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Chapter 3

We were told to choose the three regiments we most wanted for our first posting and I got my first choice: 13 Air Assault Support Regiment. Based in Colchester, it had a good boxing team and looked more interesting than the standard logistics units in that we got maroon berets and bigger badges and it was said to be more warlike. Its soldiers were trained to move things – people, fuel, water, ammunition – wherever they needed to go. The regiment had a fleet of vehicles and the specialisms within the regiment ranged from drivers and logistics specialists to petroleum operators who specialized in the transport and storage of fuels.

We provided this logistical support to the airborne brigade and the paratroopers who hated us for being ‘crap-hats’ (non-paras). Nonetheless we got to wear maroon berets like them. The paras – while professionally aggressive – were unlikely to be parachuted en masse into anything ever again. The epoch of mass parachute assaults had ended but it still looked good to have paratroopers. I disliked heights but planned to take the course – it meant more money.

I walked through the gates one morning and was quickly processed and told I would be in 82 Squadron. I was put into a room with three others. A St Lucian, a Scottish kid named MacDougal, and Dobbin who was a shit-magnet (a soldier who attracts trouble) I knew from Deepcut. I never knew anyone who messed up so much, or got shouted at so often. We thought perhaps his mother had made him join. These kinds of kids go one of two ways: they are either abandoned as a liability or kept on as a kind of dopey mascot. We tried our best to look after him. MacDougal was the scruffiest soldier I had ever met. Once, when he turned up on parade in clip (a scruffy state) he was told he would have looked scruffy naked. Despite this he was a regular Casanova and very successful with women. I started drinking with him to pick up stragglers and it turned out he was also good company.

Dobbin was terribly unfit and always late. He constantly exasperated our administrative sergeant, Nasty Bob, who was a professionally unpleasant senior NCO. He was also commando and airborne trained, very fit and completely tapped. I suspect he saw in Dobbin a younger version of himself and he tried to shape him. He took him on runs and beasted him and tried to stop him chain-smoking, eating kebabs every night and drinking litres of Coke. These long, arduous runs were called Bobercise. I imagine every army in the world has a Bob and a Dobbin. The sound of Nasty Bob shouting in frustration at Dobbin as he messed up simple tasks was the elevator music of our working day.

The tension in a working unit was different to that in basic training. Any new private who believed that passing training would elevate them was soon crushed. You were a nig (new in green) or a crow (new bloke), and the last batch of nigs had been waiting for the next batch so as to assume the role of slightly-less new bloke in order to be able to avoid shit tasks and duties. I had picked up enough cant and bearing so that people assumed this was a second posting. At twenty-two I was geriatric by these standards and as soon as I arrived I came nose to nose with my sergeant major. He took exception to my not standing rigidly to attention as soon as he appeared – albeit unidentifiable in civilian clothing. From then on I realized that bullshit was maintained here and wheeled out on occasion. This was my first clash with the hierarchy and my only clash for years. After that I built a rapport with the seniors, mostly by just turning up on time and not moaning when I did get assigned a shit job.

One morning after I’d been in the field army a week or so – the camp was woken by the regimental sergeant major setting off all the fire alarms. It was around 0500 hours. He had gathered his senior NCOs from the sergeant’s mess and they screamed at us until we were all on parade. Some of us were in no. 2 dress, others in sheets and some in boxer shorts or half of a uniform. He paced the great square as we gathered and waited, tapping his stick on the tarmac. ‘Somebody,’ he roared in his Northern Irish accent, ‘was outside my regimental HQ early this morning, smashing up the garden furniture that my HQ staff sit on.’ There was silence and hundreds of sidelong glances. ‘You will all go from here, and reassemble in ten minutes in full no. 2 dress.’ He went on, still pacing, ‘After that you will parade again in combat order.’ He let it sink in. The RSM timed threats expertly. ‘This will continue until I have a confession.’ He faced us squarely, putting both hands on his stick and leaning on it. The sun was coming up by then. ‘Begin’.

We did about three changes before someone grassed up the guilty soldiers. The two offenders, a pair of Geordie lance-jacks (lance-corporals), were marched away for discipline. It turned out they had staggered into camp after a night on the beer and seen the plastic garden furniture on the grass by RHQ. They had been smashing it up in the balmy night when the RSM returned from a conference. He had driven back overnight and pulled up as they were throwing chairs at the building. They had run off before the RSM could identify them.

The level of prejudice surprised me and took some of the gleam off my shiny new world. At times it was worse in the army than outside, perhaps because prejudices were institutionalized. We had Fijians, Nepalese, black and white Africans, Scotsmen and Ulstermen and a gay chef. He was constantly sniped at for his orientation and he sniped back admirably. Contrary to recent PR exercises, gays are not generally appreciated in the British Army.

The white NCOs opined openly that the African soldiers were not only lazy and disrespectful but also – and worst of all – black. The NCOs would assign punishments accordingly and the Africans would complain. This would start the ‘race card’ debate. This saw strenuous denials from the racists and they would fall back pathetically on a standard excuse: length of service. ‘I’ve been in the army ten, fifteen, eighteen years. I’m not a racist!’

Bizarrely, this fallacy often worked. Length of service seemed to impart a special voodoo-like force field against all accusations in the military. I saw this time and time again. These characters would then switch back to their racist rants when the Africans were out of earshot: ‘Shouldn’t be in the army, lazy fucking niggers, fucking skiving again.’ The spiel we were given in basic training about there being ‘no black, yellow, brown or white’ in the army, ‘only green’, didn’t seem to exist outside basic training, though occasionally the term ‘fucking non-swimmers’ was substituted for ‘fucking niggers’; most of the Africans and Caribbeans could not swim and on their personnel documents non-swimmers was the term used. I wasn’t going to join in, so I kept my head down and learned quite quickly that when anyone starts a sentence with ‘I’m not a racist, but… ’, they are a racist.

Likewise, women were a sore point, routinely treated as what the army terms ‘ginger cousins’ rather like the Royal Air Force. They generally couldn’t carry as much, had periods, cried, and didn’t put out when required. They also smelled far too nice – which was distracting – and they made the camp look untidy. They nonetheless were expected to adapt to the maleness of the culture: spitting, swearing and fighting were the criteria and many contributed admirably.

The physical culture was punishing but I embraced it. We did at least three training sessions a week and were encouraged to do more – these were beastings designed to push people physically and break them if possible. Every Friday we assembled for commanding officers’ physical training. This was normally a run in boots or a speed march with weight on our backs.

Physical training instructors (PTIs) are the prima donnas of any regiment and a gathering of them looks like a second-tier boy band. These mythical creatures can normally be found in the gym doing lunges, wearing crisp white short-shorts and permanent tans and their hair was often worn longer than regulation and crafted delicately and carefully. I often wondered if they got up especially early and styled each other. That summer we regularly ran a circuit through the woods in blazing heat, often in boots, sometimes carrying weight or even each other up hills, through rivers and so on. Once, during a fireman’s carry that seemed to go for miles, a corporal shat himself. The PTI applauded him and told the rest of us that this was exactly the kind of effort he wanted to see. We should count ourselves lucky to be going to war with men committed enough to shit themselves with effort before giving up. During another beasting, when the regiment gathered for a water break, the ‘elite’ 63 Squadron was missing. They were hiding in the woods. ‘Skive to survive’ was our adage on commanding officers’ physical training, which was fine unless you got caught taking it easy at the back. We were all thrashed in the heat for the sins of these few with many press-ups and sprints and fireman’s carries.

I loved the soldiering life. That system is designed to create a robust character and it made me robust physically and mentally. The military also teaches you that it’s socially acceptable to explode. Colchester has been a military town since the Romans and perhaps for this reason the inhabitants were adept at spotting soldiers and all but the least scrupulous of its womenfolk avoided us. We would regularly go to one of the two clubs or the various bars and pubs, and then batter each other or some unfortunate before devouring a kebab. Midweek, if we’d failed to ‘trap’ a woman – which was often, given we were a charmless herd of drunk soldiers – we would stumble back across camp to our rooms giving each other drunken abuse every step of the way. Sometimes we had grazed knuckles, split lips or aching mandibles and we stunk of kebabs and beer.

Such was the lifestyle of a junior private or crow. We had no rank to lose. We were closeted in the army and we were fit, strong and aggressive young soldiers. We would drink all night and sweat it out on a morning run. Violence was fine, even encouraged, and certainly expected. However, if you got caught or arrested then you discovered how much the sergeant major hated the paperwork and you would suffer doubly from the punishment and his attentions.

Getting on a sporting team was the way forward, we were told. Some people get into a sport and never go on tour but still fly up the ranks. I joined the boxing team and we trained all day long for weeks. It was immense. We were permanently in sports kit and went running at dawn and hit bags and pads and each other for three hours a day. The squadron boxing event was approaching and we threw ourselves into it. The medicals came around and I was barred from entering. I couldn’t believe it. I had been kickboxing for years by then and never even had a medical. I’d been punched and kicked in the grid (face) more times than I could recall, with no ill effect. Apparently my eyes were sub-standard. I was told to get into uniform and report back to my troop.

I went with the regiment to a training area in Norfolk, down on the whole thing until I realized what we were doing. We were to ‘play the enemy’ for a battalion of paratroopers who were going to Iraq. We were given vehicles and drove around wearing Middle Eastern scarves for a week, playing cowboys and Indians – or rather, soldiers and insurgents. We finished the week off by rioting in a village built specifically for training FIBUA (fighting in built up areas). We came in our hoodies and boots, some of us with newspapers stuffed in our clothes knowing we’d be getting a beating. We fought with the lines of paratroopers all day. They were fortified like ancient warriors behind their wall of shields, visors down, and armed with lengths of piping instead of heavy wooden batons. We threw spent baton rounds instead of bricks and got repeatedly beaten up and mock-arrested. It was even better than boxing.

One of our lance corporals managed to take down the CO of 2 Para (the 2^nd Batallion, the Parachute Regiment) with a baton round. The man was prancing behind the line of his men when our boy saw him and chucked the round. It was a good shot. It split his eyebrow open beautifully and all us proxy rioters cheered as he folded and the 2 Para sergeant major dragged him away for treatment. During a break in the rioting he approached us as we sat around. We gawped at his patched-up face and the bloody dressing and he thanked us for our viciousness and told us that we needed to be as cruel as possible as these men were going to Iraq soon, where some of them would likely kill and perhaps die, and they would need to be tough and vicious to survive.

Between bouts we would sit in a barn with a group of Iraqi interpreters who stoked up a huge shisha. These Iraqi expats hired by the army for realism were great. They called everyone sarge and when we were rioting they would bang drums, dance and start chants, which we would mimic: ‘Down, down Bush,’ we sang to their cues, ‘Down, down Blair, down, down Ah-mer-ica!’ We fought with the paras all day until we were mottled with bruises and cuts and we could hardly lift our arms to block their blows.

I, along with two other privates, managed to make a baby paratrooper cry as we played at rioting. The paras were strung out in a line between buildings and this lone crow was between a building and a fence. The others couldn’t reach us with the plastic pipes they swung in lieu of batons. Some of these weapons rattled because the paratroopers filled them with stones and sealed the ends with tape to bite us harder and bloody us better. The kid had a bigger shield than the others. We asked him why – was he fucking new or something? We bullied him until he blubbered and started lashing out with his baton. One of the exercise marshals in his high-visibility vest eventually pulled him out of the game.

The final exercise had us huddling in buildings all night, loading hundreds of magazines with blanks. As dawn broke we squatted in the streets like guerrillas, faces covered with bandannas and keffiyehs. Through the mist the paras came in vehicles and on foot. We blasted off hundreds of blanks on automatic, and threw dozens of smoke grenades. The paras screamed as they followed us into the buildings and through the rat-holes which connected them. Anyone they caught was beaten for good measure. The rest escaped. Then suddenly the exercise was stopped by the marshals. One of the top-heavy Land Rovers had rolled on a corner. One paratrooper had broken his arm, another got his helmeted head wedged between the roll cage and the concrete and an unfortunate Iraqi interpreter was taken away in an ambulance. The need for realism in training often led to casualties before anyone ever got to a war zone.

We played the enemy in a lot of exercises. It seemed to be our role and was much better than sitting in camp. We were dressed as Chechen-type rebels and given old Kalashnikovs brought back from war and deactivated for training. We wandered around the Brecon Beacons in Wales so the Pathfinder selection (reconnaissance) course could observe us from the hills and log our activities. These guys were some of the toughest in the brigade and had a fearsome reputation. Some of our lads got bored as we hid in an old farm. One of them had brought a football which they covered in fluid from a Cyalume (glow stick) and kicked it around the fields all night. The glow-in-the-dark football crowd later left our machine-gun out on a guard post. The Pathfinders crept in that night and nicked it. The course instructor had gotten sick of our antics and disassembled the gun into its three main parts. He handed each of the troublemakers a piece and pointed to a stone pillar on a hillside a mile or so away. They were made to run over fences, through ditches and bogs to the distant pillar and back until they could go no further. The rest of us held in our laughter. Being an insurgent is all about discipline, the Pathfinders assured us.

We eventually ambushed the would-be Pathfinders in the closing stages and beat them to the ground as ordered, piling on top of them while two of our number – a German speaker and a Ghanaian – ranted at them in foreign languages. We put bags over their heads, plastic-cuffed them and marched them up a hill to a little sheep shed, in which a fizzing radio provided disorienting white noise for our captives.

Back in camp there were whispers of an operational tour coming up and the old hands told us about invading Iraq – the oldest of them had been in both Gulf wars. They told us about machete wounds in Sierra Leone and Kenyan or Belizean or German or Russian and Balkan whores and fly-covered bodies on Rwandan roadsides under a toothless UN mandate and the heat in Iraq and the cold in Bosnia. These veterans told us about waiting near the border to invade Iraq and how the WMD sirens would wail several times per day so they’d have to get into their awful, sweltering chemical warfare suits and respirators and sit in the heat waiting to die, and how the WMD never came because there were no WMD and it had been known that there were none. All those awful, sweating, panting hours had been for nothing and that had pissed them off.

One of the corporals told us that he got D&V (diarrhoea and vomiting) in Iraq and that when you are shitting and puking uncontrollably you just sit in your filth and ask yourself what the fucking point is. A guy from a different squadron told us that he had avoided D&V by simply drinking Coke instead of water for the whole tour and how he had been ordered – straight out of training and eighteen years old – to invade Iraq in a great, lumbering forklift truck with a can of warm Coke in one hand, a single magazine with only twenty rounds in it and a big flashing light on top of the cab which could be seen for miles. Why, he had asked, was that light there winking, marking him out like a bull’s-eye? And they had told him the light had to be there for health and safety reasons.

Nasty Bob in particular told a lot of war stories and made them as gory as he could and we were sure they were mostly bullshit but we wanted them to be true. We crows wanted to shit ourselves uncontrollably in the desert then get home and laugh it off. We wanted to bang whores at Rosa’s brothel in Belize City and invade countries in inappropriate vehicles and with a lack of ammunition and see bodies covered in flies. We wanted stories to regale birds with and to tell in the pub to our civilian mates who would never get them. They just wouldn’t and couldn’t know, but we would know and we would be wise, grim-faced and powerful for knowing these war things. I wanted to be in their club and all I had to do now was go to war.

The experienced blokes assured us of blood and gore and plunder and trophies and raw experience we would share with our mates, and we embraced it all. We wanted our own stories and adventures and they wanted us to want them. Then the whispers turned into stronger rumours that we were bound for Afghanistan. By then we were aching for it. The old hands in the regiment would tell us that ‘this one’s going to be different, not like Iraq’. And they spurred on our yearning with lines that, for the most part, would turn out to be true: ‘People treat you differently when you’ve done a tour… You’ll get to do your proper job… There’s less bullshit on tour… 13 badly needs a tour… You’ll come back rich from tour… You can get loads of cheap shit on tour… Fuck, I need a tour, my wife’s pissing me off… People get promoted off the back of tours… I’ve knocked up some tart, I need a tour… I’m getting done for assault, I bit some civvy cunt’s ear off, and so can I come on tour, sir?’

We started training months before we deployed and we shifted from playing at insurgents to playing at soldiers. The regiment hadn’t been on tour since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. By 2005, Afghanistan had reappeared in the media and we were to be among the first into the south of that country. There was much anticipation but in the end we went through a vague series of training activities and started to shoot more often, we practised live-firing vehicle anti-ambush drills, the highlight of which was when one of our Fijians nearly cut our hated sergeant major in two with a GPMG (general purpose machine-gun) as the man ran around manically shouting during live-firing. We practised cordoning and rudimentary mine-probing, vehicle recognition (presumably in case the Taliban started driving tanks or flying Apache helicopters) and other military skills. We were never given firm reasons why we were going or a specific mission to be carried out. We hardly noticed any of that because we were going to a war. I drew from the media and from what little we were told that we’d be ensuring the streets of Britain would be safer because security over there equalled security here. Peace needed to be kept or built from scratch, women needed to be liberated, or maybe everyone needed to be liberated, opium production needed to be stopped. We needed all of these, some of these, many combinations of these.