The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars - Softcover

Hennessey, Patrick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141039264 ISBN 13: 9780141039268

Publisher: Penguin, 2010

Synopsis

Patrick Hennessey's The Junior Officers' Reading Club is a lucid, witty account of all the horror, boredom and exhilaration of war.

Patrick Hennessey is pretty much like any other member of Generation X: he spent the first half of the noughties reading books at university, going out, listening to early-90s house on his iPod and watching war films. He also, as an officer in the Grenadier guards, fought in some of the most violent combat the British army has seen in decades.

Telling the story of how a modern soldier is made, from the testosterone-heavy breeding ground of Sandhurst to the nightmare of Iraq and Afghanistan, The Junior Officers' Reading Club is already being hailed as a modern classic.

'Soldiers who can write are as rare as writers who can strip down a machinegun in 40 seconds'
  Christopher Hart, Sunday Times

'An extraordinary memoir ... Hennessey has a reporter's eye for detail and a soldier's nose for bullshit'
  John Shirley, Guardian

'High tempo, full-on, honest and revealing'
  Patrick Bishop, Evening Standard

'The most accomplished work of military witness to emerge from British war-fighting since 1945'
  Boyd Tonkin, Independent

'Remarkable ... conveys vividly what it's like to experience combat' Jeremy Paxman,
  Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year

Patrick Hennessey (b. 1982) joined the Army in January 2004, undertaking officer training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst where he was awarded the Queen's Medal and commissioned into The Grenadier Guards. He served as a Platoon Commander and later Company Operations Officer from the end of 2004 to early 2009 in the Balkans, Africa, South East Asia and the Falkland Islands and on operational tours to Iraq in 2006 and Afghanistan in 2007, where he became the youngest Captain in the Army and was commended for gallantry.

About this title

Review:

Soldiers who can write are as rare as writers who can strip down a machinegun in 40 seconds, but Patrick Hennessey is one of the few (Sunday Times)

High-tempo, full-on . . . honest and revealing . . . a memoir brimming with vinegar and testosterone (Evening Standard)

The military memoir of the moment (Times)

A very fine book, a powerful dispatch from the front line ... what impresses is the sheer candour and immediacy (Spectator)

An extraordinary memoir . . . Hennessey has a reporter's eye for detail and a soldier's nose for bullshit (Guardian)

Outstanding . . . A classic of its kind (William Boyd, Sunday Herald, Books of the Year)

Harrowing and frequently funny . . . sparkles with wit, wisdom and boyish glee . . . His generation owns the war (Times)

Must rank as the most accomplished work of military witness to emerge from British war-fighting since 1945 (Independent)

Remarkable . . . conveys vividly what it's like to experience combat (Jeremy Paxman, Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year)

An engaging mix of war reporting, stream of consciousness and reflections on the nature of conflict in the twenty-first century (Caroline Moorehead, Spectator, Books of the Year)

From the Back Cover:

We founded the Junior Officers' Reading Club in the heat of the Southern Iraqi desert. Marlow and me, the smart-alec Oxford boys, with surfer dude Harrison and the attached Coldstreamers. Basking in boxers on improvised sun-loungers, we snatched quick half-hour escapes from the oppressive heat and boredom routine - caught our breath among the books, wallowing after patrols and riding the adrenaline come-down. We might have thought we were the Army's Bright Young Things, but we weren't the first and we won't be the last.

The Club was a product of a busy Army, a post-9/11 Army of graduates and wise-arse 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 twenty-two. 'Too Cool for School' was what we'd been called by those higher up than us and in a way they were right: what did we know just because we'd had a few scraps in the desert? Those above us had probably been to the Gulf back in '91, were probably trained by those returning from the Falklands, who in turn were instructed by grizzly old-timers sporting proud racks of World War Two medals, chests weighed down by North-west Europe and Northern Desert Stars, which told of something greater than we could comprehend, the stuff of history imagined in black and white when no-one was anyone without an MC. Our grandfathers were heroes, whatever that meant, and they had taught the legends who charged up Tumbledown and who had returned to teach us.

We who didn't believe them.

We who had scoffed as we crawled up and down Welsh hills and pretended to scream as we stabbed sandbags on the bayonet assault course. We tried to resurrect the Club at the start of our Afghan tour. Same sort of base, same sort of desert, just a few thousand miles the other side of Iran. By the end of the first month it was obvious that there would be no Club. Each of us, wherever we were and if we could at all, would be reading alone. We went into battle with sketch pads in our daysacks and i-pods on the radio, thinking we knew better than what had gone before.

In the end we did and, of course, we didn't.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0141039264
• ISBN 13: 9780141039268
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368