by Martin Hand
‘When Jesus washed/ When Jesus washed/ Oh when He washed/ When Jesus washed/ He washed my sins away/ Oh happy day.’
Happy days as the boys and girls mingled and sang. Even the comb-overs had to join in.
While O’Rourke continued in his zombie-like state, the boys slid open the wine case cover and quickly uncorked two of the twelve gleaming bottles. O’Rourke was in no state to either call a halt to the singing or charge for the drinks. You could hardly charge for a product you didn’t know you had. The mutiny was over and the party was on. The bullying O’Rourke was mumbling something. A Christian might say he was joining in with ‘Good King Wenceslas’ but it was doubtful.
A party, and a Christmas party at that. The Hole in the Wall would have to wait for another night. Fionn seemed to float out of the good-natured scrum at the bar and over to his mother’s table.
‘Well done, son, good job,’ Margaret said.
‘What trickery were you and my Joe up to, giving that excuse for a barman his comeuppance?’ asked Dermot.
‘I meant no harm,’ Fionn said. ‘I think I’ll sit with you for a while.’ He seemed visibly drained again after the bit of excitement.
‘He gets like that after these queer episodes,’ said Margaret, talking about him as if he wasn’t there.
‘I just want to enjoy the singing,’ said Fionn as he rested his eyes, his back to the bar and his front to the fire.
Chapter Two
The week before departure to Fort Shamrock in the Lebanon was a break for the lads. Youngsters as they were, they had a natural inclination to enjoy the down time, especially after two tough, sodden months of training. Also, a reportedly bleak station awaited them in their desert camp. Even at this time of year you could be roasting by day and freezing by night.
Blondie had turned out to be a Miss Eleanor O’Brien. The initial attraction that had signalled a gravitational pull towards Joe had been cemented in the officers’ mess. After the engagement with the enemy – Jimmy O’Rourke – the cement had set with a wine-induced kiss. Multiple kisses, really, outside the mess as the partygoers had dissipated into the fog that rolled off the Phoenix Park.
The two kids had had a couple of dates during the week. Joe’s hormones were in disarray. He liked the look of this one as a keeper, but a nine-month absence was about to begin. He needn’t have stressed himself, though. Girls need an emotional bond to develop before an intimate one can. Lads on the other hand want the sex part first, before forming an emotional connection. Nothing was happening below the waist, just because Joe was on a transporter the following Saturday. It would have to be enough for Joe to console himself that he had a good catch to think about while he was away. Eleanor seemed interested in him and not put off by his deployment. Letters would be the method of communication between the couple for the foreseeable future, and not French ones.
Fionn was very withdrawn in the week before leaving. He’d admitted to his mother that he was spending a bit of time in Victories church that week. He meant Our Lady of Victories, which was walking distance from their house.
‘Are you going to Mass, son?’ Margaret had asked.
‘No, just enjoying the quiet and the light. The light through the stained-glass windows is beauty itself.’
Margaret didn’t want to think about mental illness. She had always known Fionn might be the type to succumb. He was different. Him becoming a soldier occurred only by the accident of taking Joe’s lead. Joe had chosen it as the easiest way to see at least a bit of the world. She knew Irish soldiers had been killed on peacekeeping missions, but that wasn’t Margaret’s biggest worry. Most of her siblings had had little bouts of mental unwellness, usually involving some time in hospital. Margaret had been lucky not to have been afflicted herself. She saw how the ‘process’ of it had affected her brothers and sisters: overwhelmed, hospitalised, six weeks of treatment, recovery. Quite effective, really, but still not something you would want for your son, and certainly not if getting stuck on medication for life was the upshot.
Fionn and Joe had emerged from the new middle classes. Their Dubliner parents had come from the working-class estates like Cabra, Drimnagh and Finglas that were built in the nineteen-fifties and sixties. They had all fought their way through the system and, at least to the outsider, had stepped up a rung of the ladder. The problem with being middle-class, or middle anything, is that you might be able to go up, but you can also go down.
There was a difference between parents like Dermot and Mary and their millennial sons like Joe. ‘Too much minding and molly-coddling and not enough building resilience,’ Dermot was prone to saying.
‘You do need to make your own way through life, you know?’ was a common refrain, even from Mary.
In fairness Dermot and Mary were not the worst example of millennial minding. They at least had not fallen into the trap of bludgeoning their offspring into the college system, with the hidden objective of massaging their own egos.
‘Let him learn from himself,’ Dermot had told Mary.
Mary agreed to follow Dermot’s lead on this one. If it didn’t work out, though, there might be hell to pay.
Margaret was relieved of any of this deep parental angst about steering her son in the right direction. Fionn had developed an independent, but not selfish, approach to life. He had been like this for the longest time.
Margaret recalled getting a note home from Fionn’s teacher when he was seven, berating the child for not trying hard enough. Margaret had gently asked Fionn for the story behind the note and got a very good sounding of what was to come. Fionn had described how an older class had been invited into his junior classroom to witness a spelling competition among the kids. A few of the youngsters had volunteered to tackle the words randomly selected out of the hat. They had acquitted themselves well in front of the older boys. Hoping to finish with a flourish, the teacher had sought a final volunteer but had been met with an embarrassing silence, which caused her to redden a little. Fionn stepped forward, but the words, hippopotamus, for example, did not hold his interest, and one out of five was not the triumphant conclusion Miss Mills had been hoping for. Hence the note.
‘Teacher finished off at the bell for lunch by saying that all the class had done very well, all except for Fionn O’Toole.’
‘I’d say that left you in a miserable mood, son, and I’ll be writing back to that Mills one.’
‘No need, Ma, she was misguided, that’s all. The good spellers went first and did a good job. And so what? I wasn’t bothered at all. She was just wrong.’
That little incident marked the start of a shift in the mother–son relationship. Margaret kept as nice a home as she could on her meagre income, and Fionn was going to turn that to his advantage. He was only looking upwards.
There had been incidents during their early and teenage years that had caused Joe to wonder just what made his friend tick. Was it that Fionn took the lead because no one else would, or was it some other form of over-compensation for those around him? Joe admired his buddy but knew that, too often, he was happy to take the shortcut of rowing in behind Fionn’s lead. This seemed to him to be a natural response when someone else was willing to do the heavy lifting, but his dad always encouraged him to stand up and be counted.
The first time Joe noticed a power in Fionn was when they were eight years old. There can be a viciousness in small kids that’s so unsavoury that adults convince themselves ‘That would never have been me.’ The classroom bullies made a target of Fionn, who came across as a bit different. Fionn was having none of it and had no problem dealing with their teasing. He simply ignored them and took himself out of earshot. This irked the ringleader, Eric.
Eric the Terrible had decided to sort this Fionn fella out once and for all. The bullies had cleverly employed an agent to do their bidding. A big autistic lad, maybe ten or eleven years of age, was encouraged to lie in wait behind
a wall near the school gates. The smaller brains behind the operation had demonstrated how all would be well in the world if he would just smash the rock he had been armed with into Fionn’s face.
Eric and two runts diverted Joe from Fionn’s side to facilitate the ambush, and before he could do anything, Joe saw his friend lying on the ground with a much larger boy standing with his feet planted either side of Fionn’s stomach. The assailant held the rock in both hands above his head.
From nowhere appeared a sight that none of the youngsters were used to seeing – a lone garda on foot patrol. The burly assailant could only deal with order, and having a stranger grab his shoulder while at the same time unleashing an unmerciful roar in his ear was not at all orderly.
Fionn seemed to anticipate what would happen next – that the stone would be unwittingly, out of fright, be dropped in the direction of his privates. It was, and without any fuss, he simply caught the rock in his two hands and laid it to one side.
Diminutive Eric was the next to feel the long arm of the law … literally. The young, skinny garda must have had a sense of what was afoot. He gave Eric an enthusiastic open-palmed clatter to the cheek, which knocked Eric on his arse. Thankfully, for the garda, in the Dublin suburbs of the mid-noughties, mobile phones and social media were not yet ubiquitous. If they had been, the guard and his clatter would surely have gone viral.
After that the bullies just didn’t feature, neither annoying Fionn nor anyone else. Eric either lost his passion for evil leadership or saw the error of his ways.
As Joe looked back, he compiled a collection of little events from the boys’ teenage years. Once they were robbing an orchard, when Farmer Jack set upon them, cursing like blue murder. Like a trapped frog, covering his eyes in the hope that the danger would disappear, Joe knew he was done for when he ran, only to find a high-walled cul-de-sac at the end of the orchard. The thin trunks of the apple trees didn’t provide many opportunities for avoiding detection. But Farmer Jack walked right by a crouching Joe. A great, slightly inexplicable, escape.
Fionn avoided aggravation throughout his adolescence, but Joe could remember one time when his friend resorted to violence. Fionn didn’t do sport growing up but Joe did; he had the teenage testosterone for it. Soccer was an opportunity for him to get out from under Fionn’s wing, something his father encouraged. The match results were OK, but some of the company was a bit dodgy. Within the under-sixteen ranks, an opportunity to sell marijuana presented itself to a budding entrepreneur. Joe inhaled and confided in Fionn that it made him vomit. At the very next training session, Fionn joined in, after a fashion. When the boys got together behind the clubhouse for their post-training joint, Fionn was there. The joint was being passed along, and Fionn waited and took his turn. In the quickest move Joe ever saw him make, he pinned Gavin to the wall and viciously stubbed the lit end into his cheek. The smell of burning skin shook the team out of their stupor and the rescue of a smouldering Gavin was executed. Joe hurriedly led Fionn away before he could be set upon. Fionn was never invited back, but neither was the would-be drug lord. The dalliance with drugs had been stubbed out by wanton violence.
The army was a different thing, though, and in some ways it further rebalanced the friendship between Joe and Fionn. Joe was out of his friend’s shadow again. This time Fionn was the follower and all was good with the double act again. Joe felt good that he could be ‘the man’ for a change. But something would happen during army training that would make Joe rethink who the man really was.
Chapter Three
Both now in their forties, the two sergeants had been to the Lebanon before, Kevin Doyle twice and Martin O’Brien three times. They knew the ropes, as it were, even though this time was a little unusual, to say the least. The platoon was only thirteen strong, with no lieutenant and no corporals. The sergeants, to their credit, didn’t mind the absence of a lieutenant. In a way that could be seen as a compliment. Regarding the corporals, the commandant insisted that some would earn corporals’ stripes during the nine months of the tour.
‘Whoever shines through,’ he said.
Two things bugged the sergeants. One, it would be the first time they had to mind a bunch of kids without having a wily old hack of a corporal, on the inside, telling them what was going on. Secondly, and much more importantly, they knew that the mission was a new one and a strange one at that. They were landing in Jordan. The first time for Irish peacekeepers.
‘Cutbacks me hole,’ was Martin’s take on it. They knew such a small outfit would mean twenty-four-hour stints of sentry duty instead of twelves. The justification for keeping the platoon small was secrecy, apparently. Fewer soldiers to blabber, even though their orders were that the mission’s location would be revealed only upon landing at their destination. Even then, the privates’ families would be told only that there was a change of location, not the actual new location.
‘All a bit cloak and dagger,’ was Kevin’s opinion.
Why all the kids, though, and a girl? They both pondered on that one.
Martha had been absent with permission on the night of the infamous mess battle christened ‘O’Rourke’s Drift’.
She made light of Fionn’s antics: ‘No matter. I’m a white-wine drinker anyhow.’ She probably would have been feisty enough to cut off O’Rourke herself, if she had been there to witness his unmannerly treatment of the boys.
Martha had warmed to Fionn because of the decent and natural way he behaved around her during their basic training. She knew, the way girls know, that this was a platonic gig. She just hadn’t figured out if that was what she wanted.
Martha took on the inevitable role of being tougher than the lads as the representative of women in a man’s world. The other young fellas were finding their feet in dealing with a female private. Private Jake Hardiman had already made the mistake of taking her on in a verbal joust, making sure there were plenty around to hear.
‘Martha, have you ever been mistaken for a man?’
‘No. Have you?’
That shut Jake up for a while, and guys who sniggered at the put-down also had their cards marked.
‘Jake, that didn’t go so well,’ said Fionn.
‘Ah, for God’s sake, I was only having a laugh,’ said a blushing Jake.
‘Yeah, but it’s a laugh at another human being’s expense, and maybe they’re not the best laughs. You can be a man without trying to be The Man for an audience,’ said Fionn. He wasn’t finished. ‘You know, I often think that’s where mental illness comes from – a person trying to be something that will be accepted. Whatever happened to people being themselves, being the best their parents brought them up to be? Jake, be yourself, and as for you, Taylor, I know your game.’
‘Ah here, don’t go picking on me,’ Taylor said.
‘All that trick-acting and pretending to be a clown. You have good in ye in spades. Let it out, why don’t ye?’ said Fionn.
The two young boys had never been spoken to like that by an adult, never mind a peer.
Both sergeants were impressed by young Fionn. They agreed that he was certainly different, mature for a twenty-year-old, sure of his opinions. He already seemed to be the leader of the young boys and girl private.
Sergeant O’Brien had recommended to the commandant that Private Fionn be appointed corporal of the platoon before the tour. ‘No deal,’ the CO instantly responded. He was suspicious that the sergeants’ real motivation was to make life a little easier for themselves, not to mention having a chain-of-command scapegoat.
The CO was also a bit miffed over that case of Chateau Musar that had fallen into enemy hands. He was sure that must have been a forgotten present sent by some Lebanese mayor or official. His view was that any stripe-holder or potential stripe-holder didn’t go in for any messing that defrauded an officer of his rightful due. In any event he was genuinely concerned as to whether a twenty-year-old kid could h
andle the three older career privates in the platoon. He had a point. If the youngster got his spirit broken by the older guys, he’d be turned off soldiering for life.
Unlike Martha, the older privates hadn’t seen Fionn in action during basic training in the Glen of Imaal. The plan was that the eight new recruits would be trained by the sergeants for seven weeks. They were then joined by the three career soldiers for the last week of basic training so that the unit could bond as a functioning platoon before they departed.
Being billeted away from family for two months answered a couple of questions. First, could the kids be taught how to fire a gun, do hand-to-hand combat, be real soldiers? Second, had they the bottle to live away from Mammy’s apron strings for more than a few days? The latter was important because if you whinged enough in the hills of wintery Wicklow, you could at least be discharged, unfit for military duty, and be home in hours. If, however, you made it to a foreign station, that was a different matter. You might be a youngster, but you would be subject to military law. Bailing out would mean court martial and a dishonourable discharge.
That September and October in Wicklow were bleak for the recruits. The ground underfoot was sodden towards the end of autumn and this was felt in the weight of the army-issue boots, as the hillside mud crusted their soles. The barracks, where night-time exhaustion was treated with lights out at ten, were a standard dormitory affair. Military regulation allowed for a curtained partition for the female soldiers. No airs and graces here.
There probably would have been a lot more moaning about pay except there was nowhere to spend the miserly remuneration of a basic soldier. There was also the lure of the serving-overseas allowance, which meant that the Christmas period – not this one but the next one – would be a time of plenty.
Training itself was tough to the point of brutality. The drill was to break down the spirit until orders become unquestionable. There was also the unifying threat that if one soldier failed in anything, all soldiers would be punished.
