HOWZAT

Knowles was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for a mission on the first night of the invasion when, short of fuel and heavily laden with bombs, they came under enemy fire. He ended up landing on a small desert airstrip which he was not absolutely sure was open, “which only goes to show that there is probably a fine line between getting a gallantry award and getting a court martial.” The medal citation also mentions a mission when he ran out of bombs, so started blasting the enemy with the aircraft’s cannon. “Was that,” he wonders now, “a dumb, effective, admirable or reprehensible thing to do with a £20m aeroplane?”

For someone as thoughtful and analytical as Knowles, shock and awe was almost overwhelming.

But these are the poems of a professional fighter. The enemy, the target, the Iraqis beneath the Tornado’s shadow, hardly get a mention.

“We don’t get to see the final results,” he says. “We’re not like an infantryman who gets to see the whole thing, there’s a bit of it missing which is dissociative. There’s nothing physically different for us, rather than the excitement that’s come via knowledge — that those bombs I dropped were on the enemy rather than training over Cape Wrath. The actions of flicking that switch, aiming and dropping the bomb, and the bomb thumps and comes off, are all exactly the same. In a passive sense, we are dissociated from the consequences of our actions. We attempt to reacquire that reality, but it’s hard to do.

“There were all sorts of feedback loops going on in there, which is one of the things I hoped to capture in the poetry,” Knowles explains. “And all of those defining moments are on video tape as well. I can go back and replay the tape and that’s a very strange experience indeed. I still find my stories have drifted and I have to bring them back.”

When missions allowed, Knowles tried to get as many thoughts as impressions down as he could.

“Some of the first drafts and phrases — some of the elements of the poems — were scribbled down then and put away on a piece of notepaper. Some of it is derived from journals and diaries I kept at the time. I preserved the raw material as best I could,” he says.

Meeting The Jet Man covers the whole of Knowles’s career, from the frustration of 1991 through to the post-Iraq decision to hang up his uniform for good. It is his way of recording the experience, making sense of it and, finally, drawing a line under it. He has returned to his philosophical first love, Nietzsche, as well as writing more poetry, publishing more books for Two Ravens Press, and looking after the sheep.

“If I had three lives I’d give one of them to flying operations and do nothing else, but there’s a lot of other things I want to do,” he says. “And I’m not going to be a war poet for ever. I’ve said what I want to say.”

Meeting The Jet Man by David Knowles, Two Ravens Press, £8.99

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