Patrick Hennessey

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

  Hazrat bets me I can’t last a day observing the fast, to which I reply that I didn’t spend long Lent weeks when I was younger giving up chocolate for nothing (even though we only counted actual chocolate bars, so ice-cream or cookies were OK, obviously) and I’ll see his day and run a mile. We’re idle, and all I have to do is carry on writing hand-over notes, but by afternoon it’s starting to kick in and I have to stop.

  And fantasize about proper food.

  Subsisting on exactly the same rations for more than a month has taken its toll, and I can barely look at meals which were perfectly acceptable a few weeks ago. Only the chilled sugar rush of the tooth-rotting orange Miranda hasn’t quite got boring, and I force down biscuits or Haribo with which to take anti-malarials and multivitamins and slip into reveries of ordering real food from a menu or cooking up improvised deliciousness from a well-stocked fridge, deciding what I want and then being able to feed that hunger on crisp, fresh salad leaves or with heavy, biteable pasta or potatoes with fresh butter and anything, anything for the slightly salty and warm succulent bite of meat.

  Later in the day, having a wonderful cigarette stroll across the dark of the base with the stars still bright in the moonless sky listening to ‘Chasing Cars’, I’m massively amused that Grey’s fever has spread to the Anglians, that now this whole base of dusty, cool sand trapped between my feet and flipflops, a base of beleaguered and six-month veteran fighters, has become addicted to a hospital soap. My stag hours pass in blissful abandon to the latest episodes. Pte Emmitt collates his int-brief for tomorrow with half an eye on the newest series while the rest of the ops room try and look away from spoilers; the doc heads to the fridge for saline and pauses to reflect on the hotness of Addison Shepherd; while Dave strolls around like a caged lion cursing the cruel fates that took Sgt Evans and his hard-drive away when he’s the only man with the first half of season two.

  I make my way back up the dash of death after a hearty Ramadan supper with the Afghans, a veritable feast of not just the usual pilau and naan and ghosht but tomatoes and onions and aubergine and courgette and sweet milk and watermelon and pomegranate. It’s easily the best meal I have had in months on the back of yesterday’s food fantasies and the earlier and equally delicious scoff I wolfed down with Sgt T and the boys as we finally succumbed to our western palates and fried up sausages and bacon slices in tins of their own delicious and woefully bad lard and finished off the cheap Army tomato ketchup. So wrong and so right.

  The day has been an incredibly peaceful one at Inkerman—strange given the contact that has been raging slightly to the north—but from the dawn call to prayer which sounded up the valley with a volume and intensity I’ve never heard before to the warming dusk sight of the ANA all crammed on to the small hill with mobile reception, phoning home their Ramadan greetings with the free minutes the networks give them as presents, I’m filled again with a sense of just how enormous this festival is. Even the British soldiers, whingeing about the jubilant evening gunfire that announces into the gathering dusk the end of the day’s fasting, can’t shake me from being deeply moved.

  The Ramadan afterglow wears off pretty quickly, however, as I awake somehow instinctively from my sleep, immediately aware that it’s earlier than I would like it to be, and see Hazrat and Zabi hovering apologetically, blurry through my mosi-net. A civilian has come in to the front gate to report the Taliban laying an IED down the road; my first reaction is damn these Afghans and their four a.m. starts.

  It’s followed by a sudden and unfamiliar resolution. I’m not going to get caught up in this. There is an unusual stubbornness in my subconscious, which is to do with the recent, bitterly-close-to-the-end-of-tour injury to LSgt Ball, and to do with the bad dreams I can only hazily recall having just woken up from, and is to do with the fact that as of today we officially have only a week to go, but presents itself with black-and-white clarity to my thoughts. I am not getting caught up in this. The ANA can go and get themselves blown up, the UK callsigns can flap around and wait and sweat for IED disposal team. I am absolutely not going to get myself blown up today.

  My hope that it’s nothing fades as the Roshan mobile chirps up the wonderful old-school tones of ‘Groovy Blue’. I let it run for a few bars too long and am briefly transported back to idle suppers at university and the days when we all had it as our ring-tone, before picking up and learning an anonymous caller is giving the same tip-off. I can’t damn the success of our earlier psyops patrols as heartily as I’d like to, recalling that patrol that went into a village where the Taliban had chopped off someone’s hand simply for having the slip of paper we’d been handing out with our mobile helpline number on: dial for quick assistance to the ISAF hotline (thirty seconds’ guaranteed HOT AIR-STRIKE ACTION). As magnanimously and responsibly as I possibly can I explain to the commander that my priority remains the security of the landing site for the Chinook which is coming in this morning to extract my guys (and his guys) back to Shorabak. If he remains concerned, I suggest, he should send out a squad. He nods in assent and doesn’t seem bothered by the unspoken implication: the OMLT can’t deploy with him today, reduced as we are to the final three. And anyway, I am not getting blown up today.

  Events take their usual course, and once the pair of crows have been extracted for the long march to 3 Company and a bonus month on tour (with LSgt Roper cock-a-hoop at his late call-up to run the RSOI back in Shorabak for the next week, which will see him even this evening, while we’re still sweating out the IEDs, chowing down on fresh food and gateaux). The Anglians push out a cordon, and we wait for the arrival of the IEDD team and all their precious little habits. I can tell I feel slightly guilty, like deep down I know that with an ANA squad out there in the cordon, even though it’s now logistically impossible, I should have made more of an effort to be out there myself, because without hesitation I volunteer the OMLT (or more accurately myself, Sgt T and a broken Sherlock, who has been subbed off for LSgt Roper and faces an extra five days of this crap with the final trio) to oversee the VCP which will freeze movement on the 611. The ANA are being predictably ‘Afghan’, and the company commander gets more and more wound up on the net until we decide it would be best to pull them in. Hazrat, who has actually been out on the ground himself, can’t see what all the fuss is about and wants to know why we spend hours out in the baking sun, waiting for the idiots with cartoons on their sleeves to blow up devices we could blow up ourselves within minutes. His boys have been fairly scatty but they’ve also been out for eight hours during Ramadan without food and water. Next time, he tells me, only half-joking, he won’t inform us about the bomb until afterwards and will just blow it up himself.

  As the Chinook drops the fifteen-man IEDD team down and the whole company is pushed out in various moving parts for the deliberate clearance op and I’m sitting down on the 611 with a pistol lazily enforcing the no-road-movement and fucking up everyone’s Ramadan in the process while the stoner squad of whingeing Pashtuns who’ve been left behind listen to endless droning cassettes of whoever the current Pakistani star and femme fatale is, I realize he may have a point.

  The ANA are still arguing when dinner finally starts, and even those of us who haven’t been fasting have earned scoff in the dark because the controlled explosion has blown the power lines for the whole valley (Happy Ramadan from the IEDD team), but at least my morning’s first decision is vindicated.

  I did not get blown up today.

  A very clean and fresh and unbearded-looking captain runs off the back of the Chinook and, exactly as I did what seems like a long time ago but is actually only six weeks, heads off through the brown-out in completely the wrong direction.

  We’re all hugely excited to be meeting ‘the relief ’, the living, breathing evidence that we’re on the verge of going home, so we only quietly smirk at the naivety of the remaining seven guys who jump with celebratory cheers off the back of the next chopper. Sherlock, Sgt T and myself enjoy a last WMIK moment securing the landing sit
e, smoking like the grizzly vets we are and trying to suppress our delight. The new boys have arrived, and school’s almost out.

  As the handover begins it’s clear from the new faces just how far we’ve come, and I realize how ridiculous all the briefing notes must sound, trying to remember how similar notes sounded to us nearly seven months ago. Before they’ve had a chance to meet the ANA we’re crashed out to pick up a casualty from the C Company patrol and half the 2 Yorks find themselves charging out of the gate, tooled to the max and dangling off the Snatch, trying to keep up with our WMIK, which in turn tries desperately to keep up with Hazrat’s Ranger vehicle charging off down the 611. The laughs that we elicit from C Company when we arrive are partly at the ANA and ourselves for our even more than usually chaotic state of attire, with the crash-out no notice, so shorts and all sorts of dress irregularities, partly at the general wonder on the faces of the new boys.

  To make room for the casualty is going to be a squeeze, so I jump on the back of Hazrat’s Ranger and stand over the dushka with Goldie, who’s grinning like the lunatic he is, loving that the British toran is up on top-cover with him and more likely to die from the Afghan driving than anything lurking back down the road. I’m aware, as Sgt T shakes his head resignedly as we set off and tries in vain to keep up, that this is very much the last ‘patrol’, and I’m glad that it’s as irregular as it is; last-minute, largely unplanned and with me in the Ranger probably not exactly by the book, but slicker and more efficient than it would have been otherwise and with me where I’ve always believed we were supposed to be to do this job, right there with the Afghans. Speeding past C Company stacked up in the shade of the compound walls, nodding what will be final goodbyes to by-now familiar faces, no reflection on them, an excellent fighting unit, but I’m in no doubt that these are my comrades—Hazrat, Mohammed Nabi, Azim, mad mad Goldie and brilliant Qiam—and if we’re going to miss anything beyond the buzz of the whole thing, it’s going to be these guys.

  Back in camp I can’t quite comprehend my own briefing. I watch myself deliver the ‘Afghan Fighting’ PowerPoint presentation I’ve prepared, wondering if there’s ever been such a dubious boardroom, and I’m gratified again by the genuinely awed stares which greet some of the points and, even though I’m not trying to lay it on thick, Sgt T sits at the back, watching video clips of himself in disbelief, and it’s only then, watching faces hungry and curious like mine must have been for years, that I realize it’s come full circle. There’s no way I can brief this to the incoming boys, no adequate way of explaining the ANA, describing the relationship which we have, must have, with them. Instead, I note with amusement how the video clips and memories which just make us glad to be getting out of here are the very ones which make the Yorks glad to have arrived. But they’re also memories I’d always wanted to have, and I seem to lose them in the official retelling and correctly staff-written notes. After all the waiting and imagining the stories I have are everything we could ever have imagined and more, and I’m aware how unfamiliar this is. Only the Afghans, now alert across the whole camp to the RiP and reluctantly moody like children losing their nanny, have seen this all before. To cheer them up, Sherlock agrees to ‘tap dance’ one last time on the roof, not as funny as when he suddenly started jigging away with an entertainer’s spontaneous genius to lighten the mood in the middle of the long defensive battle, but the ANA roar with approval and nonetheless join in.

  Most of the ANA move to resigned silence, but a few maintain the bolshy stance and insist they’ll either prevent us from going or refuse to fight without us and sneak on to our chopper home. I understand how difficult it must be for them to have brand new mentors every six months. To have to wait again for us to catch up and get the novelty and excitement out of our systems and I’m saddened myself at the realization that we are just a cog in the machine, but at our last supper when the boys finally join me down in the Afghan compound there’s an amazing sense of melancholy we’re off and I believe their protests that they will miss us and that we have been a good mentoring team. I’m even more touched when, having come back up the hill for final packing touches, the S4 sergeant races up to present me with a brand new ANA uniform as a leaving present, something they have so little of at the best of times that I can’t escape the generosity of the gift and, however much I can’t wait to get out of Inkerman and out of Afghanistan, my insistence to him that I want to come back is immediately genuine.

  And then, finally, through a cloud of dust and lost hot metal minutes wedged uncomfortably and noisily and dreamily in the back of the Chinook, we touch down in Shorabak and we’re back inside the wire.

  29.ix.2007—They sicken of the calm who know the storm

  i’m trying really hard to conjure up the feelings of relief and elation which should accompany the choking brown-out as the Chinook finally hammers down into the sand and shitty moon-dust behind Patrol Base Inkerman and we run on to thumbs-up and smiles from the door-gunners who’ve obviously been briefed that we’re getting out of here for good. but thundering low over the desert dropping chaff like confetti and swinging hard behind the mountains in helicopter hide-and-seek with the rocket positions in the green zone i can’t feel anything other than a sort of dull emptiness.

  and on reflection it was probably for the best that we didn’t have internet in Patrol Base Inkerman. didn’t have anything in Inkerman except the terrified choppers that dropped in every other day to keep us going through the siege, caught between the need for food and water and ammo and the hope of a rare letter and the knowledge that with each heli-drop the shelling would kick up again. it fucks you up being stuck in defence, ducking with every thud of incoming and always closing your eyes as if that’s going to make a difference when a mortar slams into your mosi-net.

  didn’t make a difference for young Gilly, blown up by a Chinese 107mm rocket as he followed me down the hill into a wall of enemy fire to try and hold the front position. 19 years old and fresh out of training, wide-eyed walking cliché who’d only been in theatre 3 weeks and had spent them scrapping hard and growing up fast and who was still stupid or brave enough to try and stammer an apology as i ran back up to him idly wondering in the adrenalin rush of it how i had landed 40m down the hill, deaf as a post but without a scratch, and he had been unlucky enough to cop the full blast and lose an eye and hand in the bargain but still have the sheer guardsman-like stubborn balls to be worried only that we get a suitably gory photo of him for Nuts and Zoo and could he have a fag instead of more morphine?

  didn’t make a difference for LSgt Ball, the fastest runner in the company whose leg was clean blown off as the Taliban kicked up an ambush with a mine and followed up with RPGs which cut the lead afghan in two before the ’terp’s head exploded with a pretty good shot from somewhere and in the chaos one of the stammering and panicking new guys is practically crying as he picks up LSgt Ball’s perfectly intact foot, thirty metres down the road.

  didn’t make a difference for Dave Hicks, fragged on the roof during one of the by now daily hammerings the base was taking whose wide eyed expression betrayed what his insistence that he didn’t need to morphine couldn’t accept and who hung in with fearful, gasping breaths while we won the fight and then died in the medevac chopper. but then maybe he was just the most unlucky of another dozen guys up in Sangin in the last 2 months which have passed not in hours or days but seconds and where only grim statistics and phoney newspaper percentage calculations that we had a 1 in 36 chance of being hit in Afghanistan made us laugh with the black humour of it as we pushed out on patrols with 8 blokes while hundreds of fat cunts sat eating pizza hut in the safety of Camp Bastion wondering if they’d been factored into the numbers.

  it can’t be good for us in the long run, we push off into the GZ looking for revenge and the release of the fire fight in which all the worries fly down the barrel of your weapon and our only concern is to cheer like thugs the A-10s roar low overhead and we smash in and blast the black-turbaned fuckers back
to the stone-age where they belong, the instant hit of the moment the shadow in your sights drops like a stone and like perverts for death we push forward past the poetic and eerily beautiful sight of bright red blood, exploded heads and twisted torsos against the brown dry poppy and lush green ganja, well-tooled up pakistanis and iranians oozing life into the muddy water of the ditches they ambushed us from with the relentless and unimaginative frequency, quickly bustled away by the smiling local villagers for the undignified funerals deserving of the murderers of teachers and rapists of little boys.

  but it’s all a bit different licking wounds and feeling sick on rich fresh food and burger king at kandahar airfield surrounded by the planners in neatly pressed combats and fat bellies arguing over the cost-effectiveness of the bases we’ve just been fighting tooth and nail to hold for the ungrateful bastards. the world is a headache-inducing whirl of colour and pepsi and comfy chairs and air-con and beds and women and even the dust can’t be the same as that which we were crawling through only 36 hours ago and if it’s this strange in a military base which, after all, is still in southern afghan i wonder what the fuck it will be like back in london and how do the men show photos of dead afghans to adoring wives and kids and expect them to understand?

  the company i deployed with 6 months ago was 36 strong when we kicked out on first op and looking around at my boys, unrecognizable with thick mops of hair and deep tans, making the most of the leniency which everyone applies to us as they give a wide berth to the combat troops letting off steam and leering hungrily at the NAAFI girls on the way home, i wonder if any of them would have deployed with 1 in 3 odds at the start of the tour. we’ve lost 12 blokes, 1 killed in action and 3 of the 6 officers. i’m the only platoon commander left and even though i’ve only lost one guy out of the 26 i’ve commanded it doesn’t seem like any fucking consolation. we’ve lost far more of our crazy brave afghan soldiers killed in action and allah only knows how many injured in their ridiculous style of inshallah lets just charge the enemy position even though we’ve run out of grenades fighting. our ‘official’ stats reckon we’ve accounted for between 180 and 190 taliban and i should surely be disgusted that i’m just gutted we didn’t get a double century but clearly we checked in our humanity when we checked in our personal items at the start of the tour and swapped them for heavy osprey body armour and extra ammo.