by The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time;Fighting Wars
The night-tray wasn’t a tray at all, but a room. Once the mess staff had gone to bed, the night-tray was opened, a room with a fridge well stocked with all the booze we could possibly need and the other essentials: fags, Smarties, crisps and Worcester sauce. The piquet officer signed for the key and in theory was responsible for the stock, but everyone signed, or at least scrawled, for whatever it was they took, and the door was never closed.
I learned to love the night-tray that summer, the idea of the night-tray, the reality of the night-tray. Friends, coming from offices in which they had cubicles in twenty-man rooms, e-mails monitored and websites blocked and billed, their days in six-minute chunks, whispering in reply to my calls that they couldn’t be seen to be talking on their mobiles at work, were envious of the laziness of our days and the fact that even at the bottom of the pile I had an office and an orderly, but more than anything they were jealous of the easy-going trust of Army life. One appreciative friend, up for a boys’ weekend when I was on piquet duty, confined to camp and on call but playing long evenings of poker in fancy dress, even passed out and spent the night in the night-tray. I suppose the night-tray symbolized everything that was suddenly good about life, everything that, when we put our thoughts of war to the back of our minds where they belonged, we had pushed through the last eighteen months for.
The paradox of the night-tray was that, after a year and a half of being treated like a child, once we’d got through it all we were treated more like grown-ups than any of our peers and for all the distinctly ungrown-up marching around in fancy dress and the eighteenth-century lifestyle, it was because when we were actually doing our jobs, we had more responsibility than anyone else.
In fact, we were primary-school teachers. Sure, teachers with guns, but a platoon commander was, nonetheless, the guy who sorted out the waking day of the thirty men under his command, taught their lessons, helped with their homework, sorted out their petty squabbles and put plasters on their knees when they fell over in the playground. Granted, they were ten to fifteen years older than your average primary-school class, a lot bigger and uglier and only a little bit better at maths, but they were completely my responsibility. (To those who found the generalization patronizing, we pointed out that the banter went both ways—all junior officers were floppy-haired, brandy-quaffing, huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ inbred imbeciles who’d spent their year at Sandhurst learning to use a fish knife).
And even in peacetime, this was terrifying. Terrifying when guardsmen came to me with their money troubles, not understanding why, when their banks were telling them they were overdrawn, they wouldn’t accept a cheque for the money owed. Terrifying when guardsmen fell in first thing in the morning in paper suits because their clothes had been sent to forensics, still a bit too drunk to remember what they had or hadn’t done the night before but touchingly confidently putting their arrest reports and the conduct of their defence in your clueless hands. Terrifying when guardsmen came to see me because they shared a girlfriend who was pregnant and couldn’t work out whose it was and didn’t really care and didn’t want to pay for paternity tests so could I witness a coin toss. Terrifying most of all when a wincing Monday-morning guardsman would ask to report sick and drop his trousers to dispense with explanations; as we were always saying, in the Army a picture paints a thousand words.
The most basic training modules the Army conducts, the lessons that must be delivered annually to keep any soldier current, were the Military Annual Training Tests, which covered shooting; fitness; first aid; chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear warfare; navigation; and values and standards. One to five were pretty straightforward, bread-and-butter Army stuff, but values and standards incorporated the law of armed conflict, security, health and safety, substance misuse, and equality and diversity. I was supposed to be a personal trainer, lawyer, doctor, social worker and padre, and, looking around my peer group, we were on some pretty shaky hypocritical territory there.
Guard duties were great for conducting interviews with all the blokes; getting to know that Gdsm X was a keen artist and wanted to join the recce platoon or that Gdsm Y was dating a fifteen-year-old, but it was all right because her father liked him and she looked older. They were perfect for joking in the company bunk with Sgt Childs, my ultra-competitive but ultra-competent young platoon sergeant (a new platoon commander’s nightmare: an all-round better second-in-command. Sgt Childs could out-run, -bench and -shoot me, but I nearly killed myself beating him in our marathon first encounter on the squash court, and we were an unstoppable team thereafter). Public duties were fine for dreaming up idle adventures to fill the gaps between guards, taking the boys off for an afternoon water-skiing or recceing low-level training areas with the best pubs nearby, but it wasn’t real, it wasn’t testing.
Exercise Dartmoor Dash was testing.
In the Army way that I was learning, the counterpoint to all the marching and the eating and drinking and the museum living and the entertaining and the running and shooting and the financial and legal and medical advising and the drugs lecturing and the relationship counselling was suddenly a spare fortnight in the training programme and the whole battalion off to Dartmoor for a horrific exercise, a race between all the platoons in the battalion, hundreds of men in little teams across the sodden moor. By the morning of the first day of the exercise half the company had disappeared into the medical tent with ankle injuries and lower-limb injuries and back injuries and many, many spine injuries (not actual back injuries, but lack-of-grit-and-backbone injuries, also known as ‘upper-head injuries’). Those patrols that had made it had cut down onto the roads and hitched lifts on the back of tractors, and only poor old Sgt Barrett’s boys were still unaccounted for, plodding gamely on in completely the wrong direction after he had programmed his brand new GPS upside down.
When the Dartmoor rain closed in, the summer really ended. Sgt Childs and I could only giggle as we shivered uncontrollably, vainly trying to dry off after the river crossing and watching the heartless senior visitors chowing down on warm bacon rolls inside the safety of the Land Rover. We might or might not have been hallucinating when a lone figure appeared through the six a.m. mist, eighty if he was a day and dressed like he’d run all the way out of Chariots of Fire with a dripping moustache and a dripping spaniel in his wake, and shouted a cheery ‘Pongos, eh? Nice morning for it!’ as he disappeared again. It was that sort of exercise.
What we should have stopped to consider was that the Paras and the Marines and the Jocks in the Falklands had basically done exactly what we’d just done, with real bullets. That might have woken us up for a few seconds with a sharp slap, but we were so far gone in public duties and desert yearning that we couldn’t make the link, wouldn’t make the link until two years later when someone would remark in the shattered shell of a compound somewhere in Rahim Kholay in the middle of the Battle for Adin Zai that the last few days had been ‘almost as bad as Dartmoor Dash’. Almost.
For all the relief to be loading up the coaches, stiff and blistered but sedentary and already looking forward to Burger King on the way back, I felt hollow. For all the congratulations that somehow we’d actually got the best time, I couldn’t help but gaze out of the window at the murky hills as we moved off north up the M5, thinking that this was pump.
Somewhere, as I was snoozing on the coach, aching from lack of fitness after a summer of stamping and twirling swords, friends were doing things for real. Somewhere, as we overdid the nuggets and got hit by the instant post-MSG-rush sickness of the junk food, guys I’d slogged through Sandhurst and Brecon with were adventuring in Kabul and posing for iconic snaps on desert patrols in Iraq. Strolling back down the Mall after a swim, trunks hidden neatly under the bearskins and enjoying ignoring the astonished gasps of the queues outside the sandwich shops was fun, but it wasn’t what we’d joined to do and it certainly wasn’t what we’d just humped across Dartmoor for.
Marking Time and Treading Water
We’d joined up and humped acr
oss Dartmoor to fight the three-block war. Bosnia had been the perfect start, classic low-level peacekeeping, help the police, paint a school, build a bridge and boost the local economy by stocking up on pirate DVDs and porn, but it felt like we’d gone backwards: not the next block uptown towards moment-of-truth warfighting but back into the leafy suburbia of an idle peacetime army.
When we weren’t marching through London like the soldiers of the 1870s; we were boozing and ‘exercising’ like the soldiers of the 1970s. Old-school British Army of the Rhine style junkets and back to Windsor to compare the price of beer and whores around the world. As if in subconscious tribute we even organized our company adventure training trip to Germany, where the new platoon commanders, fresh off Sandhurst and Brecon themselves—horizontally laid-back Harrison and ‘goldenballs’ Marlow—got their first taste of ‘real’ platoon command diffusing the situation at the Biergarten after LCpl Redgate had upset the owner by eating the microphone during karaoke night.
Our planning ‘exercise’ in Malaysia probably took the biscuit: three weeks with the Aussies, Kiwis and Singaporese testing contingency plans for an Indonesian play at Malaysia’s strategic oil reserves dressed-up as ‘Command and Staff Training’. We were supposed to be testing the new BOWMAN (already well known across the Infantry as Better Off With Map and Nokia) radio systems which the guardsmen whose only job was to push cubes across the giant map board could have told you wouldn’t work as soon as you actually got it out in the field but was fine for playing solitaire in the comfy gym where we were ‘exercising’, so we didn’t mind.
If we learned anything from a year of very much not being on operations it was the yin-yang nature of the Army. From sipping Moscow Mules and doing pinches of snuff out of Napoleon’s horse’s hoof at St James’s Palace we’d found ourselves slogging across Dartmoor, and within days of getting back and dry we were out lying on a beach in Malaysia and trying to explain to the soldiers from the Corps of Drums that the nice girls they’d ‘met’ in Singapore’s infamous four floors of whores weren’t necessarily ‘girls’, to which they would respond with a grin and shrug: ‘Did it anyway, sir!’
Spiking the LE’s morning coffee with Viagra substitute we’d bought from the dodgy shop where we found the ‘guardsman’ vibrator, which we just had to buy (not to mention the 12-inch chin-mounted ‘Facilitator’, which we didn’t) wasn’t Platoon or Apocalypse Now, it was pure Buffalo Soldiers, and the only thing which brought us back to earth was visiting Singapore’s huge Commonwealth war cemetery. The padre told us all to find someone with the same birthday as us, which was all too easy among the row upon row of serried white stones which were only further reminders that we’d left Sandhurst wanting and expecting something more profound.
From Malaysia, after a bit more marching and guarding, I took my boys on a visit to the Royal Navy, spent a month on an aircraft carrier and marvelled at how tiny and insignificant the little grey box with more than a thousand people living and working in it was against the expanse of the ocean. A change is as good as a rest, and the lucky handpicked few guardsmen were delighted to be on board, would have taken the seasickness over more public duties every time and loved the laid-back atmosphere on board the ship.
We had a wonderful time living out Top Gun fantasies on the flight deck, teasing the sailors for how they carried rifles when they had to and burning 200 litres of fuel a minute through the Mediterranean. We were joined by a Korean war veteran, a friend of the Captain who recognized some fellow landlubbers and regaled us with understated and moving anecdotes of how he’d found himself, a nineteen-year-old National Service second-lieutenant, leading combat patrols through the same Malayan jungles which weeks before we’d been frolicking through like gap-year teenagers. He’d got on what he thought was the boat home from Hong Kong and found himself sailing up to Korea and then winning a Military Cross and burning crypto with the Gloucesters at Imjin River as whole Chinese divisions swarmed the position. Divisions at nineteen, for fuck’s sake, and we’d never so much as made our rifles ready in anger.
We consoled ourselves upstaging the crew in our red tunics when the Queen came on board in Malta, and then rushing to put them back on after she left and the Sun arrived with Danni, nineteen from Coventry, and Nicola T, twenty-one from Bournemouth. As we made our way back towards Portsmouth I smuggled the golf balls I got from Gibraltar up onto the flight deck and spent an awesome half-hour smashing them out off the back of the ship with a five iron, gloriously liberating hooks and fades out into the Atlantic. It was all harmless fun, but that was precisely why it bored us. They teased us on board and referred to us as ‘the trees’ because we stuck out in our combats—but we’d chosen to wear combats for a reason, and we didn’t want our fun to be harmless.
And what really brought home how far we hadn’t come was when we got back into port and my phone came back to life and there was a message from my father in the inbox: ‘Greetings from Baghdad, the Mother of all chaos. A certain amount of incoming in the IZ but none on us. Kurdistan was more stable and able to lose body armour and helmet for a couple of days. Shortly flying to Basra then back to BZN tomorrow. Love, Daddy.’
Unbelievable. He’d had his go in the Middle East in ’91, slamming missiles up from HMS London to convince another few hundred Iraqi conscripts to surrender to the armoured divisions roaring up from Kuwait. It was my generation’s turn now, but he was still first with the snaps of Baghdad, the adrenaline shots of the Pumas skimming low over the iconic Crossed Swords, the toppled statues of Saddam and rubble J-Dam-ed remains of the Believers Palace and other vainglorious landmarks of the broken city.
I didn’t even get to spend Christmas at home, sat up in the officers’ flat in Windsor Castle and playing poker with the equally unimpressed guard who’d opened all the presents and eaten all the chocolate before we’d even got to lunch and were realizing for the first time how crap Christmas telly was.
But when we got off guard, as if in answer to our unspoken Christmas wishes—Santa, I’ve been so good, please send me to the desert—the battalion was alive with excited rumours. The rumours had started, of course, with ‘Sidney’. Sidney oozed a beguiling, privileged charm and was bound to be the first person that the heads of the Army would take into their confidence, and so, when Gdsm Quinlan told me that we were going to Iraq because he’d heard it off Captain Allan who’d heard it off a general on the way to Dick’s T Bar, I didn’t dismiss it out of hand.
We’d have asked Mark to confirm it if he wasn’t already out in Iraq being a hero—he’d already been commended for his bravery and leadership in extracting his patrol from a gnarly ambush—but we knew he was too honest and disciplined to have told us even if he’d known and even if we could. Marlow and I jumped around the mess like excited children pestering the company commanders, but they were all being uncharacteristically enigmatic, so we went to find Faulks. Gdsm Faulks was the commanding officer’s driver and as such usually the second man in the battalion to know anything important. He stonewalled us like a pro, pretending to concentrate on the copy of the Sun which the mess staff thought we didn’t realize they stole every morning before we got down to breakfast. All he would let on was that maybe Sgt Smith, the battalion PT instructor, might know something.
Rushing off to the gym, we wondered what Sgt Smith might know, given that his only job was to plan our Friday morning PT sessions, when invariably something would go awry and our 6-milers would become 8-milers and our 8-milers agonizing 12-milers with the entire battalion mutinous and certain we’d passed that particular tree three times already. What Sgt Smith did know, and for which precious information we instantly forgave him every lung-bursting extra mile and nasty end-of-run surprise exercise of the last year, was that the whole battalion was to muster in the gym that afternoon.
So by the time the officers trooped in after lunch and the rest of the battalion was waiting in the gym, the tingling sense of anticipation in the air was electric. We stood on one side, trying hard not
to grin like idiots while we watched the sergeants’ mess members’ eyes light up with a fire that had burned for three years as resentment that they spent the summer of 2003 on Birdcage Walk instead of the Basrah highway; as the commanding officer announced what everybody already knew there was a roar like a penalty shootout, and guys punching the air and hugging each other with delight.
We were going to Iraq.
Not back to Dartmoor or Wales or out for the scheduled big exercise in Canada which we’d been trying to pretend we were excited about so the blokes weren’t as disappointed as we were—fucking Iraq. Iraq, where it was kicking off again after the post-invasion honeymoon that it was becoming increasingly obvious the British Army had squandered down in Basrah. Iraq, from where I’d be able to send back the tantalizing and heroic e-mails I’d already started composing as I sped down to London that evening with the good news; careering around the Hammersmith roundabout imagining with glee how much easier it would be in a Snatch with a top-cover gunner firing warning shots at the cheeky Vauxhall Vectra trying to cut me up at the lights. I was so excited I was practically winking at the model-fit door girl as I swaggered into whichever overpriced bar it was where someone was having a birthday—Don’t worry whether or not I’m on the list, babe. I’m off to war! So excited that I didn’t get it when I broke the news to Jen and the girls and they didn’t share my ecstatic grin. Didn’t get it that she’d be upset, that she read the reports in the papers not as grisly invitations to come and prove yourself but as ominous threats from a malign force that wanted to seduce her boyfriend away to his idiot death. Didn’t get it that this was news to be broken sensitively and apologetically to those more patient and loving than we deserved.
Turned out no one got it. Bemused up in Windsor the next day, we compared stories of horrified families and tearful girlfriends and strangely nonplussed mates. Surely the frustrated bankers who could all quote Full Metal Jacket by heart would have got it: the boys who’d gone out on high-spending corporate weekends to Vegas and had admitted to having more fun firing a couple of guns on a desert range than dropping thousands in the Bellagio, surely they ‘got’ our excitement. Mostly they didn’t, and for all the encouragement and support that would follow, the first subtle barrier had come down between those who were going away and those who would stay behind; the first hint that things were different when it was all happening for real, that we were no longer ‘mates in the Army’ and they no longer mates we normally saw except when on exercise. They were suddenly ‘civvies’, while we were on the verge of being soldiers.