An officer and a gentleman

MILITARY MEMOIR: PETER CUNNINGHAMreviews Callsign Hades By Patrick Bury Simon Schuster, 320pp. £12.99

THIS IS AN INTENSELY sad and moving book. Sad because of the futility it portrays; moving because of the heroism it recounts. Written by an Irishman who joined the British army in 2006 and served a tour of duty with the Royal Irish Regiment in Helmand province, in Afghanistan, in 2007-2008, Callsign Hadesis a vivid but ultimately despair-inducing account of war in the 21st century.

Afghanistan has experienced violent military intervention by foreign forces since before the time of Alexander the Great. Throughout 25 centuries of rolling invasions and wars the ferocity of Afghan resistance has always been noted, and the current war between the Taliban and the so-called democratic Afghan state, backed by UN-sanctioned international coalition forces, including those of the UK, is no different.

Bury, who grew up in Dublin, admits that he “experimented heavily with ecstasy” after he left school. At 19 he was arrested by the Garda and charged with possession, and he was lucky to receive two years under the Probation of Offenders Act. This may have affected his chances of joining the Irish Defence Forces, which at any rate turned him down. As he “always wanted to be a soldier”, and “was attracted to the glory of war”, he joined the British army and ended up in 2006 at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, training to be an officer in the Royal Irish.

Despite the fact that the words “craic” and “Sandhurst” are uneasy companions in the same sentence, Bury describes a wide-ranging brotherhood of Irishmen from north and south, as well as many others, training hard and drinking together. Tough exercises are conducted in the Brecon Beacons, in Wales; beside Loch Ness, in Scotland; and in Kenya. In 2007 Bury, now a senior platoon commander in Ranger Company, a specially selected unit within the Royal Irish, ships out to Afghanistan.

So far so good. The problem kid from Dublin has become a leader of men, and the “glory of war” awaits him. The remainder of the book is a descent into the stark reality of modern warfare – in other words, into a living nightmare of terror, pointlessness and death. Hades, in Greek mythology the abode of the dead, was aptly chosen as the call sign of these unfortunate recruits.

Bury writes about the action he saw in and around the poppy fields of Sangin district with great energy and edge-of-your-seat intensity. His account is festooned with the acronyms of warfare, most notably the ubiquitous IEDs, improvised explosive devices laid down by the Taliban. He conveys the hair-raising seconds of battle with liberal ingenuity: “ZipzipZIPZIPCrack-crack- CRACK-CRACK . . . whoOOSH BOOM”. His action-packed prose is balanced by his personal sensitivity, his regard for his men and his regular admission of his own inadequacy. He sounds like a good chap.

And yet even Bury’s steadfastness can overcome neither the emptiness of the mission in which he is engaged nor the personal degradation that a fighting man needs to sustain himself in such circumstances. In Sangin he is part of a unit working to support the local governor, whose open paedophilia, not to mention treachery, has made him an object of loathing to his supposed foreign allies. Beyond the vague goal of drawing “the fundamentalists” into battle, in order to stop them from launching terrorist attacks in the UK, at no point in this book is it even faintly obvious what is being achieved by the coalition forces.

It is an unavoidable fact of war that in order to survive you must hate your enemy. Soldiers who go into battle have already made funeral arrangements and always carry a “spare tourniquet” in case their limbs are blown off. They quickly become men who yearn to kill their Taliban adversaries, including the small children who spy for them. This takes its toll. “Sometimes inside a little whimper of conscience begs what have I become.”

These men die horribly for a futile, wasted cause. Bury describes the shorn limbs, the bleeding out, the mates you were drinking with last night, or bits of them, in body bags. Most powerfully, when his tour of duty ends, and he is back in the UK, news of the death of a close mate in his platoon in Sangin brings home the agony felt by the families of the men on tour in Afghanistan.

Alexander the Great told his mother in a letter that Afghanistan is “easy to march into, hard to march out of”. In 2006, when Patrick Bury joined the British army, the Taliban were active in only four of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. Today, as the violence intensifies and the number of British troops killed in Afghanistan exceeds 300, thirty-three of the country’s provinces are in the grip of the Taliban. Young men, especially young Irishmen seeking a way out of our broken little country: beware.

Peter Cunningham's most recent novel, Capital Sins, was published this year by New Island