Pop Grenade by Matthew Collin

Author:Matthew Collin [Collin, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78279-832-3
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2015-05-29T04:00:00+00:00

After a couple of summers chasing the Teknival scene across Europe and tracking Desert Storm’s idiosyncratic trajectory, I drifted away and gradually fell out of touch with them - until more than a decade later, I read an article in the venerable Edinburgh newspaper The Scotsman, published under the headline: “Royal Regiment of Scotland Sets Off for Afghanistan.”

The Scottish troops were departing to fight the Taliban in the turbulent Afghan province of Helmand, the article said. It quoted 28-year-old Private Richard Harvey, who said that recent killings of Scottish troops in Afghanistan preyed on his mind, but he didn’t think that he could suffer the same fate…probably. “If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen,” he said. The newspaper added that he “found it difficult saying goodbye to his three daughters, Vikki, 11, Jennifer, 5, and Emma, 4”.

A second soldier, named as Shaun Garrett, aged 17, said that he was “excited” but had no idea what to expect when he got to Afghanistan. I felt uneasy that my country still sent teenagers off to fight and die in lands about which they knew almost nothing - but then I read the comments made by another of the regiment’s soldiers.

“I quite believe in the cause politically,” this third squaddie said. “I feel our way of life and society are under threat.” He said that he had been forced to justify his decision to go and fight to many of his friends, but he felt that the world was “at a bit of a tipping point”.

The newspaper named him as “techno musician Keith Robinson”, adding that he was “a rave organiser, a member of Desert Storm Sound System band”.

It couldn’t have been a coincidence or a misprint or some weird newspaper production error: it had to be Keith, the techno rebel, off to fight for the West in this brutal post-colonial conflict.

“I wanted a new challenge,” his final quote went, and then I knew for certain that it really was him.15

A few months later, I saw a photograph posted on the internet: striking an insouciant pose in a waterlogged bunker, stripped to the waist with an automatic rifle in his hands and a cigarette between his lips, there he was - Keith Robinson, NATO warrior in Afghanistan.

I finally tracked down the mercurial raver-turned-squaddie a couple of years later in Bristol. By this time he had already been promoted to the rank of lance-corporal and was living in a terraced house in the working-class Easton district, its living room littered with party flyers and bits of army kit. His hair was shaved back to a sharp fuzz and dyed brilliant white, and although he was now in his forties, he had as much restless energy as ever.

Desert Storm had reached the end of the line about a decade earlier, he explained, on a travellers’ site in southern France where they had pitched up. Times were hard, money was tight, and the rest of the crew decided to quit and head home to Britain, leaving him there alone.

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