Summary
The Junior Officers' Reading Club by Patrick Hennessey Allen Lane Pounds 16.99. Pounds 15.30 inc p& p (0845 155 0713). .. .
What is the reaction of a regiment when told it isbeing sent to Iraq? I would have guessed a stunned silence, but I would have been wrong. Patrick Hennessey was in London with the Grenadier Guards when the announcement came through. 'There was a roar like a penalty shootout,' he recalls, 'and guys punching the air and hugging each other with delight.' Afghanistan, being more dangerous, offers even greater delight. He talks of being 'delirious with excite-mentwhile there, particularly when he calls up air support and RAF bombs explode on Taliban positions less than 100 yards away. 'Before we can draw breath, time seems to stop and all the air is sucked out from around and there's no noise or motion until the wumph, which is part shockwave and part ear-splitting thud, cannons out and there's a few seconds of insane whooping from the Afghans [fighting on his side], who do love a good bombing, before the cloud engulfs us and it's raining mud and crap and bits of wall and goat...it's sheer exhilaration.' The excitement of war is often overlooked by historians, yet it frequently crops up in the memoirs of soldiers. After all, why become a soldier in peacetime if you are not attracted to the battlefield? Patrick Hennessey was born in 1982, just a couple of months after the Falklands war had come to an end. He went to Graham Greene's old school, Berkhamsted, and then on to read English at Balliol, the smartest of the Oxford colleges. One of his grandfathers was a soldier, the other an academic; Hennessey is an interesting mix of these two disparate impulses. On the one hand, he is a man of action, on the other, a dispassionate observer, analysing this more reckless man of action. It proves a winning combination.See the full content of this document
Extract
An Officer and a Brainbox
Early on in his book, he recalls how, at Oxford: 'I was inspired to cycle down to an abandoned warehouse in the rain just to see if I had it in me to put my fist through a window. It hurt, but there was an inexplicable elation in doing something, anything, to show yourself that you weren't just another over-privileged, overeducated,...
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