Patrick Hennessey

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

  With nothing better to do on the long night shift I find the photos and old files on my laptop (the perk of watch-keeper duty being access to the precious generator) and marvel at how far we’ve come. Harrison, chunky-thighed in his shorts non-commissioned, desperately tanning and reading The Game as if it would be of any use to him out in Iraq. Marlow grinning with his USMC buzzcut and something pretentious, me writing flippantly away about how we’d never win the war if all we had to read was Jeffrey bloody Archer.

  Where were we now? Harrison’s boys bruised back in Shorabak, the memorial to Downes more touching in its scruffy immediacy on the wall next to me. Marlow’s gritty months down in Garmsir already immortalized on the first of the video montages, the benchmark set maudlin high and for all the Baywatch skits and smoke grenade tomfoolery you only had to listen to the poignant ‘Set the Fire to the Third Bar’ to know that none of them would ever fully get over losing Gdsm Probyn, who’d been killed a month before.

  Me?

  As Well Ask Man What He Thinks of Stone

  Eight dead Taliban today so we celebrate with a precious tin of hot dog sausages.

  I’m more amused than worried that this seems now to be a perfectly natural reaction to things. More than anything, I’m jealous of the Mastiff troop and their giant air-conditioned rolling fortresses. The patrol today was a good shake-out, and being cabbied in the back of the heavily armoured trucks is certainly the way to do business, especially at the final position, when the Taliban decided that the i-com chatter traffic was becoming too boring a way of teasing us and had a few pops with RPGs, which bounced harmlessly off the monster trucks, which had already brushed off a mine-strike on the way in, and then we swivelled turrets and hammered .50-cal and GMG into the position while the C Company platoon jumped in the back, fixed bayonets and simply drove on to the position to assault it. Slightly off to the flank we had a brave old time up on the hill, sharp-shooting in fire support with the troop’s guns thundering away beside us and watching the fires started in the dry poppy stacks by the tracer and thinking that from 600 metres watching someone else do the work for a change was a good way to fight the rest of the war.

  Not that I didn’t notice again that flicker of apprehension, which I think will only be more regular as the tour draws to an end, as we clambered into the back of the Mastiffs and rolled off. Countless journeys we must have done around the country in paper-thin WMIKs with not a thought for the IED and mine-threat beyond the annoying vulnerable point checks. Yet here we are in the most heavily armoured truck in theatre, and the reluctant thought flashes through my mind—I don’t want to die in the back of one of these. I can’t help myself casting a nervous look around the cabin at the nonplussed ANA transfixed by the fresh stack of Nuts and FHM and Cpl Gus fiddling with the sick-making monitors that show you any angle of the journey except the natural one from where you’re sitting, and imagining the burst of overpressure or the agony of burning, scrambling in vain at the rear doors.

  Of course, once we’re out and rolling into the familiar compound-clearing drills and objectively, rationally, far far more vulnerable, everything is OK. Chatting up an ancient haji and scanning the horizon for the enemy, who we can hear are out there and waiting for the rounds to come in, it’s all fine, and there’s not a thought of caution except for the rabid dog in one of the target compounds which has me reaching for my pistol but proves the greater coward, and at the end of the lengthy contact which drags the patrol into hungry hours we’re all grateful for the cool and easy lift home and chilled bottles of water from the air-con units, rolling back to Inkerman, which in our absence hasn’t been attacked. We’re well fed on sausages, and spirits are high everywhere as we collapse into deep, exhausted sleep.

  And there’s that glimmer of euphoria which we used to feel rolling along the desert from Price out into Gereshk and the unknown. It’s pretty random, barely containing the frustration of failing comms strolling back from the Snatch to the admin area, and the stifling bullshit of a company in defence, the ringing warning that we’re not in PB South any more, Toto, and contact booms and flares up for Blenheim on the darkening horizon, but from nowhere I can’t suppress a smile.

  The boys are sat around the pot and reading aloud as the Telegraph and other papers eulogize about Dave Hicks and realizing that, for all the hyperbole and exaggerated reports, no one who hasn’t been in this mess can understand what it is to go through.

  I suddenly know that I hate this and love it at the same time because I can already feel both how glad I will be when it is over and how much I will miss it. How difficult to convey to anyone that matters something which they will never understand, and how little anything else will ever matter.

  I guess this is partly resignation as the intensity of today’s clockwork lunchtime contact had us thundering away perilous RPGs with back blasts shaking the roof fit to decapitate whichever unfortunate came up the ‘ladder of death’ at the wrong time. Over the top and on to the flimsy positions which the UK guys up in arms about their own defences haven’t even looked at. Sgt Ross makes the wry observation that now the Anglians have lost a few guys, Inkerman is the number one Helmand priority, and everyone’s concerned, and even the deputy commander comes in for a quick Queen’s Company love-in complete with brown shirts and side-hats and plans and defensive schemes aplenty, but never mind that no one even noticed when LCpl Perry’s head was nearly taken off by the one SPG-9 which actually did penetrate the ops room, let alone the ANA and OMLT casualties that went before.

  Now everyone in theatre is arguing about the SPG9 threat and the RPG airburst threat like experts without bothering to ask the only guys who actually use the things apart from the enemy, the Afghans themselves. Suddenly everyone’s talking protection and one-in-thirty-six chance of dying. Defensive resources are on the way and not a moment too soon as another 107 shell pounds into the ANA sleeping areas, and miraculously no one is hit, but the guys taking a cheeky siesta will be deaf for a couple of days. Frustratingly, when the Hesco does arrive, it’s prioritized to the ‘Brits’, which doesn’t seem to include the OMLT—as if Sgt T wasn’t a scouser from Liverpool and Sgt Roper didn’t grow up in Grantham with Isaac Newton and Thatcher.

  The one-in-thirty-six thing, some paper’s dubious calculation of becoming a casualty in Helmand, was bollocks anyway. It raised eyebrows, but not nearly as much as the infuriating government response. The panicked bastards read the World War Two comparison headlines and quickly calculated our casualty statistics as a percentage of the whole ISAF mission—as if they were getting shot at in the cappuccino bars in Kabul. You couldn’t compare what 7,000 Brits in Helmand were doing with the Germans loafing up in Herat who weren’t even allowed out at night. We didn’t blame them; in quiet moments on patrol at three a.m. we could even be envious, but nothing rankled more than having friends and colleagues spun by clueless, career-politician dickheads.

  There’s something vaguely familiar in the daily game of cat-and-mouse with whichever tasking seems like it might be most strenuous and, as so often seems to be the way, the day which promises so much (or rather, so little) is the one which delivers so little (or so much). Tired after the inevitable lengthening of whichever the latest patrol is that we’re on, we eventually launch on a bemused petrol station (the wrong one), which yields nothing until some idiot local gives away his concealed dicking position and we switch the rummage to his house and unearth a sack of Taliban goodies. I can’t quite be pissed off that we’re out again at four in the morning, rolling down IED alley to picket a route for a convoy that won’t go out.

  Looking out at the tanker driver preparing his cot bed beneath his cab, the work parties from the platoons making their way to the burning pit with the day’s accumulated piss bottles, we’re all drawing strength from how far removed we are here from anyone’s understanding.

  Anyone at home, obviously, but even back in Bastion, and I understand how 3 Company felt for the first half of the tour, what forged their incre
dibly strong us-against-the-world mentality. I can’t decide why this is something to draw strength from, but I do and even enjoy the lumbering suspense of the night-vision patrol, back behind the windscreen of a bullet-ridden Snatch. The last time I was night patrolling with a monocle in a Snatch like this, tense and helpless against the explosive roadside, was down in Iraq, and the fact that my current view is obscured by the bullet hole in the wind-screen says everything about the difference between the two tours.

  Then.

  FUCK FUCK FUCK.

  The pent-up emotion which I think at one stage is going to see me cry instead has me smashing my fists in inarticulate rage against the Snatch. The 107mm shell that sent me tumbling down the dash of death hill like Humpty Dumpty with the tingling of shrapnel and scorch of cordite on the back of my neck blew Gilly sideways in a cloud of dust and frag’ and must have missed both our heads by inches.

  It doesn’t do to dwell on the inches and split seconds involved in the one, two, three, GO! that I shouted seconds before we broke cover and began the run which saw me blown forward and Cpl Gus back and even Zabi at the back bleeding from his eardrums and covered in rubble. Apparently Gilly initially sat up in bewilderment and looked incredulously at the enormous twisted shell just feet away from him before collapsing back T2 with a shattered arm and shrapnel and blast damage to his right-hand side.

  My first response was to jump to my feet, dry, so I obviously haven’t been shot, and whooping insanely with the thrill of it, I may have even screamed ‘That fucker was CLOSE!’ to the bemused Afghans, and LSgt Price at the bottom, perhaps imagining Gilly was still just feet behind me but charging on regardless, up the ladder and on to the GPMG giddy with the high and no idea how close ‘CLOSE’ actually was. It was only after blazing away madly for minutes which I genuinely think I lost, pouring rounds into the firing points forward sat up like a target on the roof, that the worried ANA pulled me down off the perch and pointed down to Zabi, who was shouting up about the ‘casualty’.

  Perhaps I knew the moment the blast came in. Perhaps to have turned round and acknowledged what part of me must have known instinctively would have been to acknowledge how close I was to the same and to break down on the spot. Nothing makes sense to me until I realize that I’m pretty much deaf and, without knowing why or how, I’ve run back up the hill and the doc is trying to talk to me but even through the ringing in my ears his words mean nothing because at that exact moment I spot Gilly bloody on the floor.

  The impact of this is immediate in a way I just can’t understand let alone explain and I feel what I imagine must be the utter helplessness of a parent at a sick bed as the doc and his team crack on sorting him out, and Gilly himself is impressive as he waits for the morphine to kick in, demanding only the odd sip of water. Once the pain starts to go like a true soldier he’s gasping for a fag and wondering if this isn’t one of the few moments it wouldn’t be rude to beg one off the platoon commander, which almost has me in tears as I light it for him and he chuffs his way through three reds before the IRT make it in. On the back of the quad-bike down to the HLS he’s already joshing about beating us all to the first cold beer and make sure we save the shell and photos for him as souvenirs. I’ve rarely been more sincere when I drop off the stretcher and tell him how proud I am of him and then trudge back to the ops room, empty.

  This is now getting ridiculous. It’s fairly evident that the aiming markers for these attacks lie unchanged and unchallenged. We haven’t dropped a bomb in the weeks we’ve been here, and it will go on daily like this with misses so near I don’t know which way to turn to hide from the thoughts which assail me.

  It’s the most versatile word in the language which finds it as I catch myself repeating sotto voce at nothing and no one in particular.

  Fuck fuck fuck.

  I would probably rather be anywhere in the world right now other than here, but if I was anywhere else in the world I would just want to be back here.

  It’s best not to try too hard to understand why such a feeling of completeness can be drawn amid more dire threat warnings and the hateful chaos of deadly rounds and shrapnel and I can’t pass the gaping bite taken out of the wall where split seconds and inches separated Gilly from worse, and me from Gilly and me from God only knows what, without another piano fuck.

  It’s not actually a supreme mental effort not to dwell on it, it’s just the way the hours and days roll on, and we’re more determined to make it all the way and hammer more Taliban as we go and let events and luck take their course. Just as the Liverpool vs. Chelsea game kicks off, and some angelic signaller appears out of nowhere with hot dogs, and it seems life is as good as it gets, the message comes through about more casualties, which leaves the football forgotten, and even the bad luck Liverpool apparently suffer doesn’t matter a shit against the good luck that it’s not any of our boys, and so the point-counterpoint goes on, just caked in dust.

  Tac confirm that we won’t be heading back to Shorabak to end the tour, won’t be heading back in on Main Body 1 but will be stuck out here till the bitter end and will meet up with bags and kit again in Cyprus on decompression.

  So it’s square-heads down for the next thirty-four days, and no respite from the patrolling and mortars.

  Less Than Zero

  Time passes in taskings and moments of introspection. Orders, briefs, the patrols themselves, the roller-coaster attacks all come and go, and then we notice over a day, with all the clarity of a meal or meeting at home, how we felt about something.

  Two things struck me during that time with a violent, physical pang of recollection. The first, which drags me back nearly seven years, is the familiar double-click left-down pause double-click left-up of classic Nokia snake on the Roshan mobile. Instantly I’m back in college, idly clicking away, trying to beat Ewan’s high score and even at the time registering the wasted hours being spent in the most pointless of activities. It’s a slow day, and I’ve shot-gunned the only unbroken chair and sit comfortably as memories flood in of St Mary’s girls and bops and Toploader’s ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’, and I hate that it will probably never be re-created, and that where once that buzz was achieved by an innocent student experience, I now find myself in the hell of Inkerman, pursuing the buzz into the next fire fight, and doesn’t that just show how right old Waugh was et in arcadia ego.

  The second, in the far more recent past, is the hooligan boyish thrill of pissing in a bottle. And it’s not just the strangely pleasing monitoring of the prodigious amount that we actually seem to piss every day or the lazy sink-pissing relief of only having to stagger a few yards each night to the ammo-bunker and its emergency empty bottle collection, but the memory of how heaven-sent seemed that wonderful piss the morning after the night before, and how far removed is it possible for pisses to be only a matter of weeks apart, from the bursting hedonistic excesses of a desperate and groggy lunge for some normality of bodily function to the post-contact dehydration. It strengthens the resolve to get through these bottle-pissing months of dust and danger and make it back to a world of earthly pleasures, and proper loos.

  I’m still thinking of earthly pleasures when the next fuss kicks off, and pissing in bottles is, again, a world away.

  Sitting cosy in the ANA HQ room in a peaceful evening, I’m told that Kandahar pomegranates are the best in the world. We are a few weeks short of the best time of year, and the fruit not quite yet fully ripe, but the Afghan tongue is far sweeter than mine, and casually picking out the refreshing little seeds while we discuss bringing up the heavy weapons is one of the most pleasant eating discoveries since we tried the toot-toot berries for the first time on Silicon.

  Flip-flopping back up the dash of death, I find the angle from which you can look out over the valley without anything military in your line of sight, the silhouettes of the barrels poking out of the sangar positions too far left and just behind above. Somewhere out in the gathering dark the Mastiff Squadron are refreshing themselves after another
day of scattering the Taliban, who are increasingly terrified of the invulnerability of the Mastiffs and spend the evenings whining to commanders back up in Musa Qala. Further north the Estonians and BRF are making mischief and then Kajaki and its minefields and contact northings and iconic dam, but from where I’m currently stood it’s peace itself, only the quiet talk of the ANA, still munching pomegranates and sharing out grenades.

  I barely notice my birthday with Inkerman heavy with the sense of anticipation of the big op which starts tomorrow, nerves and minds steeled more against the inevitable fatigue and discomfort of the next few days than the possible and probable danger. My present is the way all four mortar rounds that flop lazily in at some quiet point in the afternoon miss us by metres during our siesta and land in the Engineers’ accommodation while they’re all out working on the defences.

  I’ve bored the medic so much with my whingeing about feeling unwell that instead of worrying about the forthcoming op I spend the day as high as a kite on the wonderful co-codomal she’s given me to shut me up and vegetate my way through thoughts of an early-life crisis and the gentle ribbing of the boys that I might be the youngest captain in the army, but I’m no longer ‘young’. It is odd to reflect on a birthday not only as just another day, which is I suppose a natural feature of getting older, but as a complete non-day, a day which we’re all willing over to tick off another day till the end and everyone else in camp is willing over so they can push out and get on with the extended patrol, which, best present of all, we’re not on.