Patrick Hennessey
Page 22
so that’s when the numbness kicks in and the streets of Gereshk are no longer strewn with biros and sweets tossed to the waving kids but filled with soldiers gripping white-knuckle tight on cocked and ready pistols, blasting warning shots at any fool stupid enough to come close, now that word has got around that the luckiest team in Afghanistan’s luck finally ran out.
but it’s such a bastard way of fighting that we’re glad to push on with a big surge, there’s a grim sense of determination, something uncomfortable but understandable in the thirst to get back out into the valley. Until it kicks off again and epic contact follows epic contact through grizzing hours of wilting heat, half days drenched in sweat as the company loses casualty after casualty, surrounded by Taliban, fighting break-out and carrying the poor bastard heat injuries over our backs as we cover our withdrawal with massive bombs and angry spitting Apaches and I’m thinking the whole time that surely this sort of thing went out with our grandfathers.
it’s the moment when we launch an assault on the next compound, bayonets-fixed and old-school rules but our Afghan comrades have had enough so half-way across the murderous open ground I glance left and right and there’s six of us alone to do the job.
or the moment when some idiot cowboy airman doesn’t check his bearings and drops his missile on us, actually fucking ON US, and I’m screaming ‘FUCKING CHECK FIRE’ down the net as he starts strafing us with 30mm cannon and someone has had enough and in the middle of the fight throws down his kit and stands up firing everywhere and nowhere and screaming ‘fuck this shit, fuck it, fuck it, fuck it’ till one of the boys has to rugby tackle him down from the bullets whizzing round our heads and we calm him down again with Haribo and the soothing sight of the life-saving thank-fucking-God-for-those-boys Yank F15 Strike Eagles zooming low overhead and pounding the enemy firing point.
and even then there’s an exhilaration, so we all just laugh when Panorama decide we’re too mad for them and they’re not going to follow us any more and now ashen-faced, Ben and Robin who had casually name-dropped their 8 war zones and Sierra Leone and ambushes etc back in Price, look decidedly less keen to continue the interviews as the RPGs come hammering in again.
but when Will gets hit, shot in the leg in another bloody assault on another bloody push forward as the British regiments continue to take forever in the north and we curse them for bastard cowards on a shameless game of Operation ‘Get behind the Afghans’, that’s the moment when I’m the last platoon commander left standing and all Will’s stoic English brilliance—‘Am I going to lose my leg? Only, it’s so much better having two’—can’t quite compensate for the fact that the company is now down to less than half of what it was two months ago and there’s no end in sight.
and i think that’s when we start to lose it, when the message comes through on the radio that I’m being pulled out for R&R the next morning so get my kit ready—and we all roll around in hysterics because I have no kit and haven’t had for the last 72 hours.
but when the CSM appears like St Christopher through the dawn still hazy with cordite and phos smoke I only feel hollow as I flop down into the trailer on the back of the quad-bike and watch the guys on the roof wave and slowly disappear as we pull away, unable to square the exhausting relief that I’m finally getting a break with the feeling that I should still be up there with them. And the Panorama boys reappear as we pass and joke that if I’m gone then there’ll probably be no more trouble which I hope is true for the sake of the boys but which worries me as well because it’s hardly the professional reputation you want to have.
but the showers are too good back at camp to continue giving a shit and the news comes through that we’ve dropped more bombs than anyone else in this bone country since the Paras rocked up in Helmand last year and given that we’ve now got a Pietersen-respectable cricket score in dead Taliban chalked up against our callsign it’s probably time to give some other fuckers a couple of weeks to try and catch up.
so the tone has changed again, and finally not for the worse as my breathless reports to the commanding officer are heard and the boys get pulled out for a break only a few hours after I’m back in the now creepy camp full of clean and curious idiots who treat us like we need to be wrapped in cotton wool. It seems like for the moment the Taliban have at last had enough and meetings are arranged and new plans are in place and and and …
and I couldn’t give a damn because I’m coming home and R and R are the two sweetest letters in the fucking alphabet.
Whiplash
Finally back in the UK on R&R, I was saved by the smoking ban.
CSgt Yates had been so affronted by the very idea of it, ashamed that his beloved, native Scotland had taken the lead, that he’d negotiated with the ANA for an extra brick of local snouts and out in the Green Zone we’d held a ‘First of July Smokeathon’; Lloydy cruising through the last of his Lambert and Butler from home and the Afghans laughing at my pipe.
Back in the UK I couldn’t have been more grateful to slip away from the suffocating noise and colour and smell of the dance floor downstairs at whichever predictably cool venue we were celebrating Newton and Brinnie’s birthdays. If anyone was watching, worried—which they weren’t except for the random, half-pretty American that Adcock was flirting with—thankfully they must only have thought I was smoking a bit more than usual.
The fact that Adcock was flirting with the American was really the only reason to engage her at all, politely making eye contact every now and again but really staring across the dark, red bar at people I’d rather be telling the gritty stories to, or wondering why I didn’t really want to tell them at all to the few people who actually mattered. It was only when she picked me up for fiddling with the prayer beads that Marouf had given me when he came back from the hospital with his toe patched up and an apologetic smile which made me wonder if perhaps he hadn’t shot his foot off on purpose after all, that I was completely back in the throbbing room.
I had to get out because the room seemed so incredibly hot and close and red and then blue and the music was so loud except that it shouldn’t have been hot because it was hotter back out there and it shouldn’t have been loud because the .50-cal was a damn sight louder and why was everyone so good-looking as I pushed up the stairs almost gasping for breath?
I couldn’t do it because seventy-two hours earlier I’d been smoking from the same packet with Sherlock as we fired down from the roof on to the Taliban, who just wouldn’t die through twelve hours of the ambush, which I just couldn’t process. The cheers which go up as Max drops a favourite tune and everyone is dancing and merrily Friday-night-fucked in that carefree London summer way were to my ears the same cheers which the ANA whooped up as we dropped mission after mission long into the night.
We nearly got a taste of our own medicine when the pilot dropped a bomb on the compound we’d left minutes before. We just laughed, not that there was anything funny about it, but the release had to come from somewhere, and we were still rolling about on the roof when rounds started chipping off the stone again and Sherlock sighed like it was his turn to get the brews on and with a deafening burst, because I wasn’t not expecting it, fired off most of a magazine at the cheeky buggers who’d crawled back up to within 100 metres.
So I’m smoking out on the street somewhere inevitably in Shoreditch because I can’t engage with these people. My people, the people I’ve been writing blueys to and whose throats I’ve been forcing myself down with each shrill e-mail like a Simple Minds ring-tone, ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’. I had even weighed up on the plane back from Kandahar the relative merits of appearing to be a little zapped by the whole homecoming thing, tried to work out whether the most effective ploy would be to sit a bit more quietly than usual in the corner and let the curious and surely by now respectfully impressed hordes come sympathetically to me. Hadn’t bargained for not being able to control it at all, for simply not having the mental strength to deal with how quickly everything had changed, how qui
ckly I was gratefully back in Jen’s arms, exhausted on clean sheets, infamously sipping champagne in a Chelsea bath.
For three years I’d imagined the occasion when I could sit, garrulous and over-confident with booze, and spin real tales to the girls I wanted to fancy me even if I’d stopped fancying them and the boys I wanted to be jealous of me, just to get even. For three months I’d plugged into my headphones and jogged around Shorabak or lain swinging in the hammock staring up at the stars above the Helmand Valley, salivating for a cold drink and the familiar pattern of a night out that I’d really really earned. The hardest thing about getting what you want is knowing what to do with it.
I bolted from the bars. We’d been lonely and isolated out on the line but we were just as lonely and isolated surrounded by our nearest and dearest, stiff to the welcome-home hugs and honest wide-eyed questions, the shoulder-patting teasing of the guys, distant from those I’d missed being close to. Two nights ago we’d gone straight through on our roof, our entire world the muzzle of our rifles and the vast expanse of night around us with the A-10s snorting majestically in the dark and the violent orange flare of each fresh strike momentarily sparking up the open valley. There had been nothing all night but to get through to morning, no thought of sleep or hunger or anything but who was going on the next ammo run and Martin’s calm reassurance on the net. Had we slept, I’d have dreamed of all my beautiful friends, open-ended nights of limitless possibility, a glorious lie-in and weekend papers with cold fresh juice and iced finger buns and sex for breakfast and the four a.m. music still ringing in my ears.
Now I had it, was in the middle of it, and all I could see was Sherlock, stood over me as time slowed with the deafening surprise of his latest burst in a picture of a Brecon nightmare; no helmet, no body-armour, stood upright on the roof silhouetted against the ’lum still popping up with his rifle jammed into his hip with one hand loosing huge bursts of automatic while lighting a fag with the other:
‘Fucking hell, Sherlock!’
Even I had interjected, as much for the deafening as the wanton affront to all that the British Army held dear, and he’d looked down at me apologetically and dropped to the floor as if only just realizing his slackness. And then fished out another fag.
‘Sorry, sir, I should have offered.’
Later, somewhere in a field in Cambridgeshire, Echo and the Bunnymen are playing, and I’m still imagining the D’n’B tent on fire from the schmoolie incident, which the revellers might or might not notice but probably wouldn’t be good either way, but the rocket had sailed safely into a distant field and, panting, I survey the two a.m. weirdness around the lake. According to the song, nothing ever lasts forever, but this weekend seems to be the exception as R&R, which I had thought would run by in terrifying fleeting seconds and spit me back out on to the line, has dragged.
Two weeks in and sure it all tasted good and smelled good and felt good, stumbling around with Adcock surrounded by the beautiful summer girls in shorts and wellies, but you still wanted to check the BBC website every few seconds to see what was going on, still hoped in every quiet moment that Lloydy and LCpl Price and LCpl Mizon were kicking their heels back in Shorabak because, after all the build-up, it turned out that the thought of missing a scrap was worse than the three summers reality of missing the party.
I’d driven up to Selly Oak to visit Kuks and Will on the ward, thinking the guys would be jealous of my two weeks of R&R hedonism, but they were more gutted to be missing the scraps, and deep down I knew why.
Two weeks of R&R had taken on a mythical importance out on tour: the agonizingly closer we’d got to them, even as the intensity seemed to ramp up on purpose with their approach, the more we’d wanted them. The bitterest fights I’d seen were over who was going when and if you missed your flight out or fucked up your hire car or the RAF inevitably screwed the precious hours of your fourteen-day oasis because of their unionized tea-break system. R&R had been everything, and for two weeks of sensory overload you could see why but it was too much 0-60 or maybe 60-0, but either way the body couldn’t take it, and you couldn’t have relaxed anyway because you knew as soon as you did you’d be back in Brize and the flight which would drop you back into the alternative universe which was somehow where you felt you belonged.
And Echo and the Bunnymen played as I looked out over the giant party and could think only of the valley and wanted the fireworks to be air-strikes and the huge euphoric-trance drops to be the lift and surge of a scrap and I had walked there through rings of fire and had lived in dreams today but it was always wanting more than we could get and R&R had to come to an end because they were right, nothing ever lasts for ever.
Sitting in Brize waiting for the flight didn’t feel as bad as I thought it might have done, the two weeks didn’t seem to have raced past as quickly as I had feared they would, and mostly I was too busy enjoying the double-takes my battered and faded helmet cover was drawing from the crowishly clean combated guys who were deploying out for the first time. Almost exactly a year earlier I had sat in the terminal at Basrah waiting to fly out of Iraq for the last time, sneaking envious glances at the similarly gnarled helmets of the big PWRR Fijians, whose boots and battered Warriors told of a slightly more exciting deployment than ours. By the time we were loading up I was almost looking forward to getting back into things.
It was at Kandahar with its hideous 200-man RSOI tents and lack of purpose in the air that the post-R&R depression kicked in. KAF a purgatory where we neither come nor go but where no effort is made to separate the latent joy of the outgoing bods from the hang-dog expressions of those going back in.
And when I arrive there’s an amazing sense of calm in Shorabak, familiarity in the mosi-nets and, perhaps dangerously given that there’s two months of this to go, a sense that an anxious wait is at an end. The very temporary nature of R&R prevents us from completely giving in to it; hanging over the fortnight, stopping you from letting go, is the knowledge that in fourteen days, then seven, then three, then two, then one, you’ve got to go back out again. Sitting in the briefing room receiving orders for the RiP with the Inkerman Company up in Sangin, gorging on buffalo wings in the American D-Fac for movie night, there was nothing to worry about any more.
I was back in.
Back In
Disaster struck as I was looking for the pay bloke in one of the huge huts at the back of the camp, peering gingerly through the improvised curtains and four-month intricate screens, delicately constructed between the established bed spaces of the real camp rats. I found LCpl Maskell, couldn’t help but notice that he was watching 24—and the next few days were a write-off.
It’s a testament to how professionally chilled we had become in such a short time that no one seemed to notice as I disappeared into the DVD box-set, emerging only for meals and Black Forest gateaux and grateful that my return from R&R has coincided with a spell in camp to wean me off the rich culinary excesses of leave with the chef’s incredible scoff rather than going cold-turkey out on the ground on rations. The reality is that we’ve nothing to do, and now that we’ve proved that when there is something to do we can do it, no one hassles us when there isn’t.
Lying in bed, resisting the urge to send expensive text messages home because apparently someone’s installed a mobile-phone detector and we’re all supposed to have handed them in to be locked away, I tried to remember previous days lost to 24, Jack-filled hours of my life I’ll never get back, bored of the beeping and the inevitable next double-cross but somehow not able to stop watching.
In Baghdad it had been during the handover, an antidote to Piers’ awesome stories of Helmand, which just took even more shine off our finishing Iraq tour. Glum because I was going home before everyone else, kicking heels in the transit bunk and watching prep for the patrols which I knew the second I left would flare up excitingly in a way they hadn’t while I had been around.
Before that it had been on guard, nothing else to do but lounge on the sofas in T-shir
ts and shorts pretending we’d just been on or were just going on a run, seeing if it was possible to squeeze an entire series into a forty-eight-hour guard. (It was as long as no one bothered to do the rounds, check on the sentries or any of that crap so patently less important than finding the triggering device.) The trick was to skip the updates, the previouslys and the obvious ad-break moments, letting them run through only to dash to the night-tray and grab another round of scampi fries, which by the end of our public duties stint we instinctively knew contained an average of sixteen per packet.
The first time had been in Brecon, as if we didn’t already have little enough spare time on that course. Foolishly thinking I could pass the long evenings with an episode a night from Si Greenman’s box-set and then getting sucked so far in I missed a whole week of lectures in a sleepless zombie trance, watching slides of the Assault on Longdon or Routine in Defence and pretending to nod while wondering what the hell Tony was up to and where Kim was. The beat-up exercises unbearably between seasons two and three, and I had to make up for lost time when we got back in, propping my laptop up on a chair and watching while soaking off the Salisbury Plain grime in the bath, which should have demonstrated a brilliant infantry officer understanding the value of concurrent activity but which just wound-up the DSM and health and safety.
Everything in the world had happened since then, and nothing had changed. There I was lying between two empty bed spaces, Will and Kuks’ stuff stripped down and sent to join them in Selly Oak, and I should have been wondering who would have called that play but instead was marvelling at Jack’s resistance to torture.