by The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time;Fighting Wars
It wasn’t until we were bouncing back down the road to Shorabak, quiet except for the odd purge in the back of the trucks about why the British Army is borrowing bone-jarringly uncomfortable wagons from the Afghans, that I was overcome by a surge of revulsion at the hypocrisy of the thing, the crap being peddled by the padres that somehow makes it all right for a nineteen-year-old to die if he’s going to heaven. That surely can’t have been the same heaven the suicide bombers who blew up the UN workers were off to. After the Old Testament trials of the week I’m done with the religious bullshit dimension of what is going on.
Done with uncomfortably referencing A Bridge Too Far in the padre’s canvas token ‘church’, droning ‘Abide With Me’ because we have to ‘show support’, even though we’re only there for the sweeties. Done with the ANA lunatics who drool over the cleavage-flashing, butt-wobbling Tehran diva on Iranian NMP (state-approved MTV, rock and jihad for the McBurkha generation) even while Ahmedinijad parades our pathetic sailors in a hijab. Done with the hypocrite soldiers who demand halal rations, but prefer the American non-halal MREs because they’ve got M&Ms. Done with the Yanks who bless their hummers as they roll out of camp with the callsign ‘WidowMaker’ spray-painted on the backs to fight an enemy which shouts ‘God is Great’ as he runs obligingly into our torrents of .50 cal cannon fire.
And just when I think I can get no lower I find that Fergus, bitter because he’s heading home early, has left a sticker he got from a music magazine hidden in my helmet. It says: ‘I’m Going to Glasto and You’re Not’.
Which is true.
The contrast between the sparse desert camp where we watched our comrades being flown out in boxes and Kabul airport, where the REMFs (Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers) were having multinational karaoke night, couldn’t have been more pronounced. We’d been sent up to escort a new batch of ANA recruits down to Helmand. A Mickey Mouse task, the hardest part of which would be convincing some of the more sceptical ANA to get on a flying machine at all, but were grateful for any chance to get out of camp routine and now stood in disbelief outside the bar, where the Kiwis were sipping cold beers while a couple of French Paras murdered ‘Brown-eyed Girl’ on a makeshift stage in the corner.
The next morning at the best breakfast we’ll have all tour, we count dozens of different styles of uniform in the cookhouse, and they all stare at our dusty, unpressed combats and the weapons we’re carrying like we’re vulgar gatecrashers because we’ve nowhere else to put them. A rainbow of flags, the ISAF partners, flutters outside to signify who’s feasting at the Coalition trough for US dollars and spurious international prestige; but we’re stuck in the airport for two days because most of our ‘partners’ refuse to fly down to Helmand because it’s too dangerous. Kabul was too dangerous once. Hemmed in by the snow-capped mountains, the Muj’ used to hide in and pop rockets at the fat Illyushin transport aircraft flying terrified Russian conscripts in and out. If you were lucky, so they said, you’d get blown up on your way in, not your way out. The foothills are still dotted with the rusting hulks of burned-out Soviet T72s as if to remind anyone coming what happens when you take on Afghanistan. Difference is now it’s F15s and giant C17s rolling in and out and the troops—thousands of troops doing we have no idea what up here—stroll from the beauty and massage parlour to the Thai takeaway and then maybe back for a spot more karaoke in what was once the most dangerous airport in the world.
On the way back down south to the desert we stop at Kandahar. A riot breaks out among the young ANA recruits we’re escorting because now, too late to slip a ten-dollar bill to the posting clerk back up in HQ in Kabul, they’ve found out where they’ve been sent. Some argue furiously with bored-looking officials, and I think some do a runner, take their chances with the fence and the long run to the hills rather than join the 205 ‘Hero’ Corps. Perhaps they know something we don’t. The wind has changed direction and they’re burning the shitters so the whole base is hung with a cloying, sickly-sweet, gag-inducing stench, but the radio messages from base are why we really want to get back down to Helmand.
Op Silicon is on. Not some poxy, over-excited resupply patrol, not some hand-holding training task. Our first proper mission, a real-life op.
Op Silicon
Op Silicon was to be the first push up the Lower Sangin Valley from Gereshk towards Sangin itself. Terry’s country and no two ways about it. The security of Gereshk was at best dubious while Sangin was under siege. Months back the Marines got a few kilometres up the towpath before bugging out under heavy contact and mine-strike-triggered ambushes and were lucky to tell the tale, judging from the lesson the French SF and the Estonian recce guys learned the year before, sliced up and decapitated by the Taliban in the same valley, the stuff of nineteenth-century nightmares. Op Silicon was going to be 12 Brigade’s first major operation, thousands of Coalition and Afghan troops, and, joy of joys, 1/3/205, our own lovely half-AWOL kandak of mad ANA was going to be on it. The planning maps were like pictures from history books, Battlegroup boundaries and symbols we had only ever played with before. Assets in support which beggar belief and even our own company area of operations—square miles of real estate to play in; to CLEAR and DEFEAT in capital letters.
That afternoon, we marched the company into the briefing room for an impromptu, psych-ourselves-up movie night. An evening of roaring with homoerotic bloodlust at 300, the boys bellowing every time the characters screamed ‘Sparta!’ and cheering each stylized gory death. Standing at the back, I couldn’t help feel that the narrator’s voice, the voice which knew deep down that the Spartans were all nutters, was posing an interesting question. Why? Why are you delirious with excitement for the first time on this tour?
I knew why, of course, but didn’t want to admit it. I knew it was because the summer had started and the baddies were coming down from the mountains and the brigade had decided to start flexing its muscle and because Silicon was ON and because the orders had been full of wet-dream mission verbs like DESTROY and HOLD. I knew it was because what was going to come next was going to answer all the old questions and pose all the new, unasked ones.
Because you’re going to kill or be killed.
Was this the stark truth? Was the frightening reality that the tension of the last few weeks had evaporated because we were finally getting what we wanted? Because, if so, what we wanted was actually the one thing that I should have thought years ago before all this started that I would never want. The one thing that no sane and civilized human should ever want.
Standing at the back of the room, I remembered how scared I had been watching We Were Soldiers on a coach journey back to Sandhurst, still nervous in the first term and suddenly questioning the whole thing with the horror unfolding around Mel Gibson. It was a bad film, and Gibson was a bad actor, but it got one thing right that the slick porno-violence of 300 forgot: soldiers fought and it hurt and they died. And sat in the back of the coach, surrounded by sleeping cadets, fresh off an exercise of simulated violence, I had wanted nothing to do with that.
So how, I was wondering in Afghanistan, did I get here? Somewhere, something got lost. Not all at once, but small increment by small increment while we’d been at Sandhurst; a bit in the gas chamber, a bit on the bayonet range, a bit on the final live-fire exercise, when I finally let go and went for it, screaming down the individual lane just to shut up CSgt Coates. Somewhere, something shifted, and, even if we laughed it off, we were taking it more seriously and we were enjoying taking it more seriously.
Enjoying not being the banker in the room when we got out on leave weekends, standing on the fringes of solicitors and estate agents at parties, joking that we were the guys who ‘travel the world, meet exciting new people and kill them’.
We suddenly enjoyed being the guys in the room with something to say, flirting with the old girls with a new angle. Engaging Raya in genuine conversation like the kind we had all been too cool to have for three whole years at university, explaining what I’d been doing away for
the last fortnight on exercise learning counterinsurgency and actually getting the sense that someone was interested. I hadn’t even left the factory that was Sandhurst at that stage, but couldn’t escape the buzz of holding those big eyes in a way no one was ever going to by describing his week at law school.
Four years previously I had known, more than anything else in the world, that I didn’t want to die. Four years previously as Boylan, my cynical but unerringly perceptive friend, had teased me from the idle comfort of university that Iraq would be the new Vietnam, a quagmire that we’d still be in if and when I ever found myself wearing a uniform, I hadn’t believed him. Even standing there in the ops room in Shorabak with the map boards, dotted with the gritty incidents of 365 days of unprecedented violence, I could see that the Spartans were nutters, that the big winner was the guy who got sent home. I still knew I didn’t want to die. But I didn’t want to go home either.
2
A Call to Arms
Officer recruitment shot up after 11 September 2001. At least some of the students walking into milk-round jobs paying higher starting salaries than their parents earned were moved by the apocalyptic spectacle and signed up for Sandhurst.
My recruitment began in the polish and glamour of the mess at St James’s Palace, where the Grenadiers were on guard and where Fielding (whose fault the whole thing was since we’d become friends and he’d wondered over a few bottles if I’d never thought of the Armed Forces) had invited me to dinner. Still enjoying the remnants of his gap-year commission in bastard-smart uniform surrounded by silver and pretension, he was transformed from a roguish ginger student into something more substantial. I was eighteen years old, and the promised £1,000 bursary the Army paid yearly to undergraduates would make a welcome dent in the Brideshead-imitation overdrafts I’d racked up playing credit card roulette in Pizza Express, but it wasn’t the lifestyle or the money that drew me in, it was boredom with everything else.
Potential entrants to Sandhurst were sent on the Regular Commissions Board (RCB), the weeklong test of ‘leadership potential’ which I pitched up for at Westbury on the same day that American and Coalition troops launched Operation Enduring Freedom and invaded Afghanistan. You couldn’t make a connection between the glamorous hunt for Bin Laden stories in the papers I’d been reading in the train on the way down and the quiet anonymity of the redbrick town on the edge of Salisbury Plain. At Westbury we had to climb walls, jump through imaginary windows and negotiate barrels with planks. I thought I must have failed because I said MILAN was a city in Italy (idiot: it was a wire-guided anti-tank missile).
By the time I had finished Sandhurst I could fly over walls, and the MILAN had been replaced by the Javelin, which is much harder to confuse with European cities and which I have fired in anger, which is almost certainly more than any of the directing staff on my RCB had ever done. The unlucky ones were deemed to lack some elusive quality which couldn’t be taught at Sandhurst, and to this day I’m not sure what that is. I’ve served with a number of men who struggled so severely to learn fundamental lessons that even to pass them out of Sandhurst was highly questionable and to select them over other, far better, men who never even got there is only to see how early in the process the Army can get things strangely wrong. I should have noted that, along with the portentous drab coveralls and scratchy blankets which were omens of things to come, but I needed to get back to a house party to try and kiss Parker, the beautiful new fresher, and had run out of underwear, so my mind was on other things.
I passed RCB and was pencilled to start Sandhurst after I finished my degree. It was fun to shock the parents and impress the girls and tease the future lawyers with having signed up for something a bit different, pretending you were off to hunt for Osama after finals. None of it was serious until Boylan and I sat up all night watching the next invasion of Iraq on CNN; bang after bang after bang and inferno visions of Baghdad silhouetting an unheard-of Rageh Omaar. This was the green night-vision war-porn we’d been too young to enjoy in ’91. Back then I’d been confused by the notion that my father was somehow involved, didn’t know why the grown-ups found it funny that my younger sister thought he was away ‘playing Gulf ’, nor why my mother did the ironing late into the night listening to Verdi’s Requiem on full blast while scuds rained down on Kuwait.
When we got bored of the coverage of real fighting we stuck on a DVD of Fight Club, which was somehow more realistic, more relevant. We were sat there, pampered, comfortable students, and there was Edward Norton all respectability and IKEA furniture with a smile on his face we couldn’t quite recognize, actually alive for the first time because he could taste the blood in his mouth and was getting the shit kicked out of him. There was something vital in the wanton destruction, and rather than join the tedious student union protests, I was inspired to cycle down to an abandoned warehouse in the rain just to see if I had it in me to put my fist through a window. It hurt, but there was an inexplicable elation in doing something, anything, to show to yourself that you weren’t just another over-privileged, over-educated, under-sexed student.
Serve to Lead
I received my joining instructions for Sandhurst in the midst of the haze of early summer 2003. Exams had finished, and fun was in full swing, but the papers spoke ominously of discipline and physical training and hardship and contained photos of muddy and cold people. I was warm and comfortable and had almost forgotten where my bursary money had actually been coming from.
There were many times when, with more or less justified melodrama, I endured ‘the worst moment of my life’ during my year at Sandhurst. With breathtaking prescience and wisdom the commanding officer at my first ever potential officer interview had advised me as a clueless student not to bother with Officer Training Corps at university. ‘At least,’ he observed, ‘when you sit out in a field at Sandhurst getting pissed on and miserable, it will have novelty value.’
Sandhurst isn’t meant to be easy. My joining papers spoke of the modestly entitled ‘finest command and leadership course in the world’. Filled with pictures of lots of cheerful-looking types in uniform, the brochure depicts a kind of outdoor holiday resort with more guns and less cycling. Some of the cadets look smart in dress uniform, others warry in combat face paint, a group stand in jacket and tie laughing in a bar.
Not one of the groups was wearing an all-in-one olive pyjama suit.
The brochure had mentioned that ‘the first few weeks are intensive’ but stressed that those weeks were working towards the mission of the Academy: ‘through military training and education to develop the qualities of leadership, character and intellect demanded of an Army officer’. Unfortunately what I began to discover is that LEADERSHIP, CHARACTER and INTELLECT are best developed by MARCHING, IRONING and SHOUTING.
Explaining the Sandhurst year to people who weren’t there became easier once Prince Harry rocked up, and with the blanket press coverage our little habits and customs and bits of jargon fell into the wider lexicon.
In junior term, also known as Old College, sorted into three companies of ninety (ominously named after atrocious, life-guzzling battles: Gaza, Marne and our own muddy Ypres) and further into three platoons of thirty, we were to endure a crash-course introduction to the military. Discipline would be harsh, sleep deprivation routine and life generally miserable, but in fourteen weeks the Academy would turn us from stinking civvie students into soldiers.
In intermediate term, we would spend more time in the field on exercise, not just being pushed but actually learning tactics and skills. We would spend more time in the classroom on theory and start to practise the leadership for which we were presumably all there. We would have a little more freedom but be far too tired to enjoy it.
Eventually we’d make it to the senior term, top of the pile. While the new junior intake got a very public thrashing and the intermediates ran around like the blue-arsed flies we’d been just weeks before, we would stroll around, no longer required to march everywhere in a platoon,
wiser and more confident and with an end firmly in sight. We’d have chosen what area of the Army we were joining, our future regiments would have accepted us, and with our eyes on the real world we’d suddenly understand why people seemed to have enjoyed Sandhurst.
The practise was somewhat different from the theory.
12.i.04—‘BUGGER’
it is the most crushing moment in a young man’s life when he wakes one morning and quite rationally says to himself: ‘i’m at Sandhurst.’
last Sunday night was about the worst i have ever spent. I made a note in my diary on the way here, simply says ‘bugger’.
today I was given time off for good behaviour because I managed to stamp in the right place at the right time with particular excellence and decided to send you all the first of what I hope will be a series of e-mails chronicling my year at what I have been many times assured in the last two weeks that it is my PRIVILEGE to be attending, the finest leadership course in the world.
not that we’ve done much leadershiping as such. Ours is a day to day struggle for survival, the priority being not to do anything which might upset the malign despot who rules our waking (and sleeping) hours who is known as THE COLOUR SERGEANT. Daily the misdemeanours which incur his wrath change so we can never be sure when we might be pleasing him or not. Three days ago during my morning room inspection the bristles of my toothbrush were facing left—an offence which resulted in the throwing of said toothbrush, along with everything else on the shelf above the sink, out of the window. Yesterday I took great care in facing them to the right—an offence which resulted in everything being thrown out into the corridor.