by Jan Needle
Put it another way we all got out of there, and it was honest and legitimate, and all above the board, and if anybody questions us, we know the answers to every question, don’t we? All for one and one for all was what the three musketeers reckoned, according to Dogtanyan, and we stuck together, we were a team through thick and thin. It ain’t so easy to get out these days, although joining up’s a piece of piss since only fucking royalty and other low grade morons want the job. They’ve raised the age bar to include geriatrics, white sticks are standard issue if you drive a tank, and they take green men from outer space. Funny to think that fifty years ago there was a colour bar. Ashton and Sha would’ve been laughed out of the recruiting office.
What did for me – and I swear to you this was not a put-up job – was another piece of army lunacy. There was a random drug test due on the Thursday, I took it like I always did because I knew that I was clean – and failed. I don’t do drugs, see? I used to work in a needle exchange, I spent time with crackheads and no-hopers, I even slept with a poor neurotic bitch from Portavogie. To pass the time I’d done some bits of dope maybe, a tab of E or two sometimes, but all the random tests I’d ever gone to I’d passed A1. And this one wan’t no different.
Most people in the camp who don’t do drugs take the random tests, and they always pass, surprise surprise. Sometimes people who do do drugs get randomed by mistake, and fail. I figure that’s quite reasonable. If they’re so off their face they don’t notice when one’s due, it makes sense that they should leave the army. After all, some of the weapons they give us to play about with can be very dangerous, can’t they? Ask Al Beano, Jeff, the one that tried to find his brain and missed.
The point is about the tests, is that they’re random, which in army logic means that every bugger knows just when they’ll be. So if you don’t do drugs you go along to get some free time off, and if you do you don’t. You go hiding in the bog, you get busy, you do a CFT. There were lads on my lines who could hardly walk and talk some days, and as far as I know they’re still lobbing RPGs at ragheads in the sand. If they’d ever had a test the lab technicians would have fainted, or sold syringes of their samples down the clubs for rocket fuel. But they didn’t have a test, because they damn well knew the rules. I went along this Thursday as per usual, innocent as a newborn babe. And failed.
Would you believe it?
It was a real big shock this was, as I told my mother on the phone, a mistake, a mystery, some sort of army snafu that I couldn’t understand. Why would I do it, mum, I said – when the OC called me to his office I honestly thought I was going to get promotion like they’d offered Shahid Khan, my mate. I was one of the good guys. I always had been.
The funny thing was, was the drug I got picked up for. The OC said it was cocaine, and the test was definite. I asked if I could have a second test, on the same sample, and he said I could if I paid three hundred pounds, and the result would be the same, they always were. He asked me, if I said I hadn’t done it, how it could have been there, so positive? I said I didn’t know. And when I thought about it, I cited the football riot and the piss-ups that had followed on. My sister Vronnie said it was the “drug of choice” these days for spiking people’s drinks. Her best friend’s mum, a nurse at the infirmary, said they did dozens of young kids every weekend. It was an epidemic.
Vronnie rung me up later, in actual fact, and said “Nice one Tiny, but wouldn’t pot have been a cheaper way to go?” A fucking cynic in the family. You’ve got to laugh though, an’t you?
She’d’ve been dead wrong in any case, because the times they were a changin’, which was another funny thing. When I’d joined the army, not so bleeding long ago, you could get chucked out for soft stuff like weed or dope, or even getting ratted once too often. Now though, it was only the hard gear that they bothered with, and after a few more years in the Sandpit, if we last that long out there, you’ll have to be so full of drugs you’ll go off like a bomb when they stick a needle in to test you. Otherwise, according to Shahid, they’ll be so short of cannon fodder they might even have to stop the fucking war – or call up Tony Blair’s kids, ha ha ha.
Drugs or no drugs, though, they took a damn long time to let me go, compared with Sha, who got out like lightning with a very sudden case of acute religious persecution. Dead true in one way, I suppose, because it must have really pissed them off the way he pissed on them. He’d gone to see the Padre bold as brass, and said he was going to become a member of the Wahhabi sect, was that all right? The Major had to say he was delighted, naturally – all faiths welcome here, my son, even if I’ve never heard of ’em – till Sha kindly spelt it out. Wahhabis are the gang of nutcases who think that all non-members, including other Muslims, have to be killed off as a sacred duty because old Allah said so (but only to a Wahhabi, naturally). So next time he got issued with an SA80 and a clip, said Sha, he’d have to shoot down all his mates, unless they converted on the spot. Plus officers. Plus Padres.
“But why?” goes Canon Fodder.
“Because blood is thicker than water!” Sha gives it. “It is written! And the Koran Q’ran’t be wrong!”
We all knew he didn’t mean it, and maybe they did too, but how could they prove a thing like that? They questioned and questioned him, and he never cracked a smile. He went everywhere carrying his good book and never changed his story by a single word. He left ten weeks before I did, although they kept him waiting months and months and months for the pay that they still owed him, the office clerks’ revenge, sad twats. He’s not a terrorist, though, however hard they tried to make him. In fact I think he still tries to talk sense into pissed-off young Muslims outside mosques from time to time, and sometimes they beat him up for it. When I asked him why he bothered he said he had a sense of duty.
“That’s why I joined the army in the first place, innit? I thought if we could stop foreign Muslims wasting other foreign Muslims’ blood it might stop brainwashed English Muslims flocking out from here to kill Yank and British squaddies – and other Muslims. Stop English Muslim dickheads putting bombs on trains and planes and buses full of other English Muslims. I were born in Oldham, Tiny, it’s full of English Muslims and it’s my fucking home. England’s where I fucking live.”
“But the army chucked you out!” I said. “You joined, and then you couldn’t stand the bastards any more, they drove you into quitting! And I mean, it was us lot that invaded in the first place, wan’t it? You can see their point in some ways. Even I can, for Chrissake!”
“Their point, my point, your point, whose point, Tiny? That’s what’s fucking bugging me. They killed three thousand on 9/ll, and we killed five hundred thousand just to pay ’em back in a country that weren’t involved to start with. Mad enough for you? Try this: My sister still thinks the Muslims had nowt to do with the Twin Towers, it were a Jewish conspiracy. And when you ask her a conspiracy to do what, how dare I question Allah’s will? And she wants to be a teacher, Tiny, she wants to mess with children’s minds. Maybe we started it, but it’s Muslim killing Muslim now, and maybe it always will be. What is it? Are we stupider than you lot? We can’t be, can we? What’s the fucking reason?”
We had a fair few conversations like this these days, and Shofiq and Susie down in Withington, where I’d gone to live now, sometimes joined in, too, they’d got to be good mates. It made me feel a bit ignorant to tell the truth, and Shof and Ashton couldn’t take too much of it, but Sue and Shahid argued black was blue, because she said she’d been a Catholic and knew where he was coming from, and said that both of them was “damaged goods.” She said the Muslims’ problem in Britain was simple – they still thought God was real, and couldn’t believe the British didn’t and might be bloody right.
“It’s not stupidity,” she told him, “You’ve been conned, indoctrinated. And one day you’ll all wake up and realise they’ve been telling you porkies, just to keep you where they wanted you, and then you’ll slowly come all right. Your mullahs, the men who know it all, the men w
ho get it straight from God – they’ll end up like our priests in Ireland, brain dead with whiskey and a nice fat housekeeper who gives a lovely handjob when the need arises, so to speak. When my dad was young, every other son in every other house in Ireland was sent to train to be a priest, and now they have to bring them in from Poland, like the plumbers and the plasterers. It’s brainwashing, Sha, all brainwashing. Get over it and find yourself a sex-mad English girl. She’ll teach you what religion’s all about! Shofiq knows!”
Ashton’s way out had been the most spectacular, although it could have blown up in his face big style, but he was getting desperate. He didn’t trust the drugs thing, religion was a no-go, and he thought his scheme was foolproof anyway. First off he nicked a car one night, completely pissed, no licence, no insurance, no cock-all, and demolished a bus shelter just by the camp, his get-out from the army, guaranteed. But although he got a mega bollocking, the army kept the cops away and covered up for him, like they could do brilliant if they wanted to. He was a quota-boy, remember, one of the ethnics, one of the few, as Winston Churchill put it. And he could hardly tell them it was done deliberate, could he?
Insubordination, insolence, farting in church – after that he tried the lot, and got damn all down them roads, neither. Three days in cells, one severe beating off Sergeant Williams and Martie Martin, two painful sessions at the dentist for his broken teeth.
When he was totally pissed off with all the duff attempts, he “changed the habits of a lifetime,” and got his cousins to set up a failed “robbery” – and bloody nearly got sent down, because they cocked it up. Luckily his fiancée stood by him – she was pregnant with their little girl – and she looked so respectable in the witness box, so nice and demure, so very, very white, that they damn nearly let him stay in the regiment as well, which would have been the worst disaster in his life! He’d asked me to be another character witness, as it happened, and I told him not to be so bloody mad – unless he wanted to go down, to avoid the wedding that he’d still not managed yet. After pleading guilty – probation, and a promise to go straight – he did go straight, as well. Still beats me at pool.
It took me ages to actually get out, to get clear of the garrison, they kept me hanging round for yonks while they fooled and faffed about, and it must have cost the country hundreds in wages and that sort of stuff. It was all free time for me as well – they couldn’t let me do anything, least of all get me fingers on a weapon “while under discharge orders” – but the wankers in the office couldn’t get it together, no way, except to wind me up. I got lots of weekends off, though, and me and Emma took up finally, although she finishes with me if I ever lose my temper, which is terrific training after all the shite they’ve piled on me. As well as basic IT stuff with her, I’m going back to college soon, to train up for some sort of job. Shofiq and Susie have been brilliant.
The others in my army life, I must say, have faded from my memory pretty fast, and pretty far, and I don’t regret their going for a bleeding moment – because I didn’t make so many proper mates, did I? On the other hand, I don’t regret signing in the first place neither, come to think of it. I needed something to give me life a kick up the arse, and it did some great things for me, too, until I messed it up. I got a lot of strength, a lot of fitness, even a bit of confidence, in a funny sort of way. And that’s growing all the time.
I feel pity for the poor sods that are still there though, especially the halfwits that don’t even know they’re being screwed and slaughtered to save some bastard’s face. And I can’t help feeling sorry for the ones I see on telly, brown, and hard, and active, and looking like their weapons are a part of them, like they’re some sort of a brilliant, natural, human man-machine, born and bred to fight.
For some lads it’s dead good, I’ll go along with that. Some lads love it, some lads think it’s mint. And in a way, I sometimes wish I could have ended up like that, I feel maybe I could have done if things had turned out different. I feel sorry for them, with just a little touch of jealousy. And then I look at mum, and Vron, and Emma, and I think.
I think: Let’s just hope they’re not the ones who have their cocks shot off and find their only helpers are the social and the NHS. Let’s just hope they’re not the ones who get sent away from hospital with a bunch of pamphlets for depression and go back home and butcher up their mum and dad. Let’s just hope they’re not the ones whose families have to sue the government to get half the compensation they shell out for a typist with a broken fingernail. Let’s just hope they’re not the alkies in the gutter in any street in any town or city, although they’re pretty damn likely to be, according to the stats.
Talk to them alkies in the gutter. Ask them if they can remember what the recruiting adverts told ’em. Or why they’re not off laying bricks.
I don’t think of them a lot, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think of them at all if I can help it – who does, they’re only failed fucking soldiers, ain’t they? But I always try to give ’em something, if I can. Most of ’em did their best, in a funny kind of way. Didn’t they?
I think of poor old Goughie quite a lot though, poor creepy, stupid Johnnie Gough. He worked up into a proper soldier, like the OC had said he would, and he went to fight “Old England’s Foe.” He was in some vehicle, maybe a Jackal, I don’t know what sort for certain, and it found an IED. One killed inside, and Johnnie Gough blown out across the sand on fire, like a Catherine wheel off its pin. He was invalided back, and farmed out to the NHS, and waiting lists, once the army medics had done the little bits the government would pay for.
What was it old Ken had sung?
“You haven’t an arm and you haven’t a leg,
Haroo, haroo.
You haven’t an arm and you haven’t a leg,
Haroo.
You haven’t an arm and you haven’t a leg,
You’re an eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg.
You’ll have to sit out with a bowl and beg –
Johnnie I hardly knew ya.”
An eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg. Yeah. That was Goughie. Nice.
And when I see the hearses drive through Wootton Bassett on the telly, and the faces of the guys in uniform, smart and brave and wonderful in their obit photographs, I fucking cry. Not for the gutless bastards who sent them out there, though. Not the lying, stupid, politicians.
Not for them, at all.
Table of Contents
Twelve Good Men and True
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Crap-Hats to the Slaughter
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Death of a Hero
One
Two
Three
Here Comes the Bullet
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Three Ways to Leave the Army
One
Table of Contents
Twelve Good Men and True
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Crap-Hats to the Slaughter
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Death of a Hero
One
Two
Three
Here Comes the Bullet
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Three Ways to Leave the Army
One
ading books on Archive.