by The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time;Fighting Wars
I may have even screamed a little nearing the exhausting end at the final impudent targets, popping up long after I’d spent all my ammo and was lobbing smoke grenades I was supposed to have saved for later. I don’t really remember. If I did it wasn’t the theatrical yelling of the bayonet range, the bloodthirsty curdling they wanted to hear; it was something more personal from somewhere deeper down and bollocks to anyone who was listening. I don’t really remember the range but I will never forget the expression on the CSgt’s face, an expression which, more than all the kind words and good reports and prizes and post-mortem assurances, meant that I did learn something that year.
‘Fuck me, Mr Hennessey!’
And nothing. No usual sarky comment, no allusion to how unsuitable I was to be joining his Infantry or his Household Division (even if it was the Grenadiers so he was minded to let me pass out just to undermine them, as he liked to say), nothing at all.
Fighting the system was all very well, but the only way to succeed was to give in.
And once we had, it was easy.
We fooled around, enjoying the elevated status of being last-term cadets. Laughing at the guys in the junior term being thrashed from pillar to post as if it hadn’t been us just months before, and devising elaborate games to see who could get furthest away from Sandhurst and back in one night, living by the motto ‘when in doubt, go civvie’.
Dashing down the M3 for a midweek bender and bluffing your way hungover through the pistol range the next morning was our own little protest at the tendency of the Academy to try and drive a false wedge between the ‘civilian’ and ‘military’ worlds—an outmoded affection for muscular Christianity it had still to fully shake off. Our commandant had written the updated Values and Standards of the British Army, his Academy had a strong moral feel to it, but once we were no longer scared by the whole system, we began to question it and wonder at the creeping social conditioning.
Earnest student campaigners probably wouldn’t have believed it, but Sandhurst was gloriously, effortlessly diverse. From the former rankers who had all the real military knowledge (and to whom we clung like glue) to the ever-fewer chinless Cavalry types, from Celtic exiles pining for real hills and space to the London boys for whom 30 miles down the M3 was too far, it didn’t take much to realize that the diversity of the intake was something to be celebrated, not ground down by the sinister homogenizing process which turned everybody over the course of a year into prematurely middle-aged turds affecting crimson trousers. We teased each other within our own platoons (sniggering like cruel schoolchildren on the back of the bus at the guy who’d never been to London before and whom we convinced the Natural History Museum was the Houses of Parliament) but furiously rejected the implication that there was, or should be, an officer ‘type’. More important, once we’d given in on the ranges and abandoned ourselves to the colour sergeants, we didn’t wonder but knew in our hearts, our exercise-loving, combat-arm-wannabe hearts, that the fitness of the man next to you was more important than his tie and whether he swore or not during the run.
And through stargazing nights on final exercise in Cyprus, each day ticked off in a glorious countdown to Endex, which would see us just two weeks short of the long-anticipated commissioning ball piss-up and all our Christmasses come at once, it was having given in that kept us going. Having given in that had us smearing on thick layers of cam-cream, the waxy combat makeup that had previously been an annoyance, had us roaring like wide-eyed madmen up the steep rock slopes in the driving rain because every sodden minute and aching step further was one closer to the end.
Even when I became briefly and amusingly hors de combat—eyes infected from long hours practising beach landings, squinting in the bright sun and of course not allowed to wear sunglasses because only Americans wore sunglasses and they look scruffy—the proffered get-out of sitting the last few days in the medical tent seemed an affront. It was an offer we’d have jumped on at any point over the last year, cried for in those freezing muddy days on our first ever exercise, but I didn’t dream of taking it. I damn well finished the exercise, stumbling with an eye patch through the long night march to the final attack; more warry and more scruffy than if I’d been allowed shades anyway (which amused and upset the Academy and College sergeant majors in equal measure when they realized that, I didn’t look like an American, I looked like a fucking pirate!).
We posed for photos after a champagne breakfast among the ruins of the training village, the sun obligingly breaking through after the thunderstorms of the night before, and all of us, eye-patched, ankle-bandaged, exercise-fatigued, grinning inanely because we’d finished final exercise, and the rest was formalities. Final exercise was the final hurdle, but in reality we’d cleared it months earlier, the moment we’d given in and started thinking about what came next.
Because what came next was for real. What came next was not marching around the square, playing hide-and-seek with the colour sergeants and make-believe in Surrey woods. What came next was joining your regiment, what you actually signed up for the Army to do. What came next was our new homes, battalions and units spread across Great Britain, Northern Ireland, Germany, Cyprus and Borneo. What came next was maybe even straight out on operations. After the proud, smiling parents and speeches of the final parade, the solemn slow march up the Old College steps and with ‘Auld Lang Syne’ still in our ears, what came next was the terrifying prospect of responsibility.
What came next was command.
3
On the First Block
There are those who believe in progressive training, starting everyone off at a low level and slowly building them up, and there are those who believe in throwing people in at the deep end, literally. Gurkha swimming lessons, so we’d been told, involved chucking poor Jonny in at the deep end and fishing him out just before he sinks, letting him grab his breath and then chucking him in again, until he learns to stay afloat. Stood in the knee-deep snow on the tarmac at Pristina airport, waiting for an onward flight into Bosnia and scarcely believing that with lingering hangovers from our commissioning ball we were in an operational theatre, we felt for the hapless drowning Gurkhas.
Second-Lieutenants Fergus Lyttleton, Mark Bowen and myself commissioned on 10 December 2004 into 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards and were sent straight to join our new family, in the Balkans. The Grenadiers were midway through the six-month winter tour as the UK Light Infantry Battalion supporting the NATO/EU mission, Op Occulus/Althea. It was cold and tedious, and Bosnia and even Kosovo had long since calmed down—the tense stand-offs with Russian-backed Serbia and the KLA a distant memory of four years before and the heroic patience of the original Bosnian peacekeepers of the previous decade already the stuff of modern history. Not that the Grenadiers minded—they were just ecstatic to be out of London and earning a medal for their services. Not since the first Gulf War had the regiment been deployed anywhere other than Northern Ireland and, though they’d become experts at handling the province, they’d watched enviously as the nineties and noughties had thrown up juicy deployments and new opportunities that always fell to someone else.
Finally a Christmas not spent in Belfast or Buckingham Palace and three new platoon commanders to tease for good measure. Fergus, befitting a twenty-five-year-old of his unusual dignity (not for nothing had he been known throughout Sandhurst as the Colonel) and fine head of blond hair, was sent to join the smart and tall men of the Queen’s Company, the Sovereign’s own unit of 110 men standing at an average of 6 foot 4 inches and as smart (as the saying went) as carrots; Mark had been sent to join the short, scruffy, taggy 2 Company, which would suit his generally chaotic admin and equally chaotic hair; and I had been posted, possibly for vague and spurious naval connections but more likely with a sense of mischief, to the Inkerman Company, the ‘fighting Ribs’.
The Inkerman Company was named after the famous battle of the Crimean War, one of the regiment’s proudest honours and, as I was told in no uncertain terms by the sergea
nts’ mess members on my arrival, the ‘soldiers’ battle’. It was so called because the Guards had fought with exceptional steadfastness often without their officers (although not, as the sergeants’ mess mythology had it, because they’d all run away but because they’d mostly already been killed), and the historical lesson was obvious to me: a young and clueless second-lieutenant straight out of the factory, I was very much surplus to requirements. My expectations of Bosnia had been formed by the horror stories CSgt Coates had enjoyed telling once he’d found out that was where I’d be going on leaving Sandhurst; the curious relish in his voice as he’d fondly recalled his months spent in the mid-nineties sorting mutilated Serb bodies from unmutilated Bosnian ones: ‘You had to leave the Serbs out in the sun, so they’d go off, and the families wouldn’t notice, and you’d have to keep the Bosnians in the fridge, so the families could make sure that they were all in one piece—happy times!’ When I’d worried that was a little bit grown-up for me I’d taken assurance from reading General Sir Michael Rose’s Fighting for Peace and imagining myself in front of a thin green line, my platoon and moral courage the only thing standing between some vicious neo-Nazi thugs and the next Srebrenica.
I hadn’t expected to be straight on duty; camp orderly officer for the Banja Luka metal factory—home to the battalion and the various other nations who made up the multinational HQ controlling north-west Bosnia. Doing the evening checks around the Task Force headquarters was exactly the same as when I’d been duty cadet at Sandhurst a few weeks before, only then I’d carried a stick and now I had a pistol. The metal factory itself was like a movie-studio hangar that no one had cleaned up after shooting Terminator. Sprawling compartments of reinforced corrugated iron and improvised stop-gap measures keeping up the walls. Military hardware everywhere among the hulking wrecks of plant machinery which loomed like dinosaur shadows after dark in the Natural History Museum. None of which was more unnerving than the huge, smart soldiers suddenly saluting us round every corner. Each evening the boys would retire to their shipping-container cabins with the cricket (or Dutch porn if one of the guardsmen had sorted the aerial on the TV); in the background somewhere out of sight Fergus, Mark and I would compare notes over pint-sized gin and tonics—we certainly weren’t on a Sandhurst exercise anymore.
When we did get out on the odd patrol—lest we took ourselves too seriously, they had names like Op Stable Door and tended to target the gangsters who cruised around in black-windowed BMW 7-Series, organized crime the real power which had rushed into the chaotic vacuum the conflict had created—we mostly just took photos of ourselves posing in missile silos. It was good, clean fun, and we got to compose exaggerated e-mails home, but it wasn’t magnifique and it certainly wasn’t la guerre.
The Grenadiers were enjoying Bosnia, enjoying being away, putting themselves through their paces in the snow, the perfect blend of operational realism to sharpen professional skills without anyone seriously thinking that everyone might not come home. A regiment in peacetime trains for war; the maxim was all well and good, but unless a regiment in peacetime was on the verge of being deployed the reality wasn’t quite that simple. The one time you could really get a feel for a ‘regiment’, that vague but oh-so-real concept of men and steel which supposedly made our army the best in the world, was when it was ‘on ops’. On ops an Infantry battalion, like ours, became a ‘battlegroup’, and although we had a notion of how things worked in theory, out in Bosnia we were introduced to the practice.
We learned the subtle nuances of who actually holds power where, the long reach of the commanding officer, the lieutenant colonel, the senior officer in charge and his relationship with his regimental sergeant major (for Grenadiers, never abbreviated to ‘RSM’), the senior soldier of the 650-man unit. Maybe twenty years ago you could have drawn an analogy between a battalion and a big factory—the commanding officer the boss, the rest of the officers management, the sergeant major I suppose the senior shop steward, and then everyone else—but there was nothing comparable anymore. For junior officers, used to creeping Sandhurst corridors in fear of the colour sergeants and even company sergeant majors who now saluted us, the men to really fear were the late entry officers (the LEs), salty veteran majors and captains who’d joined the Army before we’d been born and come all the way up through the ranks. They remembered second-lieutenants from back in the day as the chinless idiots who’d got them lost on patrol in Ulster and nearly killed, yet still expected them to clean their boots for them when they came back in. The LEs ran parts of the battalion we’d never come across at Sandhurst, the world of the stores and logistic chain, bullets and beans, all very dull but you couldn’t do anything without it, and therefore them, and they knew it.
If they didn’t pick us up for something, the adjutant would—a captain, probably only six years or so older than we were but the right-hand man of the commanding officer and responsible for all junior officer discipline. Mounting duty to him first thing in the morning would involve an extraordinary flurry of banging doors, shouting and running on the spot, invariably conducted incorrectly, or if done right, done in kit which wasn’t smart enough, and either way extra duties would beckon and you would lose a leave pass or, back home, a weekend.
Faced with such a bamboozling new workplace—the scarily senior headquarters where you knew you’d either salute the wrong person or forget to salute the right one; the strangely hostile old veterans; and at the other end of the spectrum, Support Company, a whole company of recce-trained soldiers and snipers and anti-tank weapons operators and mad mortar men, all senior captains and improbably elite soldiers we could only coyly admire from afar—we didn’t so much join the battalion itself as our respective companies. Six hundred men were too many to know at first but the hundred-man companies quickly became familiar. And I loved the Inkerman Company.
The company commander had recently got back from a UN tour in Africa and had a cheeky sparkle in his eye and a strangely crooked finger that, even before you knew he loved nothing better than teasing the crusty LEs and organizing midnight booze runs, told you he was fun. Seb ‘Gaiters’ Wade reminded me slightly of our Aussie platoon commander at Sandhurst: he gave off that same air which seemed to say, ‘I don’t care how you get something done, so long as you get it done well, preferably better than everyone else,’ and it suited me fine. His company sergeant major was a fearsome giant called Daz Chant, a proper soldier who’d spent time with the Pathfinders and whose favourite word was ‘cunt’ but who projected a similar vibe: Look after my boys and I’ll look after you. The other platoon commanders, Gabriel and Sidney, were a thinker and a joker who couldn’t have been more different or more similar, and were both well liked by the guys, if not always by the sergeants and the company sergeant major. Only a couple of years older than me but with a worldliness which seemed ancient, Gabriel had been crowned the world shin-kicking champion at some spurious village fête in Devon, and Sidney probably the champion of a dozen other sports that only he and his crazy friends had heard of, or else invented. They had hair that would have given a Sandhurst instructor a heart attack and were in the middle of a bad moustache competition. I was in heaven.
So it didn’t matter that we got sent home for a course within weeks, grumbling because we weren’t being allowed to stay long enough to get the medal which would have been our first, and the first of any of our Sandhurst contemporaries. It didn’t matter that the most nerve-racking thing that had happened had been when the hot water failed during my stint on duty and if I hadn’t managed to get hold of the plumbers in time the whole battalion would have been rioting as they stood freezing in the snow in flip-flops and towels waiting for the warm showers. It didn’t matter that our first ‘operational’ patrols carrying weapons loaded with ‘live’ ammunition had been to inspect the same site inspected the week before and had degenerated into giant platoon snowball fights. What mattered was we were getting to know our boys and they were getting to know us. We were becoming Grenadiers.
/> Unfortunately, becoming proper officers and then proper Grenadiers wasn’t enough. We still had to attend ‘seniors’, the fourteen-week course at the Brecon’s Infantry Battle School, and become proper platoon commanders.
It was difficult to say what was most depressing about the long, Sunday-blues drive to Brecon—the horizontal rain, the four p.m. dark or having to pay to get into Wales. It had been hard to leave the companies and guardsmen we’d been working all year to join, and even though we knew we were only being sent on a course, even though we were still Grenadiers and even though we had rank, that paltry but significant lone star on our chests that meant we were officers and could hope to be treated as such, January 2005 felt like January 2004 had—starting Sandhurst, cold, nervous, in the rain, a long way from home.
Our only memories of Brecon were the nightmare flashbacks of Ex Long Reach and Crychens Challenge that had been too traumatic to suppress. The place was all about running, big hills, heavy kit and killing—the best sergeant on seniors didn’t win a plaque, he won a bayonet. The classrooms and corridors were plastered with slogans like ‘pain is weakness leaving the body’ and laminated credos which, when we read them, had us feeling like unsuspecting punters who’d signed up for the whole Infantry thing without the full facts and could we have our money back please and go and join the Cavalry so we could spend the next three months down in Dorset getting drunk and crashing tanks:
Let us be clear about three facts: First of all, all battles and all wars are won in the end by the infantryman. Secondly the infantryman bears the brunt of the fighting, his casualties are the heavier, and he suffers greater extremes of fatigue and discomfort than the other arms. Thirdly, the art of the infantryman is less stereotyped and harder to acquire than that of any other arm.