I met General Sir Mike Jackson once, at a dinner party. We hadn’t spoken at all by the time he leant across the table, fixed me with those strange jowly eyes and said: “One thing you should know. Gilligan’s a c***.” I politely demurred, in defence of my friend. This was in mid-2003, when Andrew Gilligan, the BBC Today programme reporter, had ruffled one or two government feathers, if you remember. Back then, Jackson, head of the British army, was very happy with how things were going in Iraq: bloody good war, bloody well done, bloody good show.

As this book makes clear, there are very few wars that Mike thinks aren’t a bloody good thing. Show him a lippy foreigner (in Saigon, Belgrade, Basra, wherever) and he’s got an unequivocal, nonverbal, answer: ka-boom. Politicians and the media get in the way sometimes and mess things up, but by and large a bit of heavy ordnance and a battalion of disciplined ruffians from Glasgow or Leeds or Liverpool will sort the thing out.

He still seems to think that invading Iraq was a good idea. He uses that increasingly fashionable get-out clause to excuse the appalling mess we’ve wrought in Iraq: ah, we should have planned more conscientiously for the aftermath. Yes indeed, mate – by not invading in the first place. Going to war was a strategic, political and military mistake, predicated upon a grotesque misunderstanding of the country, the region and of Islam.

Jackson is, supposedly, a soldier’s soldier, whatever that means. Certainly, this memoir reads as if it has been dictated in the Naafi after several early-evening stiffeners. The clipped no-messing-about grammar, the primitive attempts at humour, the profusion of army slang and the interminable acronyms. We skip through his early career as a subaltern in the 1960s – a decade in which, it’s fair to say, he felt a little out of step with the zeitgeist. Men with long hair all over the place. Wearing strange clothes. All a bit leftish. But a bloody good war in Vietnam, at least – with Mike cheering frustratedly from the sidelines. America’s mistake in Vietnam was not sending in more troops: ka-boom. He had no objections, political or moral, to the war itself.

He was married youngish, but devotes to this relationship, which must have lasted at least eight years (he doesn’t tell us precisely), five lines, fewer than he affords to the description of the sort of rifle he used in Northern Ireland. He doesn’t even tell us the name of his first wife. Perhaps he’s forgotten it. Bloody bad show.

In Northern Ireland he was an adjutant to “1 Para”, renowned for their somewhat in-your-face style of policing in the province, something of which Mike thoroughly approved. And so it was that January 31, 1972 (Bloody Sunday) came to pass, with our hero in charge of liaising with the press. He was directly involved in the military action that resulted in the killing of 14 pro-Republican civilians; but his memory is a little stretched here, sadly. He seems to remember being fired at by some Republican sniper, but he can’t, if he’s honest, recall if he heard the shot at the time or heard about it later on the radio. That’s a big difference, isn’t it? Perhaps it was another ill-advised military adventure that has stored up trouble for Britain ever since, although this is not the conclusion at which Jackson arrives. He is, again, four square behind the army – perhaps that is what is meant when he is referred to as a soldier’s soldier; loyal, unquestioning.

In Kosovo, he had a run-in with the US General Wesley “Wes” Clark, who, according to Mike, wished to start world war three by mixing it with the Russians who had, unexpectedly, taken control of Pristina airport. Jackson, unusually, was in favour of detente and cooperation and risked his career by refusing (up to a point) to obey his superior officer’s orders. By his own lights, obeying orders is what a soldier is meant to do, but mercifully, on this occasion, Jackson resisted the temptation to do so.

Later we see him in Iraq. All the criticisms of that operation are dismissed with a parade-ground wave of the hand – the lack of weapons of mass destruction (Saddam wanted them even if he didn’t have them), the lack of a UN Security Council resolution (didn’t have one for Kosovo), British soldiers going into battle without the proper kit or equipment (the soldiers didn’t really mind, they just wanted to get across the Iraqi border and “kick that bugger’s arse”). We learn later that he has reservations about the Ministry of Defence, and particularly the scant regard that it shows the common, serving soldier. He laments the budget cuts that were occasioned by the end of the cold war. “It is self-evident to me,” he writes, “that we must defend what we have and, I hope, cherish, against those enemies who would remove it.” He was a fine servant of the army, General Sir Mike Jackson, and I’m glad he was there, doing our dirty work with bravery and no little charisma. That almost every gung-ho, sabre-rattling, buttock-clenched political and strategic instinct he had over 40 years was utterly wrong should not, I suppose, detract from the gratitude we owe to him.

SOLDIER: The Autobiography by General Sir Mike Jackson
Bantam Press £18.99 pp400
Buy the book here at the offer price of £17.09 (inc p&p)

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