Reading is my most serious addiction – indeed, it’s in equal turns depressing and a source of pride that my Waterstone’s loyalty card normally has more credit than my bank card.

So I promised myself from the outset that this blog wouldn’t just be a venue to say “this book’s really good”. On this occasion, though, one particular book has proved so superb and so moving that it would be wrong of me to resist.

The work in question is Patrick Hennessy’s “The Junior Officers’ Reading Club“, which I’ve just finished.

A memoir of the author’s time as a Guards Officer, it gives the most honest and hair-raising insight into what life is like training at Sandhurst, square-bashing in the Guards’ barracks, peace-keeping in Iraq and re-fighting Rorke’s Drift in Afghanistan that you could possible imagine, short of signing up yourself.

There’s a fine tradition of excellent military memoirs, from the Napoleonic diaries of Rifleman Costello, to George Coppard’s First World War “With a Machine Gun to Cambrai“.

Until Hennessy brought the genre into the 21st century, though, you’d have to go back to Michael Herr’s brutal, wide-eyed Vietnam recollections in “Dispatches” to find a true classic that summed up both the conflict in question and the culture, tastes and quirks of the people who fought it.

It’s only when you read about British guys of my age going off to war with iPods and DVD boxed sets of 24 that you really start to believe fully in the horrors and heroics that are reported back from the front line. Without that constant reminder that this is now, these are the guys you went to uni with or met at house parties, there’s always the danger that the realities of warfare get filed subconsciously along with the rest of military history.

The aspect of Hennessy’s writing that I found most moving was the way he documents the creeping feeling that going to war has erected a permanent barrier between him and his friends and family back home.

He is proud to have experienced that which the rest of us have not, to have achieved feats beyond our imaginings and to have a unique bond with his men and comrades. At the same time he battles a feeling of resentment against all of us who were back home, drinking beers without a bullet, an RPG or an IED ever likely to smash or destroy our comfortable lives.

As with most of my generation, I know quite a few guys (and girls) who’ve been out to Afghanistan or Iraq – and this got me thinking. How do we appear to them, the people who go through hell and glory for Britain in return for such a shoddy deal for their suffering?

If you haven’t read this book, read the first copy you can get your hands on, and don’t let it out of your sight until you’re finished. You will never, ever forget it.

Tags: Afghanistan, Army, Books, Iraq, Junior Officers' Reading Club, Patrick Hennessy, Sandhurst, War

Categories: Books, Opinion

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