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

Hennessey, Patrick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1846141869 ISBN 13: 9781846141867

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2009

Synopsis

For the first time in a generation British soldiers are once again fighting at close quarters, coming under sustained and vicious firepower, losing friends in some of the most violent fighting the modern army has endured. Yet the same soldiers also serve on international peacekeeping missions, or counter insurgency. Sometimes they do all three in the same country.

The Junior Officers' Reading Club is the story of how one of these soldiers was made, through the testosterone-heavy breeding ground of Sandhurst, into the war-pockmarked, gritty Balkans, out into the nightmare of Iraq and Afghanistan's Helmand Province, pinned down by the Taliban, living only from moment to moment. Written in spare and lucid prose, it describes with alarming vividness not only the frenetic violence of a soldier's life, but the periods of stifling and (sometimes) comic boredom, living inside an institution in a state of flux, an Army caught between a world that needs it and a society that no longer understands it.

About this title

Review:

'Hennessey has fashioned what must rank as the most accomplished work of military witness to emerge from British war-fighting since 1945 ... He may have shed a uniform but - surely - he cannot abandon the rare gift revealed in this extraordinary book.'

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: Allen Lane
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1846141869
• ISBN 13: 9781846141867
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352