The Junior Officers' Reading Club by Patrick Hennessey

Author:Patrick Hennessey
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

The daily Baghdad SITREP cheerfully reported one morning that some 1,855 bodies have been delivered to the city morgues in July—a nice record high, up 300 on last month.

The next slide said that attacks across the city were up 40 per cent, which we knew full well because we’d all been woken that morning by the mother of all eardrum-bursting thuds. The blast had sent the company, and most of the Green Zone, shooting out of bed, sick with adrenaline and heart-pounding, arse-doing the 50p/5p routine. Thorold had come bundling in naked from the shower across the way, diving under his bed as the alarm sirens started, cursing the barbarity of insurgents who launch attacks so early in the morning.

Once the all-clear sounded we took coffee on the banks of the river and watched the blossoming clouds of smoke that were the initial bomb on the market in Karada and the follow-up, timed perfectly to hit the emergency services’ response. The sky was alive with angry choppers and even fast air, and we all privately wondered how massive a blast must be to feel so big from what turns out to be a good couple of hundred metres.

With the slides and the bombs and the changes in personnel it felt like the tone started to change. Piers arrived from Afghanistan with tales of zips in the wire and ten-hour engagements, encircled camps of Paras groggily watching the sun rise over heaped piles of Taliban bodies surrounding their perimeter with the machine-guns still hot from the night’s festivities, which only heightened the familiar insidious sense of creeping boredom.

The boredom of watching as the Yanks go out and hammer the city while we patiently wait for another trip into the Red Zone and kid ourselves that we came here to swim not fight, when we’d all rather do our swimming in Cornwall or Blackpool.

Boredom in comparison to the tales of the medics patching up IED victims, eyes half-hanging out as they’re rushed in to the Ibn Shaid CSH (combat support hospital), where we lend a first-aid hand with the battle casualties that come in from the night before and gag and look away while tourniquets are pulled tight and limbs amputated from wide-eyed Marines.

Then again it might just be that the diving board is broken.

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