Make no mistake about this book. It’s magnificently readable, simultaneously literary and racy, youthfully engaging yet with innumerable smart aphorisms, and honest almost to a fault. It’s been called the finest writing to come out of the British army in 50 years. At the same time it displays attitudes of mind that are profoundly disturbing. It’s due out in paperback in the UK next week, so now’s a good time to assess its merits, and its demerits as well.
It’s the memoir of a young officer from the UK’s elite Grenadier Guards, covering years spent in the British army in the UK, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. After reading English Literature at Oxford, Patrick Hennessey went into the army, possibly with writing a book about his experiences also in mind, one with a title that would lead you to expect a modern descendent of the 1914-1918 English war poets.
The Junior Officers’ Reading Club has been compared to Michael Herr’s Dispatches on the Vietnam War — high praise indeed given the near-classic status of that book. But Herr witnessed war as a correspondent for the New Yorker, whereas Hennessey was a participant. The viewpoint is consequently very different.
The book’s title is something of a misnomer. Some books are mentioned, and there’s an appendix that lists others — Von Clausewitz’s On War, Catch 22, Hunter S. Thompson’s anti-war Kingdom of Fear, Day of the Locust and some Brett Easton Ellis. The author is unusually well-read for a professional soldier, but there’s not much evidence that his colleagues shared his tastes.
What’s striking about Hennessey, however, isn’t his reading but his honesty. He has his share of the charm all the young possess, but it remains unusual to read about hand-to-hand fighting from someone who also writes about Facebook, ringtones, Grey’s Anatomy and gansta-rap, who makes jokes about drugs, and sends text-messages home whenever he’s allowed to. Most important of all, though, he’s honest about the pleasure of fighting.
“Eight dead Taliban today so we celebrate with a precious tin of hot dog sausages”; “an uneventful clearance, during which all we’ve done is shoot a local though the leg with a ‘warning shot’”; “... a grenade for good measure through every door and window, and it’s sheer exhilaration.”
In a crucial passage he asks what it is about the contact battle that “ramps the heartbeat up so high and pumps adrenalin and euphoria through the veins in such a heady rapid mix.” On a training exercise he suddenly understands police brutality, and sympathizes with it “entirely.” As for battle itself, it’s “the ultimate affirmation of being alive.”
Earlier we’ve read about “wet dream verbs like DESTROY and HOLD.” So is the allure of war sexual, he asks, comparable to the “triumphant moment” of peeling off a girl’s underwear? His implicit answer is clearly in the affirmative.
Anticipation of exactly this, you realize, is why both he and his fellow servicemen were disappointed by Bosnia and southern Iraq, in both of which the Grenadier Guards arrived too late to fire a shot. Afghanistan was another matter, though, and the fighting, ambushes and attempts to win ground resulted in extensive casualties.
All this makes for vivid reading. If you want to know what fighting in Afghanistan is like here and now, this book certainly tells you. Reviewers are right to dub it a modern classic, but looked at from a broader perspective it’s a classic out of hell.
Modern warfare should be considered in the context of the phenomenon known as militarism — the gradual taking over of the state by the demands of its military or, to use a phrase rightly popular until recently, the “military-industrial complex” (the military plus the industries that depend on it for contracts). Hennessey refers to a book, Norman Dixon’s On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, that argues that most men aren’t by nature aggressive, and have to be made so by armies, with the aggression then contained by routines such as drill and the cult of smartness.
And it’s arguable, too, that the existence of standing armies itself ensures that wars will happen. To maintain a professional army without its ever having any wars to fight is like maintaining an opera company but never allowing it to perform any operas. No professional singers would put up with such a situation, and no professional soldiers will either.
Yet almost all modern states maintain such armies. In places like Taiwan, where there’s a clear and real threat, such recourse is understandable. But for countries like the UK, facing no perceivable enemy, to maintain large and very expensive fighting forces is unsupportable in terms of “defense.” (As for the UK’s nuclear weapons, do Spaniards, Swedes or Brazilians quake in fear of imminent attack because of their lack of them? Of course they don’t).
Hennessey is also of the generation brought up on computer games, many of which were developed with the cooperation of the military, arguably with the aim of de-sensitizing youth via online killing so that they would feel less compunction when the time came to do it for real. The youthful anti-war protests in the US of the 1960s are not something the authorities want repeated — nor, indeed, have they been.
The fact of the matter is that wars are the worst thing human beings inflict on each other. Even the repercussions — in Hennessey’s case randomly wanting to pick a fight in side streets, not to mention “sullen orgies of destruction” on army mess nights — are bitter indeed to contemplate.
In this context, then, a book about the thrills of fighting the Taliban, brilliant, funny and even poetic though much of it is, quickly comes to feel at best dubiously attractive.
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