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.
About fifty of us were to deploy early as part of the ‘pre-pre-advanced party’. The day before our deployment, we were brought to the mess hall of our camp where we queued to be processed by the regimental clerks. We were given dog tags and Ministry of Defence wills to fill out as we sat and waited. When it was all done, I was assigned to the baggage party. Myself and another private left in the early hours of the next morning in a truck stacked with bags and equipment and we drove through the night to RAF Lyneham. Once there, we humped the bags onto a big steel weighing plate built into a hangar floor. Bleary-eyed airmen tallied the weight and signed it off. We milled about until the rest of our squadron arrived.
We were sent into the departure lounge as it filled with more soldiers and a company of Royal Marines. We boarded by rank, beginning with the most senior. It was my first time on a plane and I was flying to war. We were instructed to keep our body armour and helmets with us. Filing across the tarmac, we boarded an RAF TriStar passenger plane where I sat next to two marines. Even to me they seemed young – even more childlike as they munched on packets of sweets.
We stopped in Dubai and were herded into a fenced enclosure next to the runway, to wait in segregation and smoke as many cigarettes as we could while our plane was refuelled. I imagined that British soldiers in uniform were not popular in Middle Eastern airport lounges. We got back on and flew towards Kabul.
The sun came up and I saw Central Asia from the air. It seemed barren and brown, with occasional spidery tracks and snow-capped peaks. It looked like the legendary Hindu Kush, though in truth I had no idea where we were. I vaguely knew that we didn’t like Iran, so assuming we had to avoid its airspace, we were perhaps over Pakistan or Turkmenistan. Over the tannoy we were ordered to don body armour and helmets as we descended into Kabul. I was afraid and excited and out of the window I could see this was a spectacular and rugged place. The runway was flanked to its edge by sheer rock capped in white. We bumped down into Afghanistan and taxied. We disembarked and trudged the tarmac amongst the marines. It was icy cold and fresh. I’d
