Four wizened Pashto Gandalfs sit impassively sipping chai around a dining
table in the middle of a rose garden, and my first thirsty thought is not
the obvious: what are we going to do? Nor the reasonable: why are these four
improbably old white-bearded guys sitting taking tea in the middle of a
firefight? But: how is there a dining table in a rose garden in the middle
of an Afghan dam?
It’s an interesting point of speculation, but one cut short by another burst
of fire. To the cracking above and the thudding, as bits of crumbling
masonry and rose petals drift down into the broiling water beneath our feet,
is suddenly and worryingly added the melodic pinging of bullets bouncing off
the sluice gates and rusty turbines below.
Qiam, the mad, brilliant Tajik major in charge of the Afghan soldiers we are
“mentoring”, is already across the now perilous dam and gesticulating wildly
for us to follow; but something holds me back, and I just have to have a sip
of the chai – I hope out of respect for the Pashtunwali codes of
hospitality, but maybe it’s just the thirst.
My mind is a whirlwind of half-remembered training nonsense, and I catch
myself trying to work out who the senior man at the table is, because he’s
always furthest from the door, only there isn’t a door, and he’s usually a
mullah or at least hajji, and so maybe I should apologise for having my
boots on, even though we’re not strictly indoors.
God, this is difficult. I’ve lost track of time in the ambush and am trying to
work out if it’s still sob bahir (good morning) or now char bahir (good
afternoon) when another burst rattles out, and the wall behind me becomes a
cartoon of bullet holes everywhere but where my head seems, inexplicably,
still to be.
I’m grateful to the elderly sahib who, taking stock of the situation and
possibly sensing my general confusion, calmly finishes his tea, produces an
AK47 from under the table and, smiling, gestures me across the dam as he
stands up and sprays a wild and deafening burst of covering fire in all
directions. It was surely never meant to be like this.
OFFICER recruitment shot up after September 11, 2001. At least some of the
students walking into milk-round jobs paying higher starting salaries than
their parents earned were moved by the apocalyptic spectacle and signed up
for Sandhurst.
My recruitment began in the polish and glamour of the mess at St James’s
Palace, where the Grenadiers were on guard and where Fielding (whose fault
the whole thing was, since we’d become friends and he’d wondered over a few
bottles if I’d never thought of the armed forces) had invited me to dinner.
I was 18 years old, and the promised £1,000 bursary the army paid yearly to
undergraduates would make a welcome dent in the Brideshead-imitation
overdrafts I’d racked up at Oxford; but it wasn’t the lifestyle or the money
that drew me in; it was boredom with everything else.
There was an inexplicable elation in doing something, anything, to show to
yourself that you weren’t just another overprivileged, overeducated,
undersexed student.
I received my joining instructions for Sandhurst in the haze of early summer
2003. Exams had finished, and fun was in full swing, but the Sandhurst
papers spoke ominously of discipline and physical training and hardship and
contained photos of muddy and cold people. I was warm and comfortable and
had almost forgotten where my bursary money had been coming from.
There were many times when, with more or less justified melodrama, I endured
“the worst moment of my life” during my year at Sandhurst. I was reading
Norman Dixon’s On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, but, having at
first enjoyed it, I was now finding it all too close to home.
It wasn’t until I went on the live-fire exercise towards the end of the course
that I really let go. I crossed the line into 800 metres of loose gorse and
pop-up targets and went mad. I may have even screamed a little, nearing the
exhausting end, at the final impudent targets, popping up long after I’d
spent all my ammo as I lobbed smoke grenades I was supposed to have saved
for later. If I did, it wasn’t the theatrical yelling of the bayonet range,
but something more personal from somewhere deeper down, and bollocks to
anyone who was listening.
“F*** me, Mr Hennessey!” said the colour sergeant as I walked away.
I was commissioned in the Grenadier Guards, which meant that “public duties
and state ceremonial” – guarding the sovereign – had to live alongside the
proud fighting history of the regiment. When we finally got the order in
2005 to deploy to Iraq, after a long, hot summer of tight red tunics in
London, there was a roar like a penalty shootout. Guys punched the air and
hugged each other with delight.
Once there, however, I found myself guarding a prison for Iraqi criminals, as
the Grenadiers were part of “rear operations”.
We founded the Junior Officers’ Reading Club there in the heat of the southern
Iraqi desert. My friend Marlow and I, the smart-alec Oxford boys, with
surfer dude Harrison and the attached Coldstreamers. The club was a product
of a newly busy army, a post-9/11 army of graduates and wise-arse
Thatcherite kids up to their elbows in the Middle East who would do more and
see more in five years than our fathers and uncles had packed into 22 on
manoeuvres in Germany and rioting in Ulster.
Rear Operations Battlegroup was a crap 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 civilised food, we foraged for chairs and books and set up our
little haven for reading, tanning and “purging” (moaning about the army).
We convened behind the junior officers’ tent, flaunting nonregulation
underwear in a gesture of defiance to the quartermasters – flip-flops and
shorts were banned. Basking on improvised sun loungers, we caught our breath
among the books, wallowing after patrols and riding the adrenaline comedown.
The rest of the reading club was whichever young ’uns were around. Despite
living on top of one another, we barely saw one another, but for an hour or
so every other day we could lie out in the sun, hidden by the canvas, and
wonder how it was that all that we had dreamt 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.
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 learnt at university without the
boys accusing us of being “gay”.
We needed a neutral space. On tour you were never alone, never off duty.
Hidden behind our tent, even if only for half an hour, we didn’t have to
pretend to the guys that running the jail 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 among 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.
In the spirit of the reading club, when we were transferred to Baghdad we
joked away our days and evenings, playing fives against bombproof walls in
helmet and body armour. I resolved to give up on Don Quixote; in three
months I hadn’t got past the first hundred pages. I resorted to winding up
the Yanks, leaving my copy of Hunter S Thompson’s Kingdom of Fear anywhere
they might find it and disapprove of what one incensed major called his
“unpatriotic and insidious rantings”.
WE tried to resurrect the club a year later at the start of our Afghan tour,
lounging on canvas chairs on the gravel behind the tin huts of Shorabak, the
Afghan army’s quarters next to Bastion, the huge British camp. Same sort of
base, same sort of desert, just a few thousand miles the other side of Iran.
Out in Helmand we were going to prove ourselves. We went into battle in
bandanas and shades with Penguin Classics in our webbing, sketch pads in our
daysacks and iPods on speakers. This was our moment, our X Factor-winning
one perfect moment; we finally had a war.
The days ticked by. The heat and dust grew more oppressive, and our boredom
intensified. The idea of spending months trying to force Sandhurst on the
Afghans was unthinkable. They couldn’t shape their berets. They didn’t get
up early, and they stopped everything for meals, for prayer, for a snooze.
They had no discipline. They smoked strong hashish and mild opium. They
couldn’t map-read. They had no tanks, no planes, no order to the chaos of
their stores. Their weapons weren’t accounted for. Their barracks weren’t
health-and-safety-compliant. They wore what they wanted, when they wanted,
and walked around holding hands. They missed target after target with rusty
and broken AK47s on the firing range.
They lacked everything that British Army training believed in and taught – and
f*** me if most of them hadn’t killed more Russians than we had ever seen.
I couldn’t train them at all, but I loved them. I liked that they had more
balls than I ever did just to stand up and say, “Why?” or, “No,” or, “I
don’t care if there is a war on and a massive IED threat; I like watermelon
– so I’m going to steal a car I can’t drive, and run a Taliban checkpoint in
order to go to the market.”
Things descended into farce. I guess it was inevitable that I would get told
off for conducting the body-bag lesson from inside it. But every so often
something would stop us in our tracks and almost force a reassessment of our
new allies. The blasé way in which the young and impressive sergeant
mentioned that he had captured a number of Taliban during the civil war and,
unable to take them all prisoner on his own, thrown them one by one down a
well, tossing a grenade in after them.
It was the ones we labelled trouble-makers early on who turned out to be the
best soldiers, lazily pretending they didn’t know how to handle a weapon
when later it transpired they knew better than most and were just taking the
piss because why would they bother to handle their weapons “safely” when all
they used them for was firing at Taliban, not manning gates in Surrey with
empty magazines?
We at last got out on patrol, playing Metallica’s For Whom the Bell Tolls
through the iPod speakers wedged into the dashboard of the WMIK (a
stripped-down and up-gunned Land Rover). On our return, exhausted, filthy,
hungry soldiers dropped their kit on their beds and headed straight past the
kitchen to queue for a desperate fix of Facebook.
And then it all got serious. At 16:05 hours on April 29, 2007, we got ambushed
on the dam. Op Silicon had begun, and the Junior Officers’ Reading Club had
downed books. Our target was the town of Gereshk, but we were ambushed
before the show had even started.
WITH deep euphoria, we rolled the entire Afghan battalion out of the camp
gates and drove them bold as brass down the road with iPods blaring from the
WMIKs, and all the excited chatter on the radios, and the stares of the
locals, and our firepower, and the fact that we’re leading the operation,
and the fact that we haven’t got lost, and the fact that we’re nearly at the
objective, and the fact that there, suddenly, was the dam.
And then it was chaos. I noticed Will Harries, one of the platoon commanders,
on the other side of the canal, and everything was going so much to plan
that the first rattle was almost offensively incongruous, and the temptation
was to ignore it because if we didn’t really hear it then maybe it didn’t
really happen.
Then, rudely and undeniably, RPGs boom in from the front and the flank, and
the ground and the hedgerows are alive with the sudden intensity of fire
that’s now bouncing like popcorn off the vehicles, and before we’ve even
registered where it’s coming from, the Afghans are in the ditches to the
side of the track, pouring back fire and answering boom with boom. And the
frozen pallor of our faces might be fear or adrenaline or just the
excitement and realisation that three years of expectation are finally being
fulfilled.
It was never meant to be like this in training on Salisbury Plain, where the
enemy were always in Soviet BMPs, and I could never remember whether they
were the scary armoured personnel carriers – or maybe those were the BTRs –
and none of it mattered because the worst course of action was always the
Russians reinforcing with the seriously scary T-80 tanks, which you always
sensed were just behind the woodland in the direction of Hampshire, and
hopefully they don’t have an AGS17, whatever one of those is, but either way
the right plan was always left-flanking with bags of smoke and avoid the
machine-gun post.
(For the record, BMPs are Soviet amphibious tracked vehicles; BTRs are Soviet
amphibious wheeled vehicles; and an AGS17 is a Soviet automatic grenade
launcher.)
It was never meant to be like this in the orders group back at Camp Shorabak
as we patiently explained this patrol’s purpose to the childlike Afghan
soldiers. Moving the little blocks of wood which were “us” – code sign Amber
63 – up the little ribbons which were “tracks” and over the coloured powder
which was “canal” into the little tins which were the “village” where we
would spend the quiet little night “securing” the line of departure.
But my thoughts only last the split second it takes for me to snatch for the
radio and whoop with delight: “Amber 63, contact, wait out!”
I’ve said it. I’ve said it first and I beam across at Lance-Sergeant Rowe, who
understands, and up at Lance-Corporal Price, who's ecstatically letting rip
with the GPMG [general purpose machinegun], and then we’re bounding
gleefully from the vehicles and firing, actually firing real bullets, at the
invisible and unperturbed enemy. Actually firing our weapons in glorious and
chaotic anger. Actually firing. I knew, deep down, it was always going to be
like this.
Afterwards, I write in my laptop: “. . . all I’ll remember is the donkey
tethered to a tree which stood there unmoved through the mother of all
firefights as we finally broke through and took the dam itself and then held
the front line which we’ve now abandoned so it wouldn’t really have made any
difference if we hadn’t done any of it at all and now we’ll go and do it all
again somewhere else and hope there’s more grenade fishing and more lucky
escapes and hope that whoever said adrenaline was finite is wrong because
there’s no heroin replacement substitute for this shit and for now the show
must go on.”
© Patrick Hennessey 2009
Extracted from The Junior Officers’ Reading Club by Patrick Hennessey, to
be published by Penguin on June 25 at £16.99. Copies can be ordered for
£15.29, including postage, from The Sunday Times Booksfirst on 0845 271 2135
