by The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time;Fighting Wars
It was hardly a great sell. Weeks of getting comfy and well fed in Bosnia had allowed us to bond with our guys but it had blunted the edge we had acquired towards the end of Sandhurst, and we definitely needed it on this pointiest of courses, here in the home of Infantry non-commissioned officer (NCO) training, where the very classrooms bristled with a focused aggression that our post-Sandhurst mindsets were tired of and our student backgrounds resistant to. The officer vs. NCO politics hadn’t existed back when the platoon commanders course had been a gentleman’s affair down in Warminster with London in easy reach up the A303 for dinner. Some farsighted but misguided Warminster entrepreneur had even opened a ‘trendy wine-bar’ to cater to the influx of officers. The popular joke at the time had told about the local bird who pulled one of the new officers and took him round the back for a quickie. Asking politely if she wanted to see his ‘member’, he drew her up: ‘Your what?’ she demanded. Upon which he had dropped his cords to show her, and her face lit up, recalling her similar encounters with the sergeants course; ‘Oh, it’s like a dick only smaller.’
The old ones are the best.
So, like the last time I’d found myself in Wales and channelling aggression and bayonets, there was nothing for it but to give in. Hammering the treadmill in the camp gym in Banja Luka with the iPod playlisting aggressive metal and running through all the massive improbables that would have to occur to fulfil my idle dreams of unlikely adventure, I had known Bosnia was not what ‘it’ was all about. Exciting, yes, and maybe even the sort of noble venture I’d imagined when I’d first decided to join the Army; something constructive and a bit different, somewhere remote and, to civvies back home, a little dangerous. But I’d lost that innocence on the ranges and assumed that the sense of impatience for what was next and better was simply to do with being in training.
Out in Bosnia, however, the guys who’d wanted for so long to get out there were chomping at the bit to get back and start training for Iraq, which was where ‘it’ was at. In Brecon we’d exhausted Bosnia stories by the end of the first week, and our peers who’d spent Christmas by the fire at home but who were definitely headed to Basrah on the first flight after the course finished had more kudos than we did. Even the shamelessly fished-for but nonetheless thrilling replies to Bosnia e-mails from long-forgotten exes signed off with lines like ‘be careful out there’ were forgotten at the bottom of inboxes. At Brecon we climbed back on the dangerous escalation elevator and got back into ‘it’.
‘It’ was psyching ourselves up for the agonizing ‘Fan Dance’—the gruelling 24km race up and over Pen y Fan, where we pushed the floppies to the point of collapse and still got sick enjoyment out of our stint carrying the extra weight of the GPMG (the general-purpose machine-gun) because ‘the general’ was what ‘it’ was all about. ‘It’ was me and Fergus (although not Mark, because he was already too fit) pushing out for runs over the hills in our free time and taking hour-long PT breaks in between episodes of 24 so we could be as fit as Jack. But more than anything else, ‘it’ was having the Y Company PWRR (Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment) tour video played to us again and again in lectures and never getting bored.
I suppose it was appropriate that we were the ‘video’ generation. Half the lecture theatre must have been born in 1982, same year as MTV crackled on to the air with the moon landings and Ladies and Gentlemen, Rock and Roll. It was only natural that we’d graduate from mix tapes and mini discs to full-blown multimedia. The Y Company PWRR video was a work of pure genius. They’d created an MTV diary of the weeks they’d spent under siege in Al-Amarah in August 2004 and set the benchmark for all future Army video compilations. The Lost Prophets’ ‘Last Train’ was the perfect backing track, a poignant enough ending for the obligatory lingering shot of the guys who didn’t make it, but with enough heavy guitar in the mid-section for the action scenes. The synching of the drums at the bridge with the first crackle of rounds recorded on mobile phone and digital camera video became standard, as did the eerie green night vision shots, the slow zoom-in-and-out effect on grainy greyscale stills and the spinning, spurious factoids—‘86 SA engagements’—which lent the video its credibility and its appeal. Montages, the work of a few hours on any standard piece of laptop software, changed the way soldiers went to war.
Previously the mini epics had been exclusively in our heads. The jogging playlist flicked to something suitably gung-ho (a bit of Guns ’n’ Roses usually saw you through a quick 3-mile circuit of the Academy grounds), and your imagination was the limit. But the problem was always how to stream these heroic images back home into the astonished living rooms of all the guys you wanted to silence and girls you wanted to fancy you. The scenario always had to involve an embedded news team (usually hot young reporter, romance blossoming against all the odds to add some spice to the run) and then things got implausible (as if they hadn’t been implausible the moment you pulled your trainers on and started the warm-up).
Once we’d seen the PWRR video, seen how simply Windows Movie Maker fused the images we wanted to take and the music we listened to to psych ourselves up for it, and then gave us the medium by which we would show our efforts to everyone back home, we’d seen the perfect art form. I didn’t know a single guy in the Y Company video, but they were the heroes of the new wars we were fighting, and their video was more vivid, more real and more motivating than all the reportage and training and lectures in the world. E-mails were fun, but as we got back into ‘it’ we realized nothing was going to trump the glorious montages we’d play back on our laptops, immortalizing ourselves as the heroes we had obviously always wanted to be.
But there had been no photos and no excitement in Bosnia which would have warranted making a movie, and there was even less in Brecon. I found myself as tired as I’d ever been on one of our endless long exercises, staring across a fence line at a herd of cows, gentle chocolate brown and retro black and white, chomping away in the field with their silly long eyelashes. I was recceing the stag positions, taking it seriously even though no one was watching or would have cared because we were into ‘it’ by then, furious when one of them saw me, so I dropped into a ditch and observed them through my sights. A field of what appeared to be animals (being careful not to call any of the bleeders ‘cows’) grazing at a distance of 100 metres. Their lead scout had alerted the rest of the platoon with the codeword ‘moo’, and slowly but surely thirty cows were staring through the trees at me, on stag, staring back.
Once we were back in the mess a week later, warm and dry and cramming down thirds of issue cheesecake, I looked back fondly on these slightly surreal moments—behind me thirty grown men scrambling around in the mud, practising how best to kill each other, and in front of me thirty pairs of soft eyes staring with an intense curiosity and myself in the middle, unable to work out on which side of the fence were the dumb animals. But these weren’t the moments which would be played endlessly to Sandhurst cadets when we were boastful ‘voice of experience’ captains and it grew frustrating that, for us Grenadiers, those moments didn’t seem to be coming anytime soon.
By the end of the course, fourteen demanding weeks which hadn’t been as bad as we’d psyched ourselves up to believe because we’d learned by then just to go with it, we were probably as good a bunch of soldiers—by the book, know the right answer, run 50 miles a day over the mountains with our wounded friends on our backs soldiers—as we’d ever be.
We spent a month in the jungle in Africa, tracking hippos through the night-sights, drinking in enormous skies and picking out the Southern Cross. There was no doubt that living and training in the jungle, even the soft Malawi bush, honed your skills, completely melted the outside world away—the longest we’d spent without mobile phone reception in years, so not even the distraction of a bored text message home to pass the time on day-long ambushes, just a copy of Heart of Darkness hidden in our Tactical Aide Memoires. It would have been the perfect preparation, should have been the perfect launchpad to rejoining our
regiments with a few more skills and a bit more knowledge and a lot more hunger, ready to launch off to war with machetes still sharp in our webbing. But for the Grenadiers, something else lay in store.
On the Square and in the Night-tray
In my memory, the London summer of 2005 is almost as sunny as the Iraqi summer of 2006 and the Afghan summer of 2007. It is blurred in a similar way, disjointed and punctuated not by weekends and holidays but by events and places. We came back from Brecon wanting more than anything in the world for our summer to be a blur of battles and deserts, but what we got was spring drills.
The story behind spring drills was that Queen Victoria had noted with displeasure a less than immaculate performance on one of her Birthday parades. Such slackness was unthinkable and for it to be remarked upon unheard of, and in penance and to ensure it was never repeated, the Guards Regiments vowed to spend a week in spring practising their drill for the next 100 years.
Unless Victoria had spoken from beyond the grave, 100 years had expired by spring 2005, but history and maths didn’t wash with the drill sergeant—the warrant officer whose only consolation at being in charge of the drill square, and thus the shoutiest, angriest man in battalion, was the chance to thrash the junior officers every morning before breakfast with the rest of the sergeants’ mess watching unsubtly at the windows with their coffee—more bloody drill.
In all the mental preparation for facing the enemy, somewhere I’d missed the preparation for right-wheeling out of Wellington Barracks towards the Birthday Cake (the lavish Victoria Memorial statue in front of Buckingham Palace), already baking in a tight scarlet tunic on a packed Sunday, and suddenly being hit by the cameras. Thousands and thousands of flashes as the thumping of the band echoes and you glimpse the Old Guard already waiting for you, and, however much you want to damn it all as the same anachronistic crap you hated bits of training for, you can’t because your chest is so swelled out with the surge of the crowd that, only as you come in through the gates and on to the forecourt of Buckingham Palace and remember that here it starts to get complicated and a slip-up would be very public, do your efforts to keep the right elbow up as you carry the Colour start to ache.
We weren’t soldiers that summer, we were actors. Spring drills was our dress rehearsal, and before we knew it our weeks and summer months were no longer days but twenty-four-hour segments of guarding the Tower of London, Windsor Castle and Buckingham and St James’s Palaces, every duty a glorious photo-shoot moment.
The confusion of the French tourists about summed up the confusion of public duties. They were by far the least respectful, most annoying, which was explained by the fact that they assumed we weren’t real soldiers. The Americans just loved it too much to be anything other than Disneyland giddy, the baby-boomers snapping away, all baseball caps and bum-bags and the obliging college girls. The Japanese were cute, sent in a terrified, giggling scutter by the slightest movement of the guardsmen or barked word of command. But the French couldn’t get their heads around the idea that these were trained soldiers—that the medals shining on scarlet tunics were actually anything more than decoration.
We drew in money, that was for sure, but there was no ammo in the rifles, and whether it was Buck or Windsor everyone knew that it was SO14, the Royal Protection Police, who did the actual guarding. The sceptics asked why on earth it needed to be highly trained soldiers stood still for two hours at a time. The realists replied that highly trained soldiers stood still wherever they were told and it might as well be outside a palace upholding ‘the fabric of the nation’ as on a freezing VCP in Bosnia or in a Sangar in Belfast. Did it make us better soldiers—the pride and the discipline? Perhaps it did. The bearskin, after all, had been a pretty practical bit of kit for dismounted troops holding the line against cavalry—the curb-chain protecting the face from the downward slash of the sabre and the deceptive hollow height of the caps themselves tempting and disarming the lancers. We might have wondered how likely we were to be facing lances and sabres but were too busy enjoying being the centre of attention as we marched around.
It didn’t matter to us that we were invisible under the bearskins, that it wasn’t us being photographed but our uniforms and everything they meant. On Tower and Windsor it was our duty to stroll around, stepping out from the officers’ flat to an instant buzz of interest and then marching off with a gaggle of snapping and questioning tourists in our wake. Imperiously silent for most of the time except perhaps to smile faintly at a particularly fit group of Americans and invite them up for tea to try on your uniform, with their astonished giggles and excited incredulity that you ‘actually spoke’ ringing in your ears up the stairs to the flat, past the nodding appreciation of the guardsmen who might have resented the lack of freedom to do the same but expected nothing less of their officers than to make up for it.
And my girlfriend Jen was absolutely right when she came to visit the Tower—or maybe it was Windsor, but there were definitely tunics and tourists involved, and they all blurred into one after a while—when she pointed out how unhealthy it all was that after only a couple of months we didn’t find it strange. She rose above it magnificently, the fawning attention we got from the try-hard tourist girls, which was maybe as hard to deal with as the six-month tour separations; at war you might die but you weren’t going to have a threesome with Texan cheerleaders.
No wonder so many Army boys got married earlier than most—we took for granted the tolerance of our long-suffering girlfriends and then ponced around in front of them. Were miffed if the day clouded over and there were only tens instead of hundreds of tourists waiting as we wheeled in through Henry VIII gate and on to the square at Windsor Castle, wondering what random object whoever it was stood there waiting at attention was going to try and hand over at the handshake—Haribo were popular but the more bizarre the better: swimming goggles, once apparently a sausage, anything other than the ‘Golden Key’ or whatever crap the tourists were being fed by the clueless guides. That we considered it only right and proper for people to stop and stare as we walked past, or to be able to step out into the road and expect the traffic to stop. Proper London cabbies know that officers in uniform won’t, can’t wait at traffic lights and slow the traffic obligingly. The problem was after a solid summer of on/off guards and dangerously high levels of residual Moscow Mules (the St James’s Palace mess speciality) in the bloodstream, we’d forget we weren’t on guard and stride out in jeans and a T-shirt over the Mall, to be nearly run down by the traffic and wonder with puzzled disappointment why no one was stirring in the park as we walked through.
This might not have been what anybody joined the Army to do, but it was dangerously seductive, and all thoughts of guts and glory might have been lost completely among the silver and historical relics on the highly polished Queen’s Guard table if we hadn’t received the frantic call to switch from ceremonial uniforms to combats and start tactically patrolling the palaces in the confused minutes after the 7 July bombs went off. Suddenly the square at Wellington Barracks was a buzz of activity, and choppers in-and-outing shocked generals and focused ‘special’ types in jeans and sideburns with the quartermasters worryingly totting up the holding of gas masks as we wondered what might come next and everyone waiting for the call to go and help the police pull bodies out of the underground.
Peacocking across St James’s Park in a bearskin didn’t draw half as many stares as running through it in combats as we ferried messages back and forth between the detachments at St James’s and Buckingham Palace and checked up on the guys on post who were taking it seriously for once and stating with meaning rather than just repetition that ‘all was well’. (I was briefly reminded of the favourite regimental story about the guardsman who had been on post on the corner of the Mall when the IRA bombed the Carlton Club in 1990. He had sprung to attention when the officers ran out to find out what was going on, and despite the smoke clouds billowing and the debris lodged in his bearskin, had stated as he always had that ‘
all is well’.)
When the decision was made on July 8 to return to the full ceremonial mount, the crowds were enormous, and the atmosphere was electric. There had been grumbles that you couldn’t police the mount, that marching behind a ruddy great band in bright red tunics down the public streets of London was an invitation to a follow-up which couldn’t be adequately protected by some barriers and a few mounted police. But that was the whole point, that was why it felt so good and why chests were more than usually puffed out, the bayonets of the escort to the Colour more than usually shiny as a gesture of defiance that said, ‘This is what we do, this is our way of life, this is why more people from around the world come to this city than anywhere else, and you’re not going to stop it.’
They liked to say at Sandhurst that the Army wasn’t just another job, it was a way of life; a battalion was not the company you worked for, but your family. I wasn’t sure this was necessarily the right way to think about things, was pretty sure it fostered the insularity and sense of superiority which characterized some of the cocks at Sandhurst and the cockish instructors they would no doubt become, but in an idle mess you could see that it rang true.
After the hustle and competition of course culture, everyone being watched and watching, we now embraced the mess life, which began with a full cooked breakfast, coffee and biscuits squeezed in for an hour or so at ten-thirty and then everyone back in for ginger beers and crisps with Worcester sauce before lunch. A good long lunch and a healthy cheeseboard would just about see us through to tea and toast at four, by which time we needed a token run to clear space for a big supper at seven-thirty. Whatever the starter was, it was always in a glass, and if we didn’t like pudding, which we didn’t, there was always the night-tray.