by The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time;Fighting Wars
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1 - The Junior Officers’ Reading Club
Chapter 2 - A Call to Arms
Chapter 3 - On the First Block
Chapter 4 - Welcome to Fucking Iraq
Chapter 5 - All Things Come
Chapter 6 - Decompression
Acknowledgements
GLOSSARY OF MILITARY TERMS
Praise for The Junior Officers’ Reading Club
“The Junior Officers’ Reading Club is a breathless, unnerving, and often hilariously irreverent journey alongside a young officer growing up in today’s messy small wars. Patrick Hennessey’s unique voice captures the black-humored sarcasm and plucky perseverance of frontline life so well that you taste the varieties of dust, smell the dried blood, and feel your fingers twitch with adrenaline. Clever, wry, and insightful, this is a tale you won’t soon forget.”
—Craig Mullaney, author of The Unforgiving Minute
“Amid the gung-ho overload of Iraq/Afghan war memoir, Hennessey’s literate and shrewd account of his time as a young subaltern is outstanding. It’s extremely rare to have this level of analytical intelligence combined with brutal firsthand combat experience. A classic of its kind.”
—William Boyd
“A tech-savvy Oxford graduate of the iPod generation spends the day spaced out on a high-decibel, high-adrenaline activity that leaves him feeling that ‘nowhere else sells bliss like this.’ What has this ultracool dude, who … customizes Amy Winehouse lyrics been doing? He has been commanding a platoon … in southern Afghanistan. Dangerous enjoyment, indeed. Connoisseurs of the finest front-line testimony composed after both world wars—or, later, Vietnam—know that (contrary to cliché) the classics of this genre seldom deliver a simple plea for peace. Instead, they tell the soldier’s truth, which arises from its own occult place of passionate small-group loyalties, pitch-black eve-of-execution humor, ecstatic camaraderie, paralyzing grief, and bristling suspicion of outsiders—all framed by a studied neutrality about the rights and wrongs of the carnage. From this total-immersion course in post-9/11 conflict, Hennessey has fashioned what must rank as the most accomplished work of military witness to emerge from British war-fighting since 1945… . He lifts the ‘invisible curtain’ that severs combat-bonded soldiers not only from civilians but behind-the-lines comrades as well. Emotionally, this is battlefield reportage in a classical vein, with every well-marked step on the soldier-writer’s march taken in its swift stride. Yet his tale’s true originality lies in Hennessey’s media-saturated reflections on media-shaped campaigns. Here, postmodernism dons desert fatigues. These kids act like a band of brothers in part because they watch Band of Brothers . He may shed a uniform but—surely—he cannot abandon the rare gift revealed in this extraordinary book.”
—The Independent
“This harrowing and frequently funny book … sparkles with wit, wisdom, and boyish glee … Hennessey is an exceptional talent.”
—The London Times
“What impresses is the sheer candor and immediacy of his reporting. A literary soldier, especially still in his twenties, is something to be treasured … A very fine book, a powerful dispatch from the front line and required reading for families of those in the armed forces.”
—The Spectator
“Soldiers who can write are as rare as writers who can strip down a machine gun in forty seconds, but Patrick Hennessey is one of the few… . A powerful, compelling, and unapologetic memoir of a young soldier’s life.”
—London Sunday Times
“Patrick Hennessey’s galvanically intense memoir of a superbright young soldier’s apprenticeship and baptism of fire will probably, for all the bone-rattling intensity of its front-line reportage, not change a single mind. Both warriors and peaceniks will find in it fuel for their beliefs: a sign, surely, that this variously tender, ironic, and ferocious new voice gives us literature and not propaganda.”
—The Independent (Books of the Year)
“[Hennessey’s] story of his three years in the army … is suffused with a craving for the heat of battle. He yearns to be able to ‘spin real tales to the girls I wanted to fancy me … and the boys I wanted to be jealous of me.’ As he reiterates … there is a huge gulf in understanding between those who have fought for the army and those who have not… . No one seems to understand what he has become, or what he is doing in Afghanistan—not the media, not his family and friends, not even his girlfriend. No one who has not been in a combat situation can possibly understand such a feeling. In watching this transformation we are taken on our own journey … surprisingly thoughtful, honest and compelling, worth reading.”
—Daily Telegraph
“A vivid account of a rollercoaster tour of duty … [This] irreverent twenty-first-century take on soldiering … provides a testosterone-charged and expletive-spattered portrait of survival in isolated and vulnerable outposts under constant attack by a tough and resourceful enemy … punchy, stripped-down prose modeled on that of Michel Herr’s classic Vietnam War book Dispatches.”
—Daily Mail
“[An] extraordinary memoir by a young Grenadier Guards officer fresh from the Middle East combat zones. Its testosterone-driven narrative may tell us some things (not all palatable) about the mindset of young recruits going to war in our name. Hennessey has a reporter’s eye for detail and a soldier’s nose for bullshit.”
—Guardian
“In military history—as in every other literary genre—every so often a book comes along and announces itself as a classic of its kind… . This unsparing account from the frontline in Afghanistan is a classic.”
—Glasgow Herald
“If you want to learn about the nastiness of modern warfare, this is the book to read. He is good at describing the lows that followed the highs, in particular the dull emptiness of coming home to friends who did not understand … a high-spirited and enjoyable book.”
—London Literary Review
“Hennessey is an interesting mix of two disparate impulses. On the one hand, he is a man of action, on the other, a dispassionate observer, analyzing this more reckless man of action. It proves a winning combination … claustrophobically vivid … The wars in which he fought are contemporary, but his ambivalent reaction to them, so clearly expressed, is one he shares with soldiers down the centuries.”
—Mail on Sunday
“Compelling reading … honest and revealing.”
—Evening Standard
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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Hennessey
Maps and photographs copyright © Patrick Hennessey, 2009
Excerpt from Lessons of the War, Part IV: “Unarmed Combat,” by Henry Reed, reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
Excerpt from “Fair Weather,” by Dorothy Parker, from The Collected Dorothy Parker, reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
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First published in the UK by Allen Lane, a division of Penguin Books: 2009
First Riverhead trade paperback edition: September 2010
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hennessey, Patrick, 1982-
The Junior Officers’ Reading Club : killing time and fighting wars / Patrick Hennessey.—1st Riverhead trade pbk. ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: London : Allen Lane, 2009.
eISBN : 978-1-101-46005-4
1. Hennessey, Patrick, 1982- 2. Great Britain. Army. Grenadier Guards. Battalion, 1st. 3. Soldiers—Great Britain—Biography. 4. Iraq War, 2003-—Personal narratives, British. 5. Afghan War, 2001-—Personal narratives, British. I. Title.
UA652.G7H46 2010
956.7044’34092—dc22
[B]
2010017134
http://us.penguingroup.com
For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
From ‘Dover Beach’ by Matthew Arnold
AUTHOR’S NOTE
One of my favourite Army stories was told to me by my first company commander. A team from his anti-tank platoon had been up to some drunken mischief or other, and he was charged with finding the culprits. When interviewed one by one they all came out with an identical and well-rehearsed story in which they had been out together and all returned to camp at exactly 23:57 (some ten minutes after the alleged incident had occurred), a timing they all recalled with such precision because each one of them had ‘checked their watches’ as they came in through the gates. Having heard the same improbable story five times, he called them back into his office together and asked them all to read him the time off their watches; needless to say, no two men had the same time, and at least two were either half an hour fast or slow.
No two recollections of an event are the same, especially an event as frantic and emotionally charged as a battle or the loss of a friend. As Anthony Swofford puts it in Jarhead: ‘What follows is neither true nor false but what I know.’ The following narrative has been constructed as accurately as possible from e-mails sent to friends, my diaries and orders notebooks. Occasionally I have turned to colleagues for their recollections of certain incidents or to official after-action reviews and reports. Some names have been changed. An element of confusion is inevitable and is, in places, intentional—the only realistic sense of the moment. For the rest, the book is entirely the time as I read it off my own watch.
DEDICATION
In April of 2001 I wrote a letter to my grandfather, also Patrick Hennessey—a retired Cavalry officer, veteran of the Normandy landings who finished his long military career in the RAF and who embodied much that was good about his generation of soldiers—asking for his advice on joining the Army. I hadn’t mentioned the idea to anyone else and I’ve always been glad I sought his advice first. He provided good counsel and measured support, knowing that my parents would probably be more dubious, but beneath all of that he was delighted and proud. He died in November of 2002, quickly and quietly from a heart attack and a life of tobacco, red wine and cheese—the perfect death for a soldier with a soldier’s hatred of doctors and hospitals—and I am always caught between happiness and sadness: happy that he died knowing that I was following in his footsteps, off to Sandhurst after university and about to embark upon the life and profession he had found so fulfilling, sad that he wasn’t there, for the parades and the medals and stories that would follow.
Four years later I visited my other grandfather, Professor Emrys Jones, for the last time and brought with me something to show him. It was considered one of the great success stories of the family that my father’s father and my mother’s father—an awe-inspiring academic, humanist, liberal and the driving intellectual force in the family—got along so well. One had been in the first wave of DD Shermans, the swimming tanks that had rolled on to Sword Beach in Normandy, queasy in the early hours of 6 June 1944. The other had driven ambulances throughout the war, a conscientious objector with quiet and strong conviction. One devoted his life to military service, the other to shaping and improving post-war communities.
They were brought together by their children, my parents, smiling and improbably young in photos in front of Durham Cathedral, outside which they had first met as students—glamorous, my father in his naval uniform and my mother in her wedding gown. What must they have thought, these two men, being presented in turn with a naval aviator for a son-in-law—army brat of bases in Germany and Cyprus, up at university with a portrait of the Queen on the walls of his room and anxious to get back in the cockpit—and a spirited and beautiful musician and feistily clever university administrator for a daughter-in-law.
Sometime in August 1982 they must have all stood together over the slightly ugly six-pound baby, their first and only grandson, and wondered. Military Grandpa might have pictured another young Hennessey in his regiment, a continuation of a long and unbroken family line of military service to crown and country, and Professor Taid (Welsh for grandfather, which was how we distinguished) might have wondered if that bundle might be a thinker, might follow him into academia and print. Taid did not murmur when I announced that I was going to join the Army. Immersed as I was, or so they thought, in literary study, it must have seemed a safe bet that the gowns and mortar boards had won out over fatigues and helmets. I know the decision came as a big surprise and slight disappointment. Taid didn’t agree with my thinking but understood and respected the thought process. He couldn’t have been more supportive. A few days before he died, I had been presented with my first Operational Tour Medal for service in Iraq. Taid had strenuously objected to the war, but we had stayed in close touch while I had been out, and he had come to see that perhaps some good was being done, and that what else was not being done was not the fault of the young men and women in uniform working hard in difficult conditions. I showed him my medal, and, like Grandpa when I wrote him that first letter, I knew he was proud.
I am happy and sad again because, just as Grandpa had died that bit too early to see me stomping the parade square at Sandhurst, so Taid died a few months too early to see the first article I ever wrote in print, a whimsical piece for the Literary Review, which I think would have appealed to him, about the books we take to war and what fraying paperbacks I found on transit-camp bookshelves throughout Iraq. Still writing in his last year, gamely mastering his laptop in his eighties as he ploughed through his twelfth book, Taid would have been my constant guide in writing this, and my sadness is he didn’t live to see a book with his grandson’s name on the spine to be placed in distinguished company on the bookshelf at home with all of his own.
They were towering, inspiration
al men: a fine soldier and an outstanding scholar. I am neither, but dedicate this book to them to show how I tried to live up to them both.
It’s one thing being able to read a map (although beyond an alarming number of my contemporaries) but it’s quite another being able to draw one. A young officer spends a surprising amount of time drawing maps: with his fingers and rocks in the sand, with sticks and ribbons in the mud, with arty chalk on farm walls and heartbreaking permi-pen on lads’ mags and, when all else fails, in biro on the back of the biggest guardsman in the platoon. The following rough approximations of Sandhurst, Iraq and Afghanistan are not the most accurate I’ve ever drawn, but they may be the most honest.
PROLOGUE
On the Dam
And suddenly we’re on the dam.
Four wizened Pashtu Gandalfs sit impassively sipping chai around a dining table in the middle of a rose garden, and my first thirsty thought is not the obvious WHAT are we going to do? nor the reasonable WHY are these four improbably old white-bearded guys sitting taking tea in the middle of a firefight? but HOW is there a dining table in a rose garden in the middle of the dam? It’s an interesting point of speculation, but one cut short by another burst of fire, and to the cracking above and the thudding as bits of crumbling masonry and rose petals drift down into the broiling water beneath our feet is suddenly and worryingly added the melodic pinging of bullets bouncing off the sluice-gates and rusty turbines below.