Harry Flashman and the Invasion of Iraq (3 page)

A sharp hoot on a car horn alerted me to the presence of the duty driver outside my window and it was with heavy heart that I heard the latch on my room door click shut behind me as I staggered down the corridor with my bag, bergen and webbing. The staff car - a ridiculously over-pompous term for a car unbecoming of a second-rate sales rep - was right outside the back door of the mess and the driver, lance corporal someone-or-other, was all smiles and good wishes as he loaded my clobber into the boot.

“The duty sergeant tells me you’re off back to the Marines, to go to the Gulf, Sir,” he beamed at me. “I bet you can’t wait. A bit more exciting with the Marines, I suppose, than with the Regiment.” Then, realising his perceived disloyalty, he caught himself and quickly added, “Not that there’s anything wrong with the QRH of course but, you know, tours of the Balkans can get a bit repetitive for the lads.”

I had spoken about almost nothing else for the whole of Christmas Leave so, as you might imagine, I was royally aggrieved that after enduring a fortnight of answering inane questions about the Middle East I should have to face more of the same from an idiot driver. I flew into a rage, told him what I thought of him and, if memory serves me, I think I even threatened to charge him with insubordination if he didn’t shut up. Fortunately the obsequious little toad got the message and we drove the route to Warminster railway station in complete silence which, considering the alternative, was absolute bliss. He even unloaded my bags onto a luggage trolley and wheeled it to my platform without uttering a sound, then hovered around, presumably waiting for my train to arrive so that he could load the baggage on-board for me. It was a distraction I could do without, so I shooed him away and spent an enjoyable ten minutes waiting for the train sending Charlotte Woodstock solicitous text messages from my mobile phone.

Once on-board, I found an empty first-class compartment and watched England’s rather soggy and not-so-pleasant landscape pass by the window until we reached Exeter St David’s, where I had to change trains. Again I had a few minutes to kill and, asides from pestering La Woodstock with yet more lurid messages, I amused myself by counting the number of Royal Marines recruits I could spot on the station.
(1)
Eventually the Plymouth train rolled in and with a heavy heart and a strong sense of deja vu I clambered aboard. Less than an hour later and the feeling was stronger than ever, as I shuffled out to the taxi rank in front of Plymouth station, feeling the cold coastal drizzle dampening my cheeks and hearing the cabby’s west country burr as he asked where I was going.

“Stonehouse, if you please,” I answered.

“I thought you must be goin’ there,” he responded. “I seen ‘em bags of yours and I thought aye aye, that’ll be another arrival destined for the desert. There’s been plenty of ‘em during Christmas Leave, I don’t mind tellin’ you.” Well at least I won’t be the only Johnny-come-lately in the mess, I thought to myself, a few more new arrivals to keep me company will be no bad thing.

Stonehouse Barracks was exactly as I remembered it: a beautiful Victorian stone quadrangle with offices and accommodation mixed higgledy piggledy on all sides, and the entrance to the officers’ mess nestling in a far corner. The setting would have had more impact if the centre of the quad had not been used as a regimental car park, but even with the addition of a hundred or so cars it was a very picturesque scene. Plymouth was hardly somewhere I would ever wish to be based but I couldn’t help thinking quietly to myself that such a glorious headquarters was somewhat wasted on the Marines, most of whom would have been just as happy in prefabricated squalor dating from the 1970s - as indeed was proven by the living quarters of 42 Commando, just a few short miles down the road.
(2)
I showed my ID card briefly to the young chap manning the main gate and loped across the courtyard to the mess, where the porter relieved me of my bag (but left me wrestling with the bergen) and showed me to my room (or cabin, as the Marines insist on calling them, in a transparent attempt to remind the rest of the world that they are part of the Senior Service), a pokey little hovel on the ground floor, complete with creaking pipes and peeling paint. Still, it would do for a couple of nights and would no doubt seem the height of luxury compared to whatever deprivations lay ahead. I unpacked the few personal items I had brought with me in a futile attempt to make the room a little more homely. Its saving grace was a proximity to the bar, where I had every intention of spending as much of the ensuing 48 hours as possible. Many of life’s little luxuries would probably be lacking in Kuwait and the absence of alcohol was a racing certainty. In addition to a carefully secreted bottle or two in my bags, I planned to smuggle as much out in my bloodstream as humanly possible. Having hung up my kit and partially emptied my bags there seemed little point in loitering around my bedroom, so I made my way through to the lounge to see whether there was anyone else on-board.

As it turned out there were numerous officers of assorted cap badges adorning the bar. A heated debate was taking place and I had difficulty making out what the discussion was about, so I ordered myself a beer and shuffled closer to the group. At first I mistakenly thought the conversation was about whether Britain should be sending troops to the Gulf at all. The UK as a whole was divided by the issue and these debates were taking place in messes and clubs up and down the country. The hawks were determined to sock it to Saddam while the doves reasoned that the UN should be given more time to deal with him and anyway, what was the rush to invade when we couldn’t properly quantify the threat that Iraq posed. For Flashy at least, the debate had reached resolution: if I was on the nominal of troops to be sent to the Gulf, then clearly the UK should not be taking part in such folly. I was about to offer my two pennies’ worth on the topic, when I spotted the chap at the centre of the group and overheard a snapshot of conversation, accompanied by some emotional gesticulation.

“Well, what can I do?” (Waving of hands and shrugging shoulders.) “We are all in zee military, non? So I must do as I am told. But zat doesn’t mean I ‘ave to agree wiz it. It’s a stupid decision, tres bete. And very frustrating for me, ziz you must understand. I would love to go, of course, I am a professionelle, juste like you.”

By this stage I had a clear view of the individual and could see that he was sporting French uniform, which only served to beg the question of what a frog was doing in the officers’ mess of 3 Commando Brigade Headquarters. The discussion was quickly halted as said frog spotted me from across the bar and waved the group aside.

“Anyhow, we have a guest,” he announced, waving me into the group. “I apologise monsieur, we did not mean to be so rude. You must be new here.” He outstretched a hand in greeting, which I shook, in spite of my inveterate dislike of all things French.

I introduced myself to the Frenchman, who I could now see was a captain in the French commandos, and to the rest of the group, which consisted of a Navy doctor, OC Brigade Recce Force, an attached officer from the Royal Artillery, and an assortment of Royal Marines staff officers - the usual group of skivers and drinkers that one finds in a mess on any given weekday afternoon. Funny how quickly a headquarters changes its staff: I could remember none of them from Afghanistan less than a year earlier.

Light was soon shed on their conversation. The French officer was on a two-year attachment to 3 Commando Brigade, and the French government had just issued an instruction that, since their troops were not to be involved in any action against Iraq, he was not to deploy with the Marines. His line, or at least the line he was taking when talking to the British, was that he was part of Brigade Headquarters and should therefore be perfectly entitled to go on operations with them. It takes one to know one, as they say, and I had delivered enough bluff and bravado in my time to have my suspicions of what his real emotions might be. I must admit feeling a fair pang of envy -the lucky swine would presumably waft his way back to Paris and spend a happy six months whoring and drinking Chablis while the rest of us were forced to slog it out in the fetid heat of the Middle East. Amongst his military peers, missing out on the deployment wouldn’t matter a farthing, since the French government had already made it plain that no French troops would be committed unless there was a fresh UN resolution which, as they held a veto on the Security Council, seemed highly improbable. Instead the opportunistic bastards would simply sit on the sidelines and wait for the shooting to finish before muscling in on the most lucrative reconstruction contracts, all shrugging shoulders and Gallic charm, no doubt. Fair weather allies, aye, and when the clouds roll in just look at ‘em run, I thought to myself.

I invested the remainder of the afternoon in getting quietly sozzled and chatting to the assorted chaps in the room, gleaning as much information as I could about the forthcoming operations and the various characters I would need to interface with. The artillery officer was particularly useful to talk to, since he was also an attached Army rank. He had admittedly completed his Commando Course so had turned partly native but nevertheless he saw the Corps of the Royal Marines through Sandhurst-trained eyes, which was helpful, at least to me. I knew the layout of a brigade operations room well enough to know that during the deployment, nestling among all the other staff officers and watchkeepers, the artillery (or “Arty”) desk would be a pretty central feature. With a bit of luck and a following wind I could arrange for the desk labelled “Armour” to be next door to him, which would at least mean I wouldn’t have to speak exclusively with Royal Marines morning, noon and night. A seasoned artilleryman, he had been attached to the Brigade since its return from Kabul a year earlier and was on good terms with almost everyone in the headquarters, and wasted little time introducing me to most of the gaggle involved in that afternoon’s conversation.

By early evening the bar had filled up significantly with a variety of souls mainly sporting combat clothing. The Royal Marines have a peculiar obsession with hygiene and widely consider it inappropriate or downright rude to dine without washing and changing first. (Fortunately the Army is a little more pragmatic and has no such hang-ups about eating in work clothes.) Sure enough, as the dinner gong drew nearer, they began to depart, returning en masse a few minutes later sporting jackets and ties and smelling faintly of soap.

I made my way to the bar to line up a last pint before supper and was startled by a swift punch on the arm and a thunderous “Hallo!” I turned around to be confronted by the grinning face of a disgracefully irreverent media liaison officer with whom I had got into several scrapes in Kabul a year earlier. I shook his hand like a man being rescued from a sinking ship. A demon skier, the man had initially been commissioned into the Army back in the 1980s but had transferred his Commission to the Marines almost on a whim after just a few years’ service. He had long since been discharged and retrained as a solicitor. But after a short time in civilian life he had joined the Reserves, risen to the rank of major, and become a seasoned war-tourist volunteering (insanely, in my opinion) for deployment after deployment on the basis that it was more interesting work than life in his law practice. He was truly his own man, someone who did as he pleased and took nothing in life too seriously. Keeping him in check was practically impossible - his CO once remarked that he would rather administer bollockings to anyone else in his unit, since it was a racing certainty that they would be ignored, which was not only frustrating but served to visibly undermine his authority too. I noticed that he was walking awkwardly and remarked upon it.

“My back’s trashed,” admitted my media liaison chum. “I broke it skiing last year. Total nightmare. Had to spend months in a body cast so I’m weak as a kitten at the moment. Can’t run either - it hurts too much. Hope no bugger asks me to carry a bergen on this trip, because I don’t think I’ll be able to lift the thing, let alone walk anywhere with it.”

“Then what the Dickens are you doing here?” I blurted out. “Surely you should have been medically downgraded by now?”

He met this outburst with a wry smile. “Of course I should. But I couldn’t let the opportunity of a good old-fashioned war pass me by. And the quacks at Chilwell are atrocious, everyone knows that.
(3)
Admit nothing and they’ll never find out for themselves. So I kept schtum, told a few half-truths and ta-da! Here I am, S02 Media.”
(4)

“You must be bloody mad,” I told him. “A perfectly good excuse to avoid this idiocy and you not only volunteer for it, you hide the fact that you are crippled in order to join in.”

We agreed to differ and shuffled through to dinner. In fairness to Stonehouse, one of the absolute joys of being based in Plymouth is the extraordinarily friendly nature of the mess staff. A posse of largely middle-aged women make it their mission in life to fuss over the officers as if they were spoilt children. Nothing is too much like hard work, everything is delivered with a smile and an old-world charm which I have seldom seem matched in the best London establishments, let alone the provinces. Yet another reason why Stonehouse is wasted on the Marines - if it were up to me, I would have the entire place moved to Salisbury Plain and given over to the Hussars. Still, their jollity and eagerness to please, coupled with the company of S02 Media, made dinner a significantly happier affair than it otherwise might have been. For reasons unknown I was as hungry as a horse and thirsty to boot, so I set about leveraging the goodwill of the mess staff in order to get second helpings of everything, while a couple of the chaps joined me in putting away a couple of bottles of Amarone, which fairly hit the spot.

I was all for whiling the evening away in the mess bar but S02 Media was having none of it. It was, he pointed out, potentially our last-but-one opportunity to paint the town red and we had nothing to do the following day but the nauseating tedium of traipsing round RM Stonehouse’s many administrative offices to draw desert kit, sign forms, and have Lord-knows-how-many inoculations. Not the kind of day which requires much brainpower. He called a cab and we made the short journey to the Barbican, always a good spot for a jar or two and for ogling the local talent which, it being Plymouth, is far from shy. It was a frigid evening but this seemed to have no effect on the attire of the local girlies, who thronged from pub to pub wearing little more than their underwear - a truly enjoyable spectacle. We descended on a wine bar and began working our way through their stock of Italian reds whilst putting the world to rights. After an hour or more I had comfortably settled in and was sporting the kind of rosy glow that comes from coupling excess food and booze with cold winter air, when I felt an unexpected tap on the shoulder and looked up. There, looking down on me with her trademark haughty smile, was Kate Gibson, a filly over whom I had spent many an idle hour fantasising during our days at Sandhurst together. She was vacuous, conceited bitch - but stunningly good looking and fit as a racehorse, which more than compensated for any failings of character, at least in my book.