by The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time;Fighting Wars
Out on the training area, as we tried to inject some aggression into our final attack, the new CSgt called a halt to the pathetic affair and, as we braced ourselves for the inevitable assault, he launched instead into a passionate and thoughtful discussion on the horror of war and the terrible reality of killing another man. The terrible reality that in our world people are still called upon to perform this act and the terrible responsibility that lies on our shoulders, having volunteered to oversee it and make sure it is not abused.
If we thought this was new and exciting, I could scarcely believe the events of the following Sunday, when I had been caught without my name-tag (no one had told me I needed one, nor provided me with one) and had been prepared for the worst.
Csgt: (Stern and incredulous crescendo) Mr Hennessey, you forgot your name-tag?
Myself: (With heartfelt remorse) Yes, Colour Sergeant.
Csgt: (Pause, suddenly piano) Mr Hennessey, there’s a war on at the moment.
Myself: (Confused) Yes, Colour Sergeant.
Csgt: Then let’s have some fucking perspective. Now, piss off!
For a wonderful week we thought we had broken clean. In the new digger lingo of chain-smoking Captain Hindmarsh the ‘field’ became the ‘bush’, which seemed a much cooler place to be crawling around. For a wonderful week we thought that now we were allowed to sign out in the evenings and not be required to be back in until the first parade next morning things would be different.
But then we had our introduction to rifle drill. Rifle drill was just drill, but with a rifle. With anything as remotely exciting as the rifle ranges firmly behind us we spent the evening hours we’d imagined escaping to London polishing and brushing and ironing and buffing and first thing Saturday morning trooped out on to the square for four solid hours of marching, just this time with a 4kg rifle to be held, swung, switched from arm to arm and, apparently, slapped—hard.
Four kilograms is not particularly heavy but, under the unseasonably harsh sun and the even harsher scrutiny of the prowling colour sergeants and snarling company sergeant majors and even the immaculate, terrifying form of the legendarily ferocious College Sergeant Major, we spent the first weekend of the term in which we’d been promised ‘grown-up’ lessons and ‘real’ military training in a dull ache. Striking, seizing and grasping inanimate metal and plastic: STRIKE! SEIZE! GRASP!
As I tried to detect a flicker of irony in CSgt Coates’ features as he explained to us that, if our hands weren’t bleeding, we weren’t fucking doing it properly, it wasn’t the painful pointlessness of the present arms! which really hurt, it was the sense that we’d been duped, lulled into a false sense of expectation that the bullshit was somehow over and the real work was about to begin. As the CSgt had already said himself, there was a war on at the moment, and you couldn’t help but wonder how much strike, seize and grasp they were doing down in Basrah.
Then again, down in Basrah they weren’t fighting the Russians either.
In Sierra Leone in 2000, in the early phases in Afghanistan, throughout the whole of our time in the Balkans and certainly down in Iraq, I’m pretty sure that we weren’t fighting the Russians. Russian influence, yes, Russian rifles, yes, hosts of Russian weapon systems and even the odd legacy Soviet vehicle here and there, but the Motorized Rifle Brigade, which was forever threatening us at Sandhurst, no. I had no problem with the theory behind preparing us for any eventuality: the British Army has a fine tradition of being so distracted by what it is currently up to it stubbornly refuses to look round the corner, let alone into the future. My problem was not with the theory of considering all eventualities; my problem was with basing everything we did on those eventualities while different realities were staring us in the face.
I’d grown up on Northern Ireland and Bosnia, and even to a kid at school, the first Gulf War had been an anomaly, the last hurrah of the Cold Warriors who finally got a chance to use all their armour and artillery without the hassle of a decent opposition. Try as I might to focus on the troop of T80 tanks which were apparently threatening us from somewhere north of Camberley, I knew that two hundred and seventy of us were going to commission from Sandhurst in seven months’ time, and within a year we would be in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia and Northern Ireland and not one of us would see a T80, let alone three unfriendly ones. When it came to theory it seemed that, as the great man said himself, ‘When all else fails a blind refusal to look facts in the face will see us through.’
‘A war’ vs. ‘the war’ is an ongoing debate: how do we balance allocation of resources for what is currently happening with what might happen in the future? Even at Sandhurst, as we started our academic studies—lessons in Leadership and Management (Slim Studies), War Studies (movie-night) and Defence and International Affairs (Defence Against the Dark Arts)—we could see that as much energy was being devoted to protecting little empires by the guys at the top as it was to actually fighting our battles, that defence procurement was a Dickensian mess, the Ministry of Defense a lumbering hippo of a department. We loved the idea of the Royal Navy cruising around in two kick-arse aircraft-carriers as much as the next men, but even at Sandhurst we could see that there wasn’t any money around and that, if it was being spent on Eurofighters to fight hypothetical Russians and ships to fight hypothetical battles in the South China Sea, then it certainly wasn’t being spent on body armour and decent vehicles for the fights involving real people stuck out in the desert.
No wonder General Mike Jackson looked so tired: something had to give and it was the bags under his eyes. He was probably knackered from being the only one in the room looking at what was actually going on while the Navy and RAF looked forward and backward and the politicians looked at the floor and nobody seemed to have noticed that we were deployed all over the place, fighting not ‘the war’ but ‘the wars’ and for the time being none of them being taught at the Royal Military Academy.
I still haven’t decided whether the Sandhurst course is astoundingly brilliant or robustly fortunate. The things that matter, we seemed to learn without actually being taught them. The things we were taught, largely useless. The intermediate term was about digging holes and being gassed. We learned that in the event of a nuclear strike the correct procedure is to lie flat on the ground with your head towards the blast and hands covering your balls and wait for the second wave before standing up and dusting the radioactive material off yourselves with a nearby tree. We went on huge marches in protective suits and banged rifles till our arms were fit to drop off, and none of it have we done since.
But we have fought the three-block war.
A US general, Charles C. Krulak, had coined the term ‘threeblock war’ in Marines magazine in July 1999, addressing an only slightly hypothetical situation faced by young Corporal Hernandez, who would have his place in history as the first ‘strategic corporal’. The idea was brilliantly simple: In the post-Cold War era—a future that was not ‘the “Son of Desert Storm” but the stepchild of Somalia and Chechnya’—soldiers would face ‘the entire spectrum of tactical challenges in the span of a few hours and within the space of three contiguous city blocks’. We would have learned this up at Far-away Hall if the Defence Against the Dark Arts teachers hadn’t been such sympathetic good academic eggs and allowed us all to sleep unmolested in their classes. As it was we learned it anyway, enviously watching Josh Hartnett in Black Hawk Down. Krulak drew on the experiences of the ‘grey zone’ operations that had erupted in the wake of the Cold War and saw a new future for soldiering. We’d have probably drawn the same conclusions at Sandhurst if the British had fought in ’Nam but instead we’d managed to pick an improbable fight down in the Falklands so were still digging and clearing trenches.
Sandhurst justified the lack of mission-specific training it delivered; it was a generic leadership academy. Specific instruction—flying for chopper pilots, building bridges for Engineers and counter-insurgency for the Infantry—would come later. It never did. I remembered those assurances a year l
ater when I was sent on the fourteen-week platoon commanders battle course in Brecon, waiting for the up-to-date, fresh-from-theatre-with-sand-still-in-their-boots instructions on new tactics while we spent two weeks cutting plastic triangles and planning ranges and only one morning discussing what we called, with unwitting genius, Operations Other Than War (OOTW). No one was denying for a second that at the spiky end of OOTW the skills required to fight would be the same as in conventional warfare—shooting a guy in the head was shooting a guy in the head no matter what the legal terms of the deployment of troops. The problem was, while we maintained the false distinction between conventional and non-conventional and privileged the teaching of the former, the British Army was doing itself a disservice.
Even our own thinking generals had caught up with the Americans, Rupert Smith in Utility of Force realizing that, although we couldn’t second-guess who the enemy would be and where and how we would fight them, the one thing we could be sure of is that all future war would be war among the people, war that still required at one end of its spectrum, yes, the guts and determination and aggression to stick a bayonet in another man, but was crying out at its other end for the intelligence and moderation and subtlety of approach that Krulak invested in his fictional Cpl Hernandez and that the Americans were sparing no expense in teaching their young grunts.
Once I finally got round to thinking about why I was doing what I was doing, bristling with comfortable guilt and righteous indignation at the contrasting bungles unhappily (but brilliantly) chronicled in the likes of Romeo Dallaire’s Shake Hands with the Devil and Michael Rose’s Fighting for Peace, I realized that these were the battles I wanted to fight. These were the battles that today’s much better educated officer corps should be fighting. So why were we still being given Sidney Jary’s 18 Platoon to read in our first term?
Jary’s was, a punchy, simple little book based on his experience as a platoon commander in World War Two. His leadership was clearly inspirational; it always amused me that he fell firmly into the category of iconoclasts who excelled despite their training, not because of it. Rather like sending people into Basrah with a copy of Stalingrad, it prepared us for the worst, but I couldn’t help thinking there was more relevant stuff out there. We knew we weren’t going to be Jary and we didn’t want to be. My comrades and I had joined the Army to fight the three-block war.
And if there’s any value at all to the experience of the Reading Club, it’s that, for all the frustrations and silliness, in three years we did.
We rocked up at Sandhurst to train for the theoretical ‘a war’ when there were two very real and increasingly bloody ‘the wars’ our Northern Ireland experience was no longer equipping us to deal with. In 2004 we joined the most over-deployed British Army in years and couldn’t understand why Sandhurst wasn’t hammering that home. Those of us who formed up the Reading Club were on the verge of three years, three operational tours, each one a step up the spectrum towards what we all trained for and watched the movies of but only ever vaguely hoped we’d do. In the meantime, we were sent out digging.
We deployed on Exercise First Encounter—the week of digging and sleep-deprivation which was supposed to mark the nadir of our Sandhurst year—with a pre-mixed special brew of super-strength Javan coffee and caffeine tablets which would see us through the nights of digging, digging and more digging. And probably, secretly, we’d been looking forward to it because there was nothing the platoons liked better than getting thrashed and comparing horror stories afterwards: whose colour sergeant was the most ferocious, who had crawled the most punishment miles and slept the fewest hours. Screw the Sovereign’s Banner—the official, year-long competition to see which platoon across the whole academy was the best! What mattered was the post-exercise punditry and one-upmanship and who had lost and broken the most men.
But when we actually lost Donaldson for real—not lost like the non-hackers who bolted when they first got shouted at and went to join the police, not lost like the unlucky ones whose ankles and knees and backs hadn’t been quite up to it and were languishing in the remedial platoon—but lost, dead, like never coming back, having come off the motorbike he’d bought himself as a reward for finishing the first term, it put all the whingeing, all the point-scoring, the whole fucking thing into horrible, unfair, grief-stricken perspective.
Sleepless exercise nights, blistered hands and bullshit we’d signed up for, not funeral drill and delivering eulogies and losing friends. My platoon—XV Platoon—didn’t win the Sovereign’s Banner, wouldn’t go on to win the drill competition or the log-race, but we couldn’t have given a shit because we put more effort into our drill at James’s funeral, put more care into polishing boots to impress his mum and then hold up our heads and come back to Sandhurst to be better soldiers, as James had always been, than any of the other platoons could have imagined.
Summer at Sandhurst was particularly strange. Half of our friends were still at university, finishing their finals and hitting all the end-of-term parties that only a year ago we’d have been at ourselves, bouncing around in fancy dress and buggering the consequences.
Straight from some party or other we deployed on a weeklong urban operations exercise. Ex Dragons Challenge was a terrifying Stalingrad meets Basrah with lots and lots and lots of shooting. It was also the first exercise where they really hammered us with casualties as part of the scenario.
At first being a casualty seemed great. In the middle of an exhausting attack to be suddenly tapped on the shoulder and told to lie down—fantastic. Maybe an overzealous DS would encourage some screaming, nominate a lower-limb injury just to make sure that you couldn’t be hobbled back to the aid post by one man but had to endure the gritty poncho-stretcher drag in which you feel worse than all for the four guys straining to carry you across the ground on a glorified bin bag.
But the urban warfare instructors just loved to emphasize how basically, as soon as war comes to town, everybody dies. Anyone suspected of enjoying the stalling momentum of each attack as point man after point man was killed off moving from room to room was subjected to lots of shouting and, after we’d all sat down in front of some footage of the US Marines ripping through Fallujah, we had as little appetite for FIBUA (Fighting in Built-up Areas) as we did for trenches.
I survived the week by my own ineptitude, not quite throwing myself quickly enough up the ladders, which we were somewhat alarmed to learn still represent our most sophisticated urban assault kit and which we were taught to throw up against bedroom windows like naughty window cleaners with grenades instead of squeegees. On the final attack only ten blokes of the twenty-eight in our platoon were left ‘alive’, which was apparently standard figures for that sort of game.
Urban warfare had been brutal up to a point, but I don’t think we lost control of ourselves. For that unnerving experience we had to wait until we got back and were thrown, with the frenetic pace and intensity of intermediate term, deliberately not letting us draw breath, into bayonet training.
25.vi.04—‘The horror, the horror’
bayonet training is unchanged since pretty much WW1, it should be one of those things which is obsolete but quite alarmingly it’s not. the rumour fuelling all the excitement and extra spice to our current stabbing tuition that the Argylls (a lunatic Jock regiment if the staff we’ve so far come across are anything to go by) fixed bayonets and fought through the position last month outside Basrah—gritty.
i approached the lesson with my usual cynicism, play the game, say the right things and laugh at the absurdity of it all inside your head … the more violent the activity, however, the more difficult it is and the instructors are well aware of this. We were beasted and beasted until we hated the world and the only way to stop the pain was to give in completely to all the screaming and aggression which goes with charging around the assault course sticking sandbag effigies. Everybody has to give in and then we’re just running around screaming at each other like animals, picturing the faces of everyone we
ever hated and going mad with horrible big fuck-off knives.
back in the halcyon days before ‘health and safety’ was invented they used to run the cadets up and down the hills on Barossa after an unscheduled four a.m. wake up and have us mill at the top, beating each other until the testosterone was charging and then pack the sandbags full of knock-off offal from the local butchers. For dubious realism the Colour Sergeants spray fake blood from water pistols as we go round but you can tell they miss the old times.
the bayonet is a nasty weapon and yet it gives the army a hard-on. Logically i would prefer to use a bullet, in fact, fuck it i’d prefer to be twenty miles away pressing a button and pounding artillery on whoever was trying to kill me, but there’s something iconic about this weapon, something personal about it at the top of the hierarchy which everyone understands is all about how close you get to the enemy and so we can’t help but get into it. Then we watched the videos of ourselves on the debrief and I felt a scared judder down my spine—the mad-man charging around screaming obscenities till he has no voice left, exhausted from plunging the end of his rifle into sandbag after sandbag is surely not me, surely?
Bayonet training wasn’t even the worst of it. Chaotically busy as we were that summer, it’s the second term which makes or breaks the cadets as exercise after exercise is crammed into the programme and no let-up for the training in between; we were still dutifully plugging away on our essays. At the time I was reading Norman Dixon’s On the Psychology of Military Incompetence but, having at first enjoyed it, I was now finding it all too close to home.
If all the current strategic discussions, not to mention what was actually going on in hotspots around the world, begged questions of the very conventional, Cold War framework of our course, Dixon’s study questioned the very nature of military training itself. Dixon argued that man is not naturally aggressive, that if we observe the animal kingdom at large there are any number of mechanisms within inter-species conflict to ensure that the participants don’t actually kill each other. Armies are required, therefore, to instill in their soldiers an unnatural level of aggression, and we’d certainly understood that as we lay exhausted on our beds after the bayonet assault course. The problem Dixon identified was the requirement for this artificially heightened aggression to then be contained. This is why the military requires large amounts of bullshit. And boy did we get back into the bullshit.