by Andy McNab
‘Is your dad dressed in camo?’ asked Liam.
Cameron shook his head. ‘He’s got one suit and he wears that shooting as much as anywhere else. Yours not here, then?’
Liam shook his head, at the same time realizing he didn’t even care. If they’d turned up, he’d have only wondered what they wanted. And, knowing his dad, it would probably have been a loan. ‘Come on,’ he said, making a move. ‘I may as well meet your parents. Got to be better than mine, right?’
Cameron laughed and slapped Liam on the back. ‘If you want, I can have them adopt you.’
Liam almost took him seriously.
7
‘SHOW ME YOUR war face! Come on, you fuckers – scream!’
Liam was lined up with a group of other soldiers in a field at Catterick Garrison. His graduation from his Phase 1 training at the Army Foundation College was now well behind him, and with the other recruits who had made it this far, he couldn’t wait for Phase 2 to start.
He pulled his face into a horror-film snarl and roared. The corporal had, for the past thirty minutes or so, been working at getting Liam and the rest of them to feel aggressive. As yet, for Liam anyway, it wasn’t quite working. He had nothing to be pissed at, so he just felt like a tit, screaming his head off and trying to look mean.
Corporal Burns, a man as tall and big as his voice was loud, bellowed once more, and again Liam responded, shouting and yelling like he was about to be a part of the Charge of the Light Brigade.
It was for once a hot day, though Liam fully expected it to turn into another storm of wind and rain. But for now, the air was filled with the smell of hot, sticky tarmac. The sky was empty of everything except an angry sun and the wisps of transatlantic vapour trails from distant aircraft.
Liam screamed again, the corporal giving no indication that he was going to let up on them and give them a break. Liam thought life at Harrogate had been tough, but Catterick made it all pale in comparison. And he had a deep suspicion that it was only going to get much, much worse from here on in. He could deal with it, though. He had to. He wanted to be a soldier more than anything he’d ever wanted in his life before.
Liam was sweating hard, could taste salt on his lips, and they hadn’t even been for a run yet that day. The way he was feeling, Harrogate may as well have been a lifetime ago – it had nothing on this, nothing at all.
‘To close and engage with the enemy with bayonets fixed?’ shouted Corporal Burns, grabbing everyone’s attention. ‘That’s right up fucking close, that is, lads. It’s personal.’
Liam knew the corporal had a point. Shooting someone was in a completely different league to taking it to them with a knife.
‘You’re not firing at them from a couple of hundred metres away,’ continued the corporal. ‘You’re not dropping a mortar on a position you can’t really see or calling in air support. This is the nasty side of soldiering. The blood and guts side. It works on a psychological level. And can be absolutely fucking devastating.’
Liam didn’t disagree. No one did.
‘Your aim is to make the enemy shit themselves,’ continued the corporal. ‘If anyone sees you with a bayonet fitted and you’re running at them to shove it into their sternum, then they’re going to want to get the hell out, aren’t they?’
Corporal Burns gave the recruits a moment or two to think on what he’d just said.
‘Think about it, what it involves, right? You’re going to be close enough to hug them if you want this to be effective. And you’ve got to have it in you to take that blade and ram it home, twist the thing in their guts, shred their intestines. Understand?’
‘Yes, Corporal!’
In reply Corporal Burns barked out the order, ‘Fix bayonets! Remove scabbards!’
Liam was clutching his SA80 tight enough for his knuckles to go white. Following the corporal’s instructions, he fixed his bayonet to the weapon and removed the scabbard. The razor-like edge of the bayonet blade glinted in the bright light of the day and Liam was struck by the awful violence the deadly shard of metal was capable of.
Out in front of them, and about fifty metres away, a number of dummies were strung onto simple wooden frames, weighed down with sandbags to stop them toppling over. Beyond these, further dummies lay fixed to the ground. Liam knew these were the enemy waiting to be charged. And by now the adrenaline had started flowing.
‘On guard!’ ordered the corporal, his voice spitting out like gunfire. He was now walking up and down the line of recruits and working hard to get them even more steamed up. And it was working too, thought Liam.
The corporal leaned in close to Liam and jabbed his finger at him.
‘They’ve just killed your bloody mate! Blown him apart with a grenade. You’d want to kill them too, right?’
‘Yes, Corporal!’
‘Then show me you want to bloody well kill them, Scott! Come on! Show me that aggression! Fucking well get angry, damn it!’
Liam was raging now. He was so geared up that he almost couldn’t wait, could already visualize ramming the bayonet home, ripping through flesh and bone, just killing and killing and fighting and yelling.
Corporal Burns moved down the line, picking on other soldiers, screaming at them. Liam joined in a chant of, ‘Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!’
The word took him over, and if he hadn’t been a part of it he would never have believed it was happening. But it was – he was right in the thick of it, and he could feel the effects of it now, his adrenaline burning through him, wiring him to explode.
Liam’s throat was sore, his neck straining as he yelled louder and louder. At first he’d felt like a total idiot, screaming out in front of people he’d known for over a year. Then someone had giggled and ended up incurring the wrath of one of the corporals.
‘You wouldn’t bloody laugh on the battlefield with your guts ripped out, would you?’
That had changed it for everyone. They’d all taken it seriously from that point on. And now they wanted to kick off. And the more Liam thought about it, and the more the aggression of the whole group increased, the more desperate he was to just let rip and tear into the dummies with everything he had inside him.
‘Advance!’
On that call, Liam moved forward with the first line of recruits. All he could see was the dummy ahead of him, and all he wanted to do was gut it like a rabbit. With each step closer the chant of ‘Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!’ continued.
‘What do you want to do to the enemy? Kill them, that’s what! You want to fucking kill them!’
With a raging yell that heaved up from his stomach and punched out of his throat, Liam slammed his bayonet hard into the dummy, stabbing into it again and again and again. Blood-red liquid burst from the dummy’s gut, spattering the bayonet’s deadly steel blade, Liam’s own hands, his face.
‘Move it, soldier! Move! Stop being weak and keep moving! There’s another enemy ahead! Kill them! Do it! Bloody well get a move on!’
Liam yanked his bayonet free, eyeballed the dummy ahead of him lying on the ground, and charged. He was still screaming, and when he got to the dummy he drove his bayonet in with such force it got stuck. More blood-red liquid burst out, not just with the initial stab, but when he eventually managed to pull the blade free. It bubbled up, splashed on him, on the grass, the red of it a horrid slick of gore against the green.
‘Fix scabbards!’
But Liam didn’t want to fix scabbards – he wanted to keep going, to let the violence and the excitement and the adrenaline take him over completely, to drive him ever onwards, away from his old life and on to everything the training would lead to.
And he, like every other recruit, knew what that meant.
A tour in Afghanistan.
8
‘WE ALL KNOW,’ said the Army chaplain at the front of the hall, ‘that death isn’t something anyone really wants to think about.’
Liam knew what vicars were supposed to look like and this one certainly didn’t look anything
like how he imagined, all weak and grey and old. He was tall, built as well as any of the corporals and sergeants in the room, and about as wet and pathetic as a nice bloody steak. Rumour had it that he was a dab hand in the boxing ring as well.
‘But in your line of work, it’s a part of what you do. You’re in the Army. You can’t escape that really, can you? And no matter what precautions we take, through training or body armour or whatever, there’s a chance that you, or I, will be killed. And it’s time to realize that right now.’
‘Never crossed my mind,’ said Cameron, leaning over. ‘You?’
‘It’s not an easy thing to come to terms with,’ continued the chaplain, ‘but if you want to stay sane and do your job well, then you’d better do so from now on in.’
Liam said nothing, just listened.
‘Very few come back dead,’ said the chaplain, ‘but some do – I’m sure you’ve all seen the repatriations on the telly. And the reality is this . . .’ He paused to make sure his words sank in. ‘Out of everyone here now, at least one of you is going to die and one will be maimed. Those are the odds. It’s sobering, but it’s true.’
‘Not exactly the happiness guru, is he?’ said Cameron.
Liam tried to ignore him as the chaplain was still talking.
‘So how many of you in here have a will?’
Liam saw that only a few hands were raised into the air. His wasn’t one of them. A will? He’d always seen those as something old people had, not someone like him.
‘The rest of you need to have one drawn up pronto,’ said the chaplain. ‘It’s not morbid, it’s sensible. It’s a good thing. No one wants to be sorting out your stuff when they’re also trying to deal with the fact that you’re gone. So make it easy on them. You owe it to them, don’t you think?’
Liam had never really thought about it like that: his parents not just dealing with his death, but his stuff too. Not that he had much. But the idea of them – particularly his mum – sifting through his belongings choked him a little and he had to force himself to keep with the chaplain and what he was saying.
‘And I’d advise all of you to do death letters,’ said the chaplain. ‘They’re quite simple: just a letter from you to your loved ones that only gets delivered if you should be killed.’
The room fell silent. No one spoke, and in the silence Liam allowed the real meaning of what the chaplain had just said to sink in. Not that he’d never thought about the risks involved before, but here and now, that aspect of Army life was being forced on them all. They couldn’t avoid it.
‘But be careful, OK?’ added the chaplain, a faint smile slipping across his face. ‘Think about who you send them to. If you’ve got four girlfriends, drop three of them before you go on tour. Otherwise it just gets complicated.’
A laugh, nervous but welcome none the less, flittered around the room. And while it took its time to settle, Liam thought for a moment about what his own death letter would be like and what he’d write in it. Letters had never been his thing, certainly not ones to his parents. And despite the fact that, since graduating, he’d at least grown a little closer to his mum, he really had no idea what he’d put in a letter to his parents. Still, he knew the chaplain had a point. If the time came for him to head out on tour – and it most likely would be sooner rather than later – he’d put something down on paper. Perhaps then he’d be able to think of something to say. Now, though, his mind was blank.
A week or so after the chaplain’s talk, Liam was with a group in a grey classroom. A young officer was with them. It was a bright day, but the sun was having no effect on the dullness inside.
On the desk in front of him was a sheet of paper – a form to be filled in – and a pen. Back at Harrogate, like the rest of the junior soldiers, Liam had chosen the corps or battalion he had wanted to join. That had been easy: he’d gone, like his mates, for the Infantry. Now, though, it was time to aim for a specific regiment. The list was extensive and Liam realized he wasn’t exactly sure which to go for. He knew it was a no-brainer for Jon, who’d made no secret of the fact that he’d turned up at Harrogate with the sole aim of eventually becoming a Para like his dad. As for himself, however, he had no particular reason, family connection or otherwise, to choose any specific regiment, be it the Mercian or the Grenadiers.
But he had to make a choice, right here, right now.
The officer was tall, athletic and looked barely older than Liam or anyone else in the room. But when he spoke, his voice had the measured clarity of someone who’d walked a university degree and thoroughly enjoyed everything that the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst – the British Army’s officer training college – could throw at him.
‘Of all those who started at Harrogate with you,’ he said, ‘only two thirds now remain. That in itself is one hell of an achievement.’
It was a sobering figure – Liam had never really thought about the number of junior soldiers who’d had to drop out. He was secretly proud to still be there and to have survived.
‘What you need to understand, lads,’ continued the officer, ‘is that once you decide, that’s it, there’s no changing your minds, and you will go where your regiment goes. And regardless of what you choose, it will, almost certainly, involve a tour of Afghanistan. That is a fact, and an unavoidable one at that.’
There was silence after those words. Liam was acutely aware that what he did with the pen in his hand would radically alter his whole life. Even, possibly, end it. And that was the crux of it all, wasn’t it? he thought. This wasn’t just a case of running around a forest and playing soldiers any more. With the stroke of a pen he was saying that he was happy and willing to be sent into harm’s way, into a war zone. A place where people, blokes like him, got injured, got killed.
Liam remembered what the chaplain had said about the death letters and the odds being that at least one of them would be killed. Would it be him? Would it be Cameron? He didn’t want to think about it, but figured that at that moment he probably wasn’t the only one mulling that thought over.
‘You also need to understand,’ continued the officer, ‘that although you are given a choice of which regiment you want to join, the Army has the final say. Period. You have only a one-in-five chance of getting the battalion you choose. And even then, I wouldn’t put money on it.’
Liam briefly wondered what, then, the point was of asking them to choose in the first place. Jon getting into the Paras was down to more than just deciding to join. He’d have to prove himself on a completely new level just to make it through. As for him and Cameron, he didn’t want to think about the possibility of them being in different battalions. It was good to have a mate by your side, and Liam knew Cameron was someone he could depend on when things got down and dirty. He tuned back into what the officer at the front of the room was saying.
‘For your information, and as a heads up, 2 Rifles is not only lowest on numbers but will be preparing for its next tour of Afghanistan when you finish here. The Army can’t send a battalion out that’s low on numbers. Understand?’
Everyone in the room nodded. Yeah, thought Liam, we all understand. It wasn’t like the message was hidden, was it?
‘That’s the reality, lads,’ continued the officer. ‘When the order comes to go, that’s what you do, you go. And know this also: the Army will always come first. Always. Your life, and that of your family, comes second. That’s just the way it is.’
The officer fell silent. Liam took his pen and started writing.
9
‘MAY AS WELL have a big fucking spotlight on us,’ said Cameron, as experienced soldiers from 2 Rifles, the regiment both he and Cameron had chosen – Jon, as he had wished, had got into the Paras and was out of their lives now – funnelled into the room they were sitting in. ‘I feel like a right tit.’
Phase 2 training was over and Liam was no longer a junior soldier but a fully signed-up member of the British Army. A soldier. Deep down, though, he was aware that right now, in this r
oom, that meant absolutely sod all.
The soldiers he was now surrounded by were all veterans of recent combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Though some were barely older than himself, they still looked aged by what they’d experienced, what they’d seen. Occasionally one would walk in built like a rugby player, with arms as thick as tree trunks, but most were wiry, like athletes; runners, rather than gym rats. Liam sensed an air of confidence about them, not just in how they walked, but in the way they handled themselves, the way they talked to each other.
As for him, at that moment, it all seemed astonishingly unreal. He’d completed his basic training and was now only six months away from his first tour of duty in Afghanistan. With the room now full, an officer stood up at the front and everyone fell quiet.
‘First, for those new to 2 Rifles, welcome,’ he said, his voice clear and direct. ‘My name is Major Edwards. We have less than six months to prepare for combat in Afghanistan. And it’s my job, and that of every other commissioned and non-commissioned officer in this room, to make sure that is exactly what we do.’
Major Edwards looked like a walking advert for Sandhurst, thought Liam. Tall and upright, he spoke not just with confidence but a certainty that what he said would happen, and happen now, no questions asked.
For the next few minutes, the major outlined what the training would involve, and Liam’s stomach refused to stop twisting itself tighter and tighter, not just with nerves, but with excitement.
‘Mark my words, gentlemen,’ Major Edwards concluded forcefully, ‘we will be prepared. None of you will go to Afghanistan unable to implement your training above and beyond the best of your ability. You will be ready.’
The following day, Liam was stripping an SA80, a task he’d grown used to through his Phase 1 and 2 training. He’d laid everything, from the retaining spring to the barrel, out on a plastic sheet on the floor. It had taken him longer than usual to get to this point, but he ignored the irritation and got on with the job in hand.