed with a knot in my stomach like I’d never wanted something so badly in my life. Smoking in the rear sangar with Gdsm Adjei, watching enchanted as tracer snapped back and forth on the other side of the river, I felt at home.

  For those of us indoctrinated by the training and filled with professional envy, Baghdad was simply somewhere you had to have been. Woodstock in ’69 for the real cats tuning in and dropping out, ripping up plastic chairs in Marseille in ’98 for any self-respecting hooligan. Baghdad was where George Bush Snr had never got to. Baghdad was where the whole world was going to shit because Junior had wanted to get to make up for Daddy. My own father may have got there first on a visit, but he’d had a protection team escorting him. We were the protection team, kitting up for riding out past the KBR-sponsored ‘hunting season’ sign with weapons FREE—it felt good to be up in Baghdad.

  The city itself, at least the bits of it you saw as you whizzed past on top-cover, keeping all traffic out of your 100-metre protection ‘bubble’ with red-dots and warning shots, was impossible to comprehend. The big-tent camouflage circus of Shaibah had been so strange we had no point of reference; Baghdad was like any city we knew. Green, like everyone always said, with the palms on the banks of the Tigris and the well-cultivated embassy gardens, but everywhere was really the colour of guns and uniforms and armoured cars and the massive convoy which shipped Saddam backwards and forwards to court and pushed even us off the road.

  Otherwise, we were delightfully idle. The boys who weren’t on guard or on task were busy on Op Massive in the weights room or playing volleyball. The evenings were spent in the ‘Duck and Cover’ bar, where Thursday night was quiz night and all the ex-Army mercenaries and indiscreet Special Forces boys popped in for a drink and the lance-corporals played poker into the small hours.

  Everything was chilled until a tasking came through, and then it was clockwork preparation. Calm but urgent rehearsals of special drills on the Crossed Swords parade ground which the Coalition forces had taken over with deliberate irony as their own real estate and which we monitored from the smashed-up balcony where Saddam had once taken the salute of his army’s massive, delusional march-pasts. The boys used to grab shade in the tunnel the generals had built underneath the square so that soldiers who’d already marched past Saddam could get to the back of the parade unseen and march past him again.

  Heading out through the Green Zone—or the International Zone, as we were now being encouraged to call it, Green considered inappropriate as it implied that there was a ‘Red’ Zone, duh!—was warm-up time. Waves from the smiling Puerto Rican and Gurkha contractors outside the embassies, gung-ho thumbs-up from the steroid-pumped mercenaries cruising around lawlessly in SUVs and then out under what the Yanks called ‘Assassins Gate’ and what the boys more poetically referred to as the ‘Golden Tit’ (probably not realizing that it was a mini replica of the Qabbat As-Sakhrah, the Dome of the Rock, which Saddam had built after his plans to steal it from Jerusalem had failed) and pounding down Route Irish or Neptune, the ‘most dangerous road in the world’.

  But when we had no taskings, we chilled at the Liberty Pool.

  6.viii.2006—‘A Tale of Two Cities’

  it would not be at all too difficult, i think, to contract schizophrenia from too prolonged a stay in this town. consider today, for example.

  today (Saturday) is lobster day in the D-Fac (US dining facility which we marvel at and regularly plunder like Bhutanese peasants who have only ever seen a 1950s black and white television receiver, suddenly finding themselves in Comet), naturally, one makes a bit
of a day of lobster day so we spent all day—pretty much literally all day—up at the pool trying out new dives (the front flip to dive—painful, the back flip to twist—worse), shooting pool by the pool (nice) munching on free popcorn (not too much in case we spoil our appetites) and mostly just lounging and waving at the paramedic helicopters coming in every half hour or so.

  the lobster was delicious, as was the Baskin Robbins ice-cream and the cookies we brought back with us.

  but then again we earned it after last night which was spent tensely monitoring the tens of thousands of angry protesters called up by Moqtada al-Sadr to show solidarity with those lovely gentlemen of Hizbollah (and you thought the countryside alliance march was rough and strangely dressed) getting progressively more frisky on the opposite banks of the Tigris while we casually sat outside a mosque deep in the ‘red zone’ waiting for a dinner party between various coalition generals, Iraqi politicians and Shi’a clerics to finish, praying they don’t take too long on the After Eights as the collocated US battalion started taking sniper fire and everyone had been static so long even i could have placed a daisy-chain of IEDs on the return route.

  it’s all or nothing as i find myself cutting back and forth, liaising with the US and the private contractor Ops room in the British Embassy (which is embarrassingly better than ours) while the 172nd Stryker Brigade (‘the Arctic Wolves’) casually report in yet more casualties and trundle off to the hospital where—by the time we come back in off task—a bunch of them are still sitting on the pavement outside smoking and waiting for their buddies.