Patrick Hennessey

by The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time;Fighting Wars

  Three Years Too Late

  They sent a US ‘Full Bird’ colonel from the First Infantry Division, the famous ‘Big Red One’, to brief us at the start of our new and hectic training regime. He casually stood in front of the most attentive Army classroom I’d ever seen and carefully explained the concept of ‘huah’. ‘Huah’ was the noise somewhere between a retch and a burp which first the US Rangers, then the US Marines and then with slight variations of tone and emphasis everyone else in the States made all the time. ‘Huah’ was anything from a battle cry to saying good morning to an officer. But ‘huah’ was also a concept, a mentality. ‘Huah’ was apparently holding off 4,000 Zulus at Rorke’s Drift; ‘huah’ was founding the SAS and yomping across the Falklands. As he quickly rattled through a capabilities brief of the US Army and which bits of it we might come across out in Iraq, it seemed to all of us that ‘huah’ was having an army so big you had more guys sitting in Korea just in case than we had full stop. Apparently we would have to train hard, it was going to be a tough few months, and ‘huah’ was not sitting in a warm Land Rover enjoying a fag while your guys were out on a night exercise.

  As it turned out, pre-deployment training wasn’t particularly ‘huah’ at all.

  With all the earnest enthusiasm you would expect, we rushed off to the library to get out Teach Yourself Arabic books and histories of Iraq too heavy to ever be anything other than extra weight on Friday marches. Hours were spent balancing platoons and companies, the right number of medics per section, who was best on the venerable but brutally reliable GPMG, who would be the drivers, the signallers—in those early months of excitement the atmosphere was terrific and the motivation to work hard only increased by the continued grumpiness of the wives and girlfriends learning that a ‘six-month tour’ didn’t include the two months before that we would be permanently away on exercise.

  Our enthusiasm didn’t seem to be matched, however, by those who were supposed to be training us. Operation Training Advisory Group had sprung up from the old Northern Ireland Training Group, where they had been pretty slick at delivering essential pre-deployment training—they had thirty years’ experience. But when the law of armed conflict instructor forgot himself he’d lapse back into talking about what to do out on patrol in Armagh, not Al-Amarah.

  We laughed off the slips of the tongue and the mapping of Salisbury Plain that turned Warminster into Baghdad and Somerset into Iran. At least in Copehill Down Village an approximation of an Iraqi village had been created out of shipping containers so that the more clueless young guardsmen wouldn’t imagine that Azubyar looked like an East German town, all gabled red roofs and three-storey brick buildings which we nonetheless practised searching through for the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment boys playing enemy and civilians in Adidas trackies and Camden-market keffiyehs, running around shouting ‘Ali Baba’. Not that we attacked it in the end, someone in their wisdom choosing instead to test our suitability to deploy by launching the battalion in an enormous forest assault, our tactical effects system vests beeping all the way into the trees as the Plain was turned into a giant game of laser tag to inject realistic (and terrifying) casualty play into the exercises.

  Leading the Inkerman Company over the line of departure, groggy at dawn after the stumbling night insertion, we’d been chuckling with Seb Wade, the company commander, at the fairy-light farce of the Queen’s Company in the forming-up point, lit up like Oxford Street at Christmas with glow sticks on their helmets because they’d all got lost. We weren’t chuckling ten minutes later, my break-in platoon massacred before we’d breached the wood line and the little screen on my vest informing me that I had a gunshot wound to my lower back. Propped up against a tree, remarkably calm for a dying man, I directed the incoming sections up the slope into the murderous enemy ‘fire’. Grinning guardsmen sprawled all over the forest floor, pointing delightedly at their beeping screens when told to get up off their fucking arses: ‘I can’t, Sergeant, I’ve been shot in the lung.’ As I was tossed over someone’s shoulder and alternately dragged and bounced the long kilometre back to the make-believe aid post, I took solace in the fact that, as far as I knew, there were no forests in Iraq.

  At Sandhurst the frustration that our training had seemed irrelevant had been a mere irritant; we were, after all, training for ‘a war’, and one model was as good as another. The DS loved to repeat the mantra ‘train hard, fight easy’, which seemed to lack optimism to those of us who hoped to ‘train easy, fight easy’ but probably recognized the more fundamental truth that, whatever else, you wanted to avoid fighting hard (as if there was such a thing as ‘fighting easy’ anyway). As the Yanks put it with all the unironic schmaltz we would have hoped from them, ‘Let no man’s ghost say, “I wish I had been better trained.’ ” What pissed us off, as we shared six Snatches throughout the battalion, stood for hours on cordons, looking out over Salisbury’s rolling green hills, lush with spring, and squinting out at the Stonehenge crowds towards the A303, was that surely now, with weeks not months to go, we were training very much for ‘the war’, and it was a war with a lot more sand.

  We moved from Salisbury up to Thetford, everyone by now exhausted by exercise after exercise, days when we were in scenario, days when we were on stand-down and snuck into Tillshead in stolen Land Rovers for newspapers and sweets; fully tactical, non-tactical, gloriously illogical ‘semi-non-tac’. In a desperate attempt to focus flagging minds and raise flagging spirits, we changed into our desert combats.

  For the first day this worked, and we got a lift from the thrill of finally putting on the combats that meant something.

  Then the weather closed in, and after mild weeks on Salisbury Plain in windproof smocks, we shivered in the lightweight desert gear and, as the rain came down, we looked ridiculous in green Gore-Tex jackets with damp yellow legs sticking out of the bottom.

  Real progress wasn’t made on serials or under the instruction of stuttering OPTAG NCOs, who admitted that they had only been on a weeklong visit to Iraq, sirs, gents, or the bullish SO2s, passed-over majors who’d done a whole tour so wouldn’t take any questions at all and fuck you for asking. As I realized was often the way in the Army, whether cleverly, intentionally or happily by accident, progress was made in spite of the training that was being done. The time we were spending with our platoons, how intimately we came to know our boys, their strengths and weaknesses, how much closer we became as a mess when the mess was no longer a building to be dashed from as soon as possible down to London, but a dripping tent in which we snatched quick hands of bridge during hard training.

  Mates became comrades; Harrison and Marlow no longer a surfer and a boxer with whom to take it in turns to wind up the LEs but the guys you depended on, and who depended on you; the new CSM, Scully, a sarcastic legend of Sandhurst days, no longer someone to argue with over haircuts but the man who wouldn’t, couldn’t let you down; Seb no longer the ever-green, good-time boss but the commander you loved for standing up for his company, shouting down battalion HQ as they made improbable, impossible demands.

  There was something wildly indulgent about the build-up to a deployment, the morbid pleasure of drawing up a meaningless will, working out who gets your CD collection and taking advantage of the subtle emotional blackmail of ‘going away’ parties. I sent out an invite which promised ‘like the wedding from The Deer Hunter but with better hair’. It was an iconic snap of two squaddies marching some detainees down the road—too good an opportunity to miss, knowing that most of my friends, if pushed, probably had questions and qualms about the whole Iraq thing anyway. ‘Goodies,’ said the arrow pointing at the soldiers; ‘Baddies,’ said the one pointing at the prisoners, ‘it really is that simple’. But all the time ‘the real thing’ was in our minds: documentaries on the news, the inexorable press build-up to the hundredth soldier to die (which had the morbid tabloids cheating and counting the poor guy who had a heart attack and died of old age tucked up in his bed in Basrah). We should have paid more atten
tion to Mark’s real-life reports of life ‘down there’—he’d lived it, after all, and his measured refusal to share in our gung-ho enthusiasm was telling, but our minds were elsewhere.

  Good soldiers don’t plan ahead. We spent every penny we hadn’t yet earned on extravagant, teary girlfriend trips abroad and badly behaved lad-weekends to Eastern European capitals because at the back of our minds was always the thought, You can’t take it with you.

  It might have been hard on mothers and wives and girlfriends, but as the late-night doors and gates closed and we drove off with waving hands still looking out of windows, our thoughts were already in the sand.

  4

  Welcome to Fucking Iraq

  Twenty-seven long months and nineteen days after I had sent my first snivelling e-mails from Sandhurst, I could finally send a dispatch from ‘the front’.

  07.v.2006—‘Welcome to Iraq’

  whoops-a-daisy!

  i guess I shouldn’t have shouted ‘COME ON THEN’ out of the back of the chopper as we flew hard and low over the Southern Desert out of Basrah on Friday …

  it looks like they did. [Two days after we arrived in Iraq a Lynx helicopter went down over Basrah with the loss of the four service personnel on board. Although we watched the whole thing from the sidelines, our anxious mothers were not to know.] but then how could I not have done with the tailgate down and from the rear seat the iconic hulks of burnt-out wreckage of ’91 framed perfectly by the rear gun and the loadie watching his arcs with his feet dangling down as we hammer along at what seems like just yards above the dirty sand?

  it’s all I can do to stop myself expecting him to turn around with a grin and a packet of Marlboros in his helmet and drawl about giving women and children ‘less lead’.

  the rows and rows and rows of blue cyalumes marking out acres of hardware in Al Udied and the sudden plunging of the Hercules into darkness as we cross out of Kuwaiti airspace and begin the jerky corkscrew and roller coaster blackness of the tactical descent into the APOD have combined with the lack of sleep and the Star Wars dusty nothingness revealed by the dawn to numb our ability to distinguish between the films and the books and the so long anticipated reality.

  there’s a part of me that knows we could have done without what’s been going on in Basrah over the last few days almost as much as our mothers and girlfriends could have done without the agonizing wait of the Op MINIMIZE which was immediately called. [In any operational theatre, as soon as a soldier is seriously injured or killed there is a blackout of all communications back home. This ensures that the family hear the bad news first through the correct channels.] Certainly the poor guys who died could have done without it, as could the boys who stood on the cordon for eight hours while bloody violence unfolded in the city which we used so famously to patrol in berets.

  and I’ve nothing but envious respect for the now legendary platoon commander who had been first onto the baseline and was still there holding the crowds at bay hours later when the General came up on the all-informed net to give encouragement and reassurance and explain the delays were ‘because there were many things to be factored into the extraction plan’. Crackling from the ground and with the angry pops in the background, he cut in with a curt: well I’ve been here five hours, I’ve got a T2 casualty, four T3s and a broken down wagon—factor that into your fucking extraction plan.

  he could have done without it, his casualties could certainly have done without but we’d be lying if we didn’t admit that it sharpened the mind.

  apparently it’s all about hitting the ground running.

  it’s just a shame that for us, that running currently consists of once round the airfield for morning PT and not off the back of the choppers to reinforce the beleaguered Shaat Al Arab.

  what was kind of sweet was the apparent surprise and shock of the public back home as we sat in the DTDF watching the rolling hyperbole and outrage on Sky News. Why was everyone surprised at the attitude and celebrations of the crowd? How did you all imagine things were normally down here? It’s not exactly as though one just strolls into town to buy fags and a paper from the local mini-mart.

  so, as long as we don’t walk anywhere (landmines), drive anywhere (roadside bombs), stand still anywhere (snipers and mortars) and now it seems fly any where—it’s perfectly safe.

  as for all this famous Arabian hospitality I’ve been reading about, I’ll take my chances with the petrol bombs and IEDs. It seems unfair as I desperately try to educate myself so that I can wage war with cultural and religious sensitivity. Rest assured you won’t find me accidentally baring the soles of my feet to a woman as I shoot her husband and heaven forbid I knock over a Quran in the house of the man I’m arresting and detaining for three years without trial.

  hearts and minds people, hearts and minds.

  welcome to fucking Iraq!

  The first thing I can clearly remember beyond the fug of the heat and the jet-lag haze of reception Staging and Onward Integration and endless processing through South Cerney and Brize Norton and Al-Udied and Basrah Air Station and Transit Camp 2 until none of us had a clue where we were or what day it was, was a pog. Sat in the Shaibah NAAFI, the Navy, Army, Air Force Institute cross between a café and a corner shop and which had the look and the feel and the smell of a (dry) chain pub, as the last dregs of excitement from the lights-out steep pitching of the Hercules as it crossed into Iraqi airspace and landed hard at Basrah and then the iconic chopper ride low across the desert seep away in ennui, I realize I am staring at a pog.

  The currency is dollars for iced coffees from the ‘Oasis Café’ and pepperoni passion from Pizza Hut or meatball deluxe and a Snapple from Subway, and change is not in coins but pogs, little cardboard discs with pictures on the side: Apaches for a dime, M1 Abrams tanks for a nickel, waving Iraqi kids for a quarter. We didn’t cover any of this in training. Outside the Welfare Village, air-conditioned SUVs ferry staff-officers back and forward from National Support Element, parked up alongside steaming Warriors, mini-tanks just back in off patrol or Snatches stocking up with Gatorade before pushing out on convoys. Fergus made the point, pretty spot on, that if Al-Udied with its rows and rows of light sticks and vague shadows of endless USAF jets and presumably a token RAF Tornado older than me parked up somewhere near the back, was Star Wars, then Shaibah was pure Blade Runner.

  Trying to get our bearings, we queued at the bar between blanket-stackers in Bermuda shorts and flip-flops and stinking guys still in their body armour with rifles slung. We’re all in hysterics when we find ‘Dell Boyz Gift Shoppe’, where you can buy towels with pictures of the Virgin Mary on one side and Islamic blessings on the other, not to mention every pirate DVD you can imagine and even fake Balkan Sobranies, which we just have to get because nothing will upset the old crusties more than junior officers smoking pink, gold-tipped cigarettes.

  The first e-mails home should probably have told tales of pogs and discounted Oakleys and the uneasy side-by-side of the Welfare Village and the helipad, thundering Merlins in and out of Basrah with people actually working or worse, still injured, while life in ‘Shaibiza’ ticked on to the beat of cruel British Forces Broadcasting Services (BFBS) radio programming throwing out dance anthems as if it was a normal Friday night. They should have told of the sense of being in the foreground of Bruegel’s Fall of Icarus, there was a war going on somewhere, but we were watching it on Sky News stuck in the DTDF or on picnic tables in the Welfare Village, not even getting to see, let alone be part of, the action. They should have told of the frustration of being Rear-Operations Battlegroup, but they couldn’t, so we just stayed quiet and waited for something to happen.

  As Rear-Operations Battlegroup (ROBG), the chances of that were fairly slim. Broken down into company groups tasked with running the Detention Facility (DTDF), guarding Shaibah itself, patrolling and securing the routes in and out of Basrah with one lucky bunch up in Baghdad, it was clear that most of our jobs would be pretty steady. We’d been ecstatic when it was
announced that the Inkerman Company would rotate through Baghdad, but would have to do its share of time running a glorified POW camp to earn it. After all the infantry indoctrination we’d got out on operations we were just another bunch of Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers, watching enviously as the reserve battlegroup saddled up in Warriors to push out on strike ops in Basrah itself.

  I think it was resentment against our REMF status that made tempers short in those early weeks, the Senior Major snapping like a wind-up dog at everyone, late entry officers busily feathering their own nests while we crammed ourselves into bursting tents. Well-connected corporals would glide by in pickup trucks while the intelligence officer had to beg for a bicycle, and in the absence of having anything real to do and the frustration at being surrounded by other units who did, silly regulations and duties flew all over camp. Flip-flops and shorts were banned amid howls of protest from the fatties who hung around all day tanning and the more legitimate protests of the guys who came in off twenty-hour sweltering patrols and wanted to relax.