Harry Flashman and the Invasion of Iraq (2 page)
“Of course 16 Brigade is working itself into a lather as usual,” he continued. The rivalry between the Parachute Regiment troops of 16 Brigade and the Royal Marines of 3 Brigade is legendary and neither enjoys missing out on a deployment at the expense of the other. 2002 was no exception, since the Marines had already seen service in Afghanistan - and me with them, mind you. A pretty pickle that had got me into, I don’t mind telling you, but it’s a story for another time. While all that was going on, 16 Brigade had fumed at home and the thought of missing out on another deployment would have been enough to have the brigade commander phoning the Samaritans. “CDS is due to hand over at any moment and the new chap will certainly send them if he can.”
(3)
CDS at the time was an Admiral, which was why the Marines (being part of the Navy) had been picked for all the choicest deployments. But his successor was to be an Army chap, so all that would no doubt change. “And if it
is
a divisional move then the last brigade will have to be armoured,” continued Bob, “So the heavies are jockeying for position. The smart money’s on 7 Brigade, with all that desert history to fall back on.” This was both good news and bad. Moving armour to the Gulf would take time and in any case we were part of 4 Brigade, as opposed to 7 Brigade (or the Desert Rats as they were popularly known) so would have a better-than-even chance of staying well away from any shenanigans. But the fact that armour might be going at all was not comforting - staff officers would be dragged from every nook and cranny to make up the numbers in brigade and divisional headquarters. Still, it was too early to get worked up about these things, or so I mistakenly thought as I sipped the froth from my latest pint.
Colonel Bob stayed with us for almost an hour in the end and the old rascal was three sheets to the wind by the time he remembered his luncheon partner and wobbled off in the direction of the dining room. Frustratingly, before departing he embarked on a series of questions about the regiment. I was pretty certain that, through no malice on his part, he would let slip to the CO that he had bumped into us at Woburn and our relaxing day out would be exposed - and punished with a string of extra duties, no doubt.
But, if it happened at all, that would be tomorrow. For the moment we were free to return to giving Roddy Woodstock a hard time over the standard of his golf and of course racking up an even bigger bar bill for Valdez-Welch’s old man to pick up.
The following day dawned blustery and bright, and despite a crashing hangover I felt relatively chipper as I strode from the officers’ mess over to the brigade lines. Gaggles of men were forming up outside their accommodation blocks for morning parades and young lieutenants were scurrying around making sure everyone was present before the squadron commanders put in an appearance. The vehicle hangars were already open and lines of Scimitar and Spartan recce vehicles could be seen peeping out. All was well with the world and I had a veritable spring in my step as I made my way towards the headquarters building.
“Morning Sir,” called the RSM as I entered the headquarters.
“Good morning to you, RSM,” I responded. “Any good rumours to pass on today?” The RSM was one of the best connected blokes in the HQ and was usually good for some chitchat about forthcoming appointments and the like.
“Nothing for you today Sir, but you’ll be the first to know when I hear something.” For some unknown reason he frequently confided in me, and his information was usually pretty reliable too. In my opinion it always pays to the keep the RSM onside and this one was no different. “Much obliged, as always,” I told him, with a conspiratorial wink.
The morning passed easily enough and a half-dozen cups of coffee put pay to my hangover, thankfully. I had a quiet word with the chief clerk who promised me a copy of all Pemberton’s reports on disk without even asking why I needed them, and the rest of the morning was spent surfing the Internet looking for a decent second hand GTi to replace the somewhat tired looking model I had been clinging onto since returning from the Balkans years before. All in all it was turning into rather a good day, or would have done if something had not then happened to blacken it beyond all recognition. At that moment there was a knock on the office door and the CO appeared.
“Harry, good to see you on this fine morning,” he grinned, not giving me enough time to reply. “Look, something has come up which I think might have your name on it, very much up your street, so I thought I should run it past you, what?” I had an immediate feeling of impending doom. Perhaps it was the hangover still clouding my brain but I failed to come up with a response and instead just sat dumbly awaiting the rest of his pronouncement. “Well look, I haven’t got much time but I would like to talk to you about this today if poss. Could you pop into my office after lunch? Thanks.” With that he was gone, and the office door clicked shut behind him. I stared at the screen, my mind churning over the various possibilities that could be heading my way. The CO was a straight talking chap and if it was anything trivial he would have come out with it there and then. It wasn’t a bollocking - God knows, I’d had enough of them, and I knew what his face looked like when he was about to dish one out. But it wasn’t a pat on the back either, which was disconcerting. Probably just some dull staff duty he wants me to take on, I decided, and returned to searching for a suitably entertaining motor car to replace the current toy.
The potential for conflict in Iraq was all over the lunchtime news, with both Bush and Blair pledging to do their utmost to get a UN resolution before committing troops to action. Like an idiot I joined the chaps getting sandwiches and plonked myself in the mess TV room, which did nothing for my nerves prior to meeting the boss. US troops were already building up significantly in the region and, as far as I could see, it was fast getting to the point of no return - in another few weeks the deployment would have generated its own momentum and Bush would have painted himself into a corner whereby he wouldn’t be able to bring his boys home without having won some kind of tangible concessions from the Iraqis. And if the concessions didn’t come . . . well, there would presumably be some kind of punch-up, and it would doubtless involve the Brits as well as the Americans. I couldn’t care less about Joe Iraqi, he could take his oil and burn it for all I cared, and as for human rights abuses, well that was clearly just an expedient excuse for taking action - there was no shortage of dictators around the world after all. But I did care that another Gulf War might involve yours truly, and for this reason alone I found myself silent in front of the BBC footage from Kuwait, rooting for a diplomatic solution to the whole mess. My face must have told a story because halfway through the news bulletin Charlie Valdez-Welch thrust a pint of the cold stuff in my hand and told me I had a face like a wet weekend.
“The CO wants to see me after lunch,” I told him. “Don’t suppose you know what he wants?”
“Sorry Flashy, I haven’t the foggiest,” he replied, then added, “Shit, you don’t think he’s got wind of us bunking off yesterday?”
“No, I don’t think he has,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind too much if it was just a straightforward bollocking. It’s something else, and I’m not getting a warm fuzzy feeling about it.”
“Well, no point brooding over it. I’m getting another beer. Want one? I mean, if it is bad news you might as well be half-cut when he dishes it out.”
He had a point, so I accepted the beer, which in hindsight may have been a mistake. If my wits were more fully about me perhaps I could have come up with something imaginative to counteract the news the CO was about to throw at me.
Straight after lunch I padded along the headquarters corridor which led to the CO’s office, passing a series of oil paintings of the regiment’s exploits during the 19th Century as I walked. Afghanistan featured several times, as did Persia, which should have been enough to get the alarm bells jangling.
“Ah, Harry, there you are. Do take a seat,” said the CO, gesturing towards the leather button-back armchairs that littered the front of his office. The room was enormous, all oak panels and more oil paintings, this time of former commanding officers. His desk was also oak and measured a good eight feet across - ludicrously over the top for a battalion commander, but then it had been in the regiment for well over 100 years. I sat myself down with a growing feeling of unease. “I expect you’re wondering what all this is about,” he continued. Too bloody right I was. “Well the long and the short of it is that a job has come up with your old friends at 3 Commando Brigade.” My heart sank like a stone. I had only returned from service in Afghanistan with the Royal Marines six months earlier - a tour of duty which had hugely enhanced my reputation (albeit not through any of my own actions) but very nearly cost me my life.
“But Colonel . . .,” I stuttered, but it was no use, he simply waved an impatient arm to shut me up. “Harry, I know perfectly well what you are going to say. Of course it’s jolly noble to think that another chap should be given a crack of the whip, but I have the reputation of the regiment to think of and you have an absolutely first-class track record with the Marines. Just look at the report that they wrote last time around!” He reached into his desk drawer and produced the dreaded document then waved it theatrically at me across the desk. “First-class! Courageous! A clear thinker! Cool under fire! It’s all in here Harry. Once I re-read this there was no doubt in my mind that you were the right man - the only man - for the job.”
My head was swimming. It seemed only yesterday that I had found myself cowering behind the mud wall of a fort in the Hindu Kush while hoards of Taliban fiends fired AK47s and lobbed grenades in my general direction. In the nick of time I managed to call in an airstrike, although I came within an ace of getting myself shot in the process. I counted it little short of a miracle that I had survived at all and frankly if that was the sort of place the Royal Marines frequented then they could keep it. And yet here I was about to be sent back to the commandos at a time when there was another war looming. It was too awful for words. I think the shock must have affected my speech, for I simply sat staring at the CO in disbelief, not uttering a sound. He probably took this to be a show of steely resolution, the daft old sod.
“Now the Marines,” continued the boss, “want someone who can act as a liaison officer between themselves and whichever armoured unit the MoD chooses to send to the Gulf. Good chaps, the commandos, but they know bugger all about armoured warfare, as I’m sure you remember from your time with them last year.” I sat there shivering in disbelief as he droned on. “You’ll be attached to Brigade Headquarters, at least at first, but they reckon you’ll probably be pushed forward to a commando unit if there is any actual fighting, to advise the CO on the mechanics of tying up with armoured formations for any push into Iraq.” He beamed at me from across the desk. “Well Harry, what do you think? Pretty bloody good, eh? We all know how much you enjoyed last year’s deployment and working with the Marines. I expect they’ll be delighted to have you back - you’re becoming something of a permanent fixture within 3 Brigade, eh?” He chortled at his own joke, while my insides turned to jelly. It would mean months spent among officers who, while presumably reasonably competent at their jobs, shared nothing in common with me whatsoever. There was barely an old school tie between them, none of them could ride, polo was a foreign language to them and, while my idea of vigorous exercise was a round of golf, theirs was a 15-mile run followed by press-ups outside the mess. The whole prospect of returning to them was simply too awful for words.
“You’ll receive the joining instructions in a couple of days and you’ll need to be with them immediately after Christmas leave,” said the CO. “I know you’ll love every minute of it Harry. Ah, sometimes I wish I was a younger man - this is just the kind of opportunity I would have jumped at.”
Lying bastard, I thought, twenty years earlier he was probably skulking around the clubs of London, doing his best to avoid serving in Northern Ireland and bouncing every filly in sight. Which is precisely what I would have been doing this New Year, if this bombshell hadn’t just been dropped on me. I bade him farewell and sloped back to the mess, in urgent need of a stiff drink.
NOTES
1.
Flashman is referring to the dossier compiled by the Labour Government and the Joint intelligence Committee (JIC) in September 2002, detailing Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and including the now infamous claim, subsequently found to be false, that the Iraqi leader could deploy such weapons within 45 minutes. No weapons of mass destruction were found following the invasion and an independent inquiry in the UK, chaired by Lord Butler, found that Tony Blair’s cabinet and the JIC had both made grave errors of judgement in publishing the dossier without significant caveats about the reliability of the intelligence contained therein.
2.
PJHQ: Permanent Joint Headquarters, the UK’s centre of operations, located at Northwood, west London.
3.
CDS: Chief of Defence Staff.
2
With the news of my impending posting still fresh in my mind I found myself somewhat distracted during Christmas leave. Even the prospect of brandy, bonhomie and slaughtering pheasants with the chaps from my Sandhurst platoon was not enough to lift me from my sulk and the whole festive season passed me by like a ticking clock, each day bringing me just a little nearer to my departure for Plymouth. The whole situation was too ghastly for words but it did have one saving grace, in that my pained expression was noticed by Roddy Woodstock’s rather attractive younger sister, Charlotte, who asked why I was looking so glum. I must admit that I hammed up the answer somewhat such that it had the desired effect and, a couple of stiff drinks later, she insisted on taking me to bed for the afternoon, which was something of a tonic I don’t mind telling you. Nevertheless, the two weeks of Christmas leave was over soon enough and on January 3rd I found myself disconsolately packing my bags and preparing myself for life in the desert. This was bad enough in itself and made substantially worse by the Royal Marines’ insistence that I bring only one large kitbag in addition to my bergen and webbing. I had always found several bags and my old Wellington school trunk insufficient to hold all my belongings when moving from place to place with the regiment, yet now I was expected to achieve the same result with less than a third of the space. It was absurd and my mood blackened further as I was forced to abandon a perfectly good case of scotch and also, would you credit it, my duvet. (After numerous uncomfortable exercises spent shivering on the Barossa training area I had vowed not to spend any unnecessary nights in a sleeping bag and yet here I was preparing, for the second time in a year, to spend months sleeping in the wretched thing.) In the interim there would be just a couple of nights in the officers’ mess down in Plymouth before we set off for the Gulf and I had no intention whatsoever of leaving a room full of clobber for the light-fingered Royal Marines rear party to pilfer while I was gone. Come to that, I had no intention of returning to Plymouth at all and, assuming I made it unscathed through the adventure ahead, I planned to bid farewell to the Marines the minute we returned to English soil. With this in mind it felt a little easier to leave most of my trappings in my room in the regimental mess in the hope that they would be the first possessions to welcome me home, so to speak.