by The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time;Fighting Wars
Rear-Operations Battlegroup was a shit job, but it was the making of the Reading Club, and in the same spirit of defiance with which we had sacrificed sleep and ease for the principle of darting back to London from Sandhurst for civilized food, we foraged for chairs and books and set up round the side of the Crow’s Nest, our little haven for reading, tanning and purging. For our task in the DTDF the normal three-platoon structure of the company had been abandoned, and we were now two half-companies. Harrison and myself in one, which meant I did the night shifts and Harrison—not known as ‘straight eight’ for nothing—could get his fat head down and then make brews for Seb during the day. Marlow and Bysshe in the second. Bysshe was attached for the tour with his fellow Coldstreamer, ‘the Amazing Sugdini’, both Sandhurst contemporaries of mine, so the desert was beginning to feel like a bit of a reunion. Marlow was strictly junior, but Bysshe was attached and had an unnerving habit of looking more stressed than he actually was, so they probably shared the duties out more evenly, but it never bothered me, I liked the cool nights and the rare solitude.
Fergus and the Queen’s Company had deployed straight up to Baghdad, and Mark and 2 Company were training Iraqis in Dhi Qar, which meant, to our sadness, that the three of us who commissioned together would miss each other on our first tour. As it turned out, Fergus was fine, putting in good performances in the ‘manly drinking competitions’ (points awarded for ripping the bottle cap off with your teeth and pouring as much water as possible over your head) he staged by the pool with Reynolds, the other Queen’s Company platoon commander. They must have had enough time on their hands because every so often we’d get a fax or e-bluey which read simply ‘COCK’; it was good to know there were some constants. Mark wasn’t so lucky, busy getting his company commander out of ill-advised fights with large American contractors, but then he’d done it before, so it wasn’t really his first time.
The rest of the Reading Club was whichever young-uns were around. Barty, the brand-new officer out of Sandhurst yesterday and wide-eyed with it all, had somehow found himself with Support Company, who resented such a junior imposter and worked him like a guardsman. I was delighted that Big Nick Tobin, a veteran of the mighty XV Platoon at Sandhurst no less, was in the squadron of Queen’s Dragoon Guards (QDG) attached to us for the tour, and when they weren’t out patrolling—which given that they had tanks and we had Land Rovers was most of the time—he would join us.
Despite living on top of each other, we barely saw each other, but for an hour or so every other day as one patrolling multiple came off shift and the DTDF handover phase was ongoing, we could lie out in the sun, hidden by the canvas, our little whinges drowned out by the generators, and wonder how it was that all that we had dreamed and boasted of had come to this—lying in pink boxer-shorts, sunbathing with a novel in between shifts as a prison warder and episodes of pirate DVDs.
We needed a neutral space. On tour you were never alone, never off duty. For six months people wore nothing but uniform, maybe the desert shorts and a plain T-shirt to really relax on a slow day, but combat pyjamas every day for months on end. We’d snuck out civvies with us, hidden in the bottom of our bergens in anticipation of illicit trysts with sexy journos up in Baghdad, but they only ever got worn in the tent on a Friday night just to break the monotony of yellow and brown. Hidden behind our tent, even if only for half an hour every other day, we didn’t have to pretend to the guys that running the DTDF wasn’t monotonous toss, didn’t have to assume the serious focus that the sergeants’ mess expected of us now everything was ‘not a drill’, could talk amongst ourselves as friends rather than colleagues. We talked about our expectations, our fears and hopes and whether it was wrong that they remained a little bloodthirsty, even after guys started getting killed.
Out in Iraq there was nowhere normal to escape to except behind the tent, where Harrison could shamelessly immerse himself in surfing magazines and Marlow and I could use the long words we’d learned at university without the boys accusing us of being ‘gay’.
At 56ºC the pages of Wilfred Thesiger’s The Marsh Arabs begin to fall out of the book and are scattered by the wind into the desert and marsh whence they first came. Trying to describe how hot it is in Iraq in June becomes quite difficult when well-meaning friends and family fail to sympathise on the satellite phone: ‘Yes, but it’s pretty hot at home too, well into the thirties this weekend.’
Of course it’s not all Thesiger out here, but I notice that escapism is not necessarily high on the agenda. Michael Herr’s brilliant Despatches—seemingly the most guttural and relevant book on Vietnam around—is accompanied on the shelves by Chicken-hawk from the same war and other, less literary but perhaps more relevant, discussions of recent conflict and peacekeeping operations: Cockburn and Cockburn’s eerily prophetic Saddam: An American Obsession, General Rupert Smith’s Utility of Force and even—with shocking disregard for the baggage allowance—a handsome Everyman Classic hardback copy of Clausewitz’s On War.
War is also a theme in the fiction we have brought. Catch-22 resonates particularly. Right now the British Army’s very own Major Major Major Majors are scouring the desert for soldiers wearing illegal sunglasses, and even Heller would have been impressed by some of the bureaucratic nonsense which stems from the hundreds of desks behind which administrators and staff officers spend entire tours. The Count of Monte Cristo and Don Quixote are perhaps more swash and buckle than fire but are still very much soldiers’ tales. Don Quixote was perhaps an ambitious book to bring out—I have never managed to finish it and periodically resume the fight with such an assurance of failure that I am worried now that if I do finish it out here it might be tempting fate.
American books include The Day of the Locust and Brett Easton Ellis’s Rules of Attraction and Glamorama. Period and contemporary portraits of Western consumer indulgence and decadence, the joke becomes that (like our complete box-set of The OC) we have these to remind us of the greed and the label culture we defenders of the West are fighting to uphold. Certainly Rules of Attraction smacks of nostalgia for the boys for whom halcyon university days have never seemed so far away.
I knew I was right to bring out a book I already know by heart, Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, especially for the scene at the end in which the drunk Major, now a Field Marshal, offers the bemused protagonist a bottle of champagne from the back of his limo in the middle of ‘the biggest battlefield in the history of the world’. My other comforter from home is Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which is perhaps even more appropriate. Uncle Toby is, after all, a suitably military man. But, more profoundly, Tristram Shandy has an ill-fated beginning, a confoundingly muddled story and no coherent ending. It is touched, as I realise are all the books we have been enjoying out here, by a sense of the surreal, an acute sense of the slightly mad. Thesiger’s escapism, Herr’s sense of fear, Heller’s bewildered sense of the absurd, Easton Ellis’s psychosis, and Cervantes’ Knight of La Mancha’s deluded faith all seem more immediate in the strange alterity in which we find ourselves.
We acquired a 4 × 4 and wrestled driving clearance from the Mechanized Transport Platoon (‘Because officers just don’t drive, sir!’) and trundled to and fro from the Crow’s Nest in Camp 4 to our new office, listening incongruously to Johnny Cash and Elvis. The warden may have thrown a party at the county jail, but I was suddenly the junior warden of the Shaibah jail and I don’t think we could have got together much of a prison band.
There was a peculiar calm in the peace of the exercise yard; the holding facility for detainees awaiting transfer to the Iraqi justice system was an oasis of tranquil efficiency amid the general bustling chaos of Shaibah Logistics Base. In the initial processing and interrogation compound the scratched Arabic messages on the cell walls encouraged new arrivals to look forward to the ‘easy life’ that the detainees enjoyed.
Not that it made it any easier to explain to the young guardsmen why the blokes they were guarding, hardened criminals, most responsible for
at least the murder of civilians and often of Coalition soldiers, had better living conditions than they did back in the camp. Why the prisoners we weren’t allowed to call prisoners (detainees, if you please) were fed so well and why the air-conditioning was a higher priority in the cell block than it was back in Camp 4. The delicately balanced legal arguments that supported the fragile legitimacy of the system meant we handled a bunch of villains with kid gloves to make up for the coach and horses the UNSCR 1456 was riding through quaint notions like habeas corpus. I suppose it was all in keeping with the topsy-turvydom of the place that, handing over to Harrison in the middle of our first night shift, we realized that arguably the most sensitive cog in the whole machine was in the hands of a couple of frustrated lieutenants and a dozen resentful guardsmen. Through the duty shift you had to keep looking at the ‘phone’ on the desk as a reminder that Seb answered straight up to the two-star divisional commander, and that just before we arrived someone had accidentally dropped a Quran while moving one of the detainees to a different cell, and 10 Downing Street had been immediately in the loop.
Even when on one of our early shifts we were mortared for the first time—grinning under the table during the attack and then strutting around afterwards with self-importance for having been on duty when it happened and we first came ‘under fire’, spinning wild hypotheses that the enemy had been aiming straight for the DTDF itself as a prelude to a mass break-out and imagining the accolades we would get for thwarting such an unlikely event—most of the detainees slept through it. The excitement of the lock-down and the soak period and the sirens was diminished when you knew that the Bangladeshi guys working in the Pizza Hut kept on delivering right through the ‘attacks’. Anything interesting in our prison we couldn’t have written home about anyway.
The most exciting thing was finding a laptop that would accept the dodgy DVDs of Over There; watching them while on duty must surely have constituted some supreme form of post-modern irony, but we never got round to it because, to everyone’s amusement, the roving sentries caught Detainee 819 wanking in the exercise yard.
After about a week the novelty and sense of false importance we got from screening everyone had worn off. We stole some free weights from someone else’s gym, and the boys stocked up on protein shakes and benched and dipped and curled on one side of wall while the detainees prayed and walked and played Ping-Pong on the other. For all the latent homoeroticism it was just another sweaty way of passing the time, and we were no freer in our gym than they were in their yard.
Riding Top-cover
Fortunately, we discovered a better sweaty way of passing the time and snuck off on patrol with Tobin and his boys. With all their experience it was the attached squadron from the QDG who were doing the bulk of our patrolling. Laid-back and swept-up officers and wise-cracking valley-boy NCOs, they were an easy bunch to like, and as soon as we got the nod from Seb we were begging them to take us out on patrol. It would have been wrong for us to have commanded them on our own, and no one wanted too many chiefs, but we were so desperate just to get outside the wire by that stage that we were happy to take off our rank slides and muck in on top-cover.
Most soldiers after a few weeks of bouncing around every day perched vulnerably out of the top of a vehicle waiting to be blown up would readily say that being a top-cover sentry is a pretty thankless task. It wasn’t exactly what months of leadership training had been invested in us for either, but the troopers on a busy and nerve-racking schedule were only too glad to have a night off if some idiot Guards officer wanted to do their job, and, as it turned out, I liked ‘top-cover’ about as much as anything I’d ever done in my life.
19.v.2006—‘Finally …’
so, after weeks of boredom, a little something
if being mortared was like drunkenly losing one’s virginity—slightly blurred memories of archers/baileys tipsy party and excited giggling story swapping the next morning with all your friends and Friends in the background—slightly painful and slightly disappointing, saying you hope he won’t say anything but secretly hoping he tells all his friends etc etc—then getting out on a first Op took things to another level
i have never been so scared and excited at the same time, extreme sports can piss off, freefall is about as gnarly as hung-over Sunday brunch at your local gastropub
Op SHAIBAH EAGLE was a little heli-mission to drop down towards the Iranian border and have a peek at a self-styled commando unit of Jaish Al Mahdi who’ve been busy lining the streets with IEDs and firing in last week’s rockets. A couple of dummy drops onto local corrupt DBE (department of border enforcement) posts, just to keep the dodgy bastards on their toes, before putting down on the high-threat IED route and doing a foot patrol clearance, long haul through the night back up to our base location.
of course, midnight, waiting on the pad—adrenalin shaky and immobile under the weight of new robocop-esque body armour, great at stopping the rounds but not much chance to run away—news comes in that the threat level has just upped to HIGH (G2 report increased likeliness of kidnapping) and so the bird has been tasked elsewhere—not enough choppers to go round as it is without them getting shot out of the sky.
in classic army style, we’ll go anyway, in the vehicles
so it’s all change and suddenly riding top-cover in a Snatch, the world illuminated bright green through the night sights and the midnight breeze still hot blasting against the sides of your face. gulping down great lungfuls of clammy, diesel air as we fly out of the main gate and into the real world, past the blown-out shells of old suicide detonated car bombs and even a downed Iraqi fighter jet, still sticking nose first out of the desert
now headlights on, charging at a forty that feels like eighty, zigzagging across either side of the carriageway with what little traffic there is around getting the hell out of the way as we take aim through the night sights just in case.
two years ago, after the initial war, we could drive these roads in soft-skin vehicles, now i’m straining my eyes with incomprehensible levels of concentration, scanning the mountains of crap that unhelpfully line every possible route and the palpitations are real because the huts and the dogs are moving too fast to take in properly and this is the real thing, top-cover, lead vehicle. The ambient light from the oil-flares works perfectly for the CWS and then the split second heart beat skip—a mortar surely looms into view, a glinting sinister round metal tube pointing directly at the driver door sticking out of the bank and there’s a lifetime long pause which lasts a second before I’m screaming down the PRR ‘where’s the fucking command wire, where’s the FUCKING WIRE?’ until a last minute familiar font presents itself and we carry on zooming past a discarded Coke bottle
it’s an exhausting, surfing balance experiment, fighting for position and a decent view but trying to stay low from the threat as the Snatch bounces from one carriageway to another with fractional warnings before crashing over potholes with a dull hammering of knuckles and elbows bruising and bleeding in the dark.
and then silence
lying-up on the fringes of a village, lots of activity, maybe too much for 1 a.m., Tobin and team push forward while Hennessey and Co. keep rifles trained on the huddle around the bicycle in the town square. clear as computer game daylight i flick the cross hairs on and almost without realizing I’m doing it, i take up the drop on the only adult male in the centre of a group of children and, him not knowing i’m even there, i scan his robes for any concealed weapon while the boys push forward.
breathing calm and regulated now, finger almost indecently flirting with the safety catch, tracing light and teasing circles over the small bud, feeling every detail of the slight indent F for fire and ghosting now over the cool metal of the trigger—an incredible and unplaceable feeling of responsibility, sinister and strangely ecstatic, bewildering calm and almost elation to have this stranger perfectly lined up, a fraction of a second—two silent fractional movements and one 5.56 mm tracer round away from me and eternity and
slowly from under his robes he pulls out another bottle of Coke and takes a swig.
and then nothing, and we’re off at top speed, no need to stay around, we’re back into camp and the sudden wave of vomited release and euphoria, all the bundled up stomach knot of nerves and concentration and suddenly noticed ear-burning knuckle-bleeding elbow-bruising from hammering around in the metal shell of the Snatch—slow pain and dull ache of huge body armour and the burn of a shoulder that’s held the rifle up for far too long, ripping off of helmets and peeling off of sweat drained shirts and stinking armour and sparking up of fags even though we know that smoking kills
and funny, but it’s very difficult to go straight to sleep
The fun should have gone out of it pretty fucking quickly when the first patrol from the battlegroup got hit, when Lt Tom Mildinhall and LCpl Paul Farrelly, who’d been scoffing at the same tables as us hours before, were lying broken in the morgue on the other side of camp. It woke everyone up, how random it was, how two nights before Tobin and I had patrolled the same stretch of road, how the next night it would have been Marlow’s turn and as it was there we all were in shorts, too shocked to read or even talk it through, all trying not to look in the direction of the thin canvas the other side of which was Tom’s empty bed.