Patrick Hennessey
Page 28
And as it had all started, for no reason and for every reason, so I dug out the formal service writing guide, dusty at the bottom of a chest untouched since Sandhurst, and penned my letter of resignation.
It would have been credible, maybe even helpful, to have left because of the inefficiencies, to point at the good guys haemorrhaging from the Army at the three- and five- and twelve-year points and the bright hopes gunning towards the generals’ stars at the top and ask who was going to sort out the mass in between. To point at civvie friends no longer, at thirty, being treated like naughty schoolboys and quite probably being paid a damn sight more. Was there even the incentive to go all the way? General Richard had been the most popular head of the Army for years, a soldier’s soldier who’d stuck by his boys on principle, and we loved him for it, and his reward for not toeing party-political lines had been to be passed over in favour of a pilot. It could have all been the familiar refrain of over-stretched and undervalued.
But it was none of these things.
No one would really have murmured if it had been about the money—everything else was after all. No one would have minded if it had been about the months away from home, but they wouldn’t have bought it after all the times I’d been in and out of offices asking for trips. Mark had pulled off a feat even greater than his famous Iraqi withdrawal and convinced a girl at least seven times more beautiful than he deserved to marry him, so it was only natural and right and proper that he should leave to focus on family and other things. All these would have been, were and are perfectly good reasons for leaving the Army.
But I don’t think they were mine, not entirely. It wasn’t even the lingering, persistent off-the-rails boozing or the inevitable self-indulgent sofa afternoons which followed. Sure, you felt good after an hour with a shrink, striding back through London, refreshed by the ego trip, with a veneer of civilization freshly glossed on, but something lurked beneath the reintegrated citizen, and the fear was that it always would.
Perhaps it was the sense that there was nowhere left to go, not right then, not right now. Like the top scoreboard at the end of some massive video-game could only be anticlimactic after you’d completed level after level after level. Like the Olympic medallists who all suffered depression because the one thing worse than silver was gold—what was there to aim for after that? Through every country and possible escalation, wanting more and more and more, until you suddenly landed back home, and what else was there? More of the same, but each time the fun slightly diminished, the frontier spirit slightly quelled and the enemy probably slightly more distant, the roadside bombs more numerous and deadly, and we knew about that sort of fighting and didn’t like it. Eight years of desk jobs, monkeying at the report-writing mercy of the sort of guys I’d already spent my young and enthusiastic credit on pissing off was too big an ask for the vague promise of one day commanding a whole company of men.
And of course the joke was that, while we sat in the corner of the mess with a knowing smile and watched the new young guys, chuckling at their cluelessness, there are guys out there who have sat chuckling at us. Every time you thought to yourself you’d got to the top, of course you hadn’t. Someone, somewhere, would always be doing something cooler and more dangerous, someone would always have better war stories, and you’d always want more like a drug, so maybe the thing was to get out while you could, while you still had the solid pavement underneath your feet because you were just starting to discern that there was nothing cool about the guy in the corner with the biggest scar and the winning stories—he was just fucked up.
If you could hold your head together for long enough, you suddenly discerned the massive spinning wheel we were all on, whirring round faster and faster, wanting better and better jobs or more and more violence, and for the sated ambitions of the Reading Club guys you could only be spun faster into the lost world of blacked-out eyes and special missions, or take the plunge and sharpen your ambition and pencils into the world of super-staff work and maybe emerge blinking one day at the end of the tunnel, the very model of a modern major general. A sandy-coloured blur of Iraq and Afghanistan and the Plain and London and round and round again until the dots of red might have been tunics or they might have been casualties on ops, but you just couldn’t tell with the blur.
Or you could jump off.
Take the leap, the plunge, the hold-breath jump away from the safety net and the coddled, built-in sense of importance and the party banter and the uniforms and the excitement and paddle off into the sunset, knowing you’ll always gaze enviously at whatever news reports follow, will squirm behind your desk when the boys step off for Darfur or Trans-Dniester or wherever will be next but jump anyway. Yossarian lives.
The Last Post
This book ends in freezing August on the Falkland Islands.
I like that it ends here.
I like that after consecutive summers of deserts and just when we thought we might make it to Ibiza with everyone else, the company was tasked to go and keep an eye on the Argentinians. The whole thing has a neat circularity. Two months before I’d been born the Argentinians had surrendered, there were probably still squaddies getting drunk in Stanley as the midwife handed me to my mother, and all my life, though most of it unbeknownst to me, the British Army had retained an infantry company on the Islands, 100 fighting men to support and protect the airfield complex and to deter further Argentinian aggression. I like that after fighting the three-block war in three years, idle Balkan peace-keeping to tense Iraqi counter-insurgency to bloody Afghan combat, my brief military career was going to end in pointless manoeuvres on the hallowed turf of gritty, conventional warfighting.
Six years earlier, a clueless civilian student, I’d have trudged these mountains bored and cold, possibly slightly dismissive of the men who threw themselves up heavily defended slopes for the epitome of nothing—two bald men fighting over a comb.
Four years ago, a shivering Sandhurst victim, I’d have sat in the Argentine positions exasperated, hauled myself over Onion Ranges, running on the sheer spite of my conviction that everything we were doing was out of date, that it was based on the anomaly that had happened down here and that surely it would never again come to bloody right-flanking, left-flanking or up the guts with bags of smoke.
Two years ago, bitten and keen, I’d have read the memorials and citations with a mixture of awe and fear, respect and envy. Wanting so much to have been and done these things and wondering so much whether we would do them again, could do them again, wanting and not wanting to find out.
I was wrong, and I was right.
Hundreds of people roam the Mount Pleasant Complex, the moon-base camp and airfield where the RAF outnumber the islanders and a farcical cold war somehow rumbles on. There are no trees on the island, bleak beyond austere and impressive with it. When the weather turns, the cold runs through and the corridors which link the whole complex throng with people shut in, shuffling the concrete indoor streets in quilted North Face jackets from room to gym to mess to café and back. They said before we came down that it was like an operational tour, just without the enemy. It’s not.
The RAF, bless them, think it actually is an operational tour, and the last part of me that still holds on, the part that reads last year’s diary just before I go to bed to see what we were doing last year, the part that I know will yearn just a little but every day to once more be charging through the crack and thump, coasting the high of each zing of a passing round, that part of me wishes it suddenly was. To watch the embarrassing carnage that would ensue if the process-driven mediocrity which seems to dominate down here was put to the test. That part of me resents the air-traffic controllers for wearing camouflage as if they ever went outside, had ever wished and prayed as those boys who started the job out here must have done, for the slightest ditch or hedge to dive into. That part of me resents the easy tolerance with which the fool who takes four hours to zero his weapon is treated. That part of me wants Argentinian battalions to drop fro
m the sky and to be able to fuck off every whingeing bar-coded, blue-rankslided war-dodger back to look after his engine parts while the real fighting is done.
What galled us more than the sudden exposure to how old and fat the officers all looked away from the deployable brigades, how much institutional boozing went on down in ‘their’ operational theatre, was the extraordinary way in which we were treated. From the unthinking, rank-driven inflexibility of the upper-echelons to the catty bitch who turned to the lads and told them that all the infantry were good for was carrying their mates’ coffins. Not a sensible thing to say to boys who had carried their mates’ coffins, and now you know why the gag was that it wasn’t the public who were abusing the RAF in uniform in Peterborough, but resentful soldiers and sailors.
But there’s another part of me that’s glad.
There’s no point to raging up and down the base against those who haven’t done what we’ve done, seen what we’ve seen, known what we know. There’s a part of me that’s glad it ends here, glad for the warmth of the ops room and the tedium of its staff, safe in the knowledge that it isn’t for real and almost choking on the unimaginable frustration that a future in this world would have held. I like that it ends here in the Falkland Islands, where we can walk the iconic hills and smile a knowing smile or gulp a knowing gulp. And, just occasionally, catch a glimpse of one of the younger guys watching in a different way, listening in a different way and realize that was you three years ago, and feel, for that split second and for everything that has been and gone before, closer to the legends of this place than the fools who now police it and pass their months in a drunken stupor.
The penguins are the only things noteworthy on these ridiculous snow-bound rocks. Mesmerizing lined up on the beach but like the ripples which meet obediently, tottering along in their marked and measured lines, one after one. Maybe it’s for the best, no distractions from the writing now, nor reading. The Junior Officers’ Reading Club could never have imagined such luxury, the well-stocked library, the gorgeous Thailand photo of Jen on my desk, next to the phone, a landline back to the UK and happy-making chats every night, tasty sofas and comfy brownies on which to gorge ourselves while we idly read and work steadily through the Olympics and endless DVD box-sets in our bar.
We’re not in Shaibah any more, not even in Baghdad, the paperbacks aren’t melting any more, and we’re sure as hell not in Helmand.
I know that it ends here because, for all the time on our hands, there’s nothing else to write home about.
Vix duellis nuper idoneus
Et militavi non sine gloria*
* ‘Lately I have lived amidst battles, credibly enough / and not without glory fought’—the epigraph to Henry Reed’s Lessons of the War poems, to which he returns in the final verses:
Things may be the same again; and we must fight
Not in the hope of winning but rather of keeping
Something alive: so that when we meet our end,
It may be said that we tackled wherever we could,
That battle-fit we lived, and though defeated,
Not without glory fought.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are a number of people to whom I am greatly indebted, they fall broadly into two groups: those without whom the book would never have been written and those without whom I’d have had nothing to write a book about—for help writing and fighting my deepest thanks.
The Junior Officers’ Reading Club had an unusual genesis. The backbone of the book is a series of e-mails I sent to friends between starting Sandhurst in January 2004 and the end of our Afghanistan tour in autumn 2007. What started as a light-hearted way of staying in touch became an important therapeutic outlet, and for their various replies which sustained me wherever I was and for their encouragement for my increasingly fraught missives I owe these friends a huge debt of gratitude. A number will recognize themselves in the book, many more were cut when I realized that I wasn’t supposed to be writing a 300-page in-joke for all my friends. Thanks to all of you; if you missed out I’ll try and get you in the next one.
My e-mails would have remained bouncing around in cyberspace, however, had it not been for the kindness of the editors of the Literary Review, and in particular the encouragement and continued support of the wonderful Philip Womack, in humouring a bored soldier and printing my whimsical reflections on literary life (or lack of it) in Iraq and Afghanistan. The two pieces I wrote for the Literary Review not only persuaded me that it was worth writing for a wider audience but also gave me something for my Taid to be proud of. (I don’t think the Guards Magazine counted!)
It was my further good fortune that these articles caught the eye of Jim Gill, who should have known far better than to ask an English graduate if he thought he had a book in him. It was Jim’s vision and confidence that turned a vague and boozy brainstorming lunch into an exciting idea, and his tireless work while I was gallivanting (at the tax-payers’ expense) in the Californian desert and the French Alps which turned that idea into a potential book. It must be unnerving for any agent to take on a retiring soldier: forever in and out of the country, prone to sending middle-of-the-night hysterical e-mails as if calling for air support and requiring frequent calming-down sessions usually involving beer and quoting war films. Jim steered me through the course of writing a book; I wouldn’t and couldn’t have done it without him.
But I am most indebted to Helen Conford, my brilliant editor at Penguin Press. Helen has given me more time and attention than I’m sure any writer should require, and her guidance and skilful editing rendered an awkward compendium of mess anecdotes and swear words into something better than I could ever have imagined. Her patience and unflappability have been amazing, and her ability to see at once the minute detail and the whole would be the envy of every general. From a position, I think it would be fair to say, of relatively little ‘military’ knowledge she has led a person of extremely little ‘writing’ knowledge with great understanding, for which she has my heartfelt and enduring thanks.
I extend my gratitude to everyone at Penguin who has endured strange Palace dress codes, dangerous cocktails in silver tankards, windy video-conferences from the Falklands and who graciously failed to bat an eyelid when an incongruous camouflaged figure in combat boots stomped through the office for various meetings. It is a source of astonishment and admiration and the result of a lot of other people’s hard work that the messy e-mails I sent off at various last possible moments before deadlines have become an actual book. For that, in particular, I must thank Thi Dinh for all her amazing publicity work while simultaneously fending off dubiously helpful friends, and also Fiona Buckland, Nicola Hill, Nikki Lee, Gina Luck and Natalie Ramm; Paula Edwards at DGMC for her official advice; and David Watson for his meticulous attention.
Thanks too to Jeremy Quarrie, Bertie Dannatt and Andrew Tiernan for a balanced military perspective and a whole lot more.
As we say in the Army, shit only rolls one way—I am at the bottom of the hill, and any mistakes are entirely mine.
It has been an overwhelming privilege and honour to serve in the British Army, and my particular fortune to have spent my time in its finest regiment, the Grenadier Guards. It is really to all the Grenadiers and all the men that I have trained, served, marched and fought with that this book is dedicated, but perhaps especially to:
10 Platoon and the Inkerman Company (2005-6), to the Nijmegen Company veterans of the endless 350th birthday marches and to the Queen’s Company (2007-8). Even over as brief a time in the Army as mine I have worked with or for, been rescued by or from, and laughed and cried with more people than I have the space or the memory to list. I apologize to anyone I have omitted; the following, for better or for worse, deserve particular mention.
Charlie Bowmont, Charlie Church, Oscar Holloway, Jonty Moore, Nick Tobin, Jim Doig, Andy Batty, Claydon-Swales, C-T and all the men of XV Platoon (even the U-man), without whom I’d never have got through Sandhurst in the first place, an
d in memory of James Donaldson.
‘Chalky’ White, Roger Coates, Gus Hindmarsh, ‘Uncle’ Kev Vacher and the omnipotent presences of Neil England and Vince Gaunt, the inspirational men who actually taught us the stuff worth knowing at Sandhurst and then terrified us into remembering it.
Si Hillard, Gussie, Evo and Sarge, who kept the Blue-Red-Blue together; JB, Lewey, Nishal, Mad-Man Mannock and all the boys who made Brecon bearable, and Bully, the finest jungle buddy and list-compiler in all of Africa.
Seb ‘Gaiters’ Wade, Marcus ‘Box’ Elliot-Square, Martin David MC and Alex ‘Monty’ Cartwright, who have endured a clueless ensign, a rampant know-it-all subaltern, a captain who thought he was an Afghan and a 2I/C who was writing a book instead of clearing the in-tray. I doubt there are four finer (or more tolerant) company commanders in the British Army, and to get to one day be them would be the only reason for staying in.
Harrison, Marlow, Fergus, Mark, Bysshe, Sugden, Tobin, Barty, Seadog and the rest—the original JORC and the guys who made a suffocating tent in the middle of the desert fun to live in.
Stumpy Keely, Daz Chant, Paddy Farrell, Wayne Scully, Danny Andrews, Chris Gillham, Glen Snazle, Simon Edgell and Rick Hampson (not forgetting thrashings at the hands of the likes of Butcher, Smith, Bates, Munroe, Robbinson, etc.). On my first day at Sandhurst I accidentally confused a company sergeant major with a major and got the classic response: Don’t fucking salute me, sir, I work for a living! One and all outstanding warrant officers with whom (should that be for whom?) it’s been a treat to work.
Phil Childs, Matt Betts, Pete Yates, Dickie Davis, Jon Thornborrow, Clint Gillies have all been exceptional Platoon Blokes, made my life easy at various stages over the last five years and have always had my back. Likewise Nick Rowe, Big-George Roper, Andy Austin, Roughers, Robbo, Benny, Wisedog, Pezza and Sir Edward Redgate have all been noted section commanders and partners in crime.