An Officer and a Gentlewoman Read Free

struck me. I continued to watch Sian Williams and Bill Turnbull on their red sofa talking about the recession and snow that were bringing the UK to a standstill. Somewhere back home someone else was probably doing exactly the same routine as me: sipping a fresh cup of coffee and watching the early morning news, getting ready for the day ahead. Except they were about to get a knock on their front door that would shatter their lives and change it for ever. A mother, father, wife, sister, brother, daughter, son, grandparent, friend. Things would never be the same for them. He was gone. Another solemn hearse travelling through Wootton Bassett.
    Death is routine in war, but these were the emotions I was not trained for. I had never been so close to death. The Royal Marine was the first of nineteen soldiers to die in my four months in Afghanistan. Each of the nineteen repatriated home in coffins draped with a Union Jack. Each remembered in prayers uttered by the padre at vigil ceremonies, the whole of Camp Bastion gathering, heads lowered, looking at boots in the dust. Each death was saddening but they became a fact of life out there, as British soldiers paid daily with life and limb.
    Outside I watched the helicopters return, and wondered how I had come to be in this corner of a foreign field. Just two years earlier I had been a suited civilian, commuting to a desk with the rest of the rat race. Now I was actually at war. Not part of the gritty infantry combat on the ground, but still here, smelling it, tasting it, feeling the emotions that newspapers, books and television screens simply cannot convey.
    As the coffee passed through me I walked across the dirt road to one of the Portaloos in the line of blue phone-box-like Tardis (or ‘Turdis’). I locked the door behind me and held my breath as Ilifted the lid to reveal the horrors within. Inside the Portaloo the plastic walls were covered with graffitied gallows soldier humour and I smiled to myself as I sat down and read the comment on the door in front of me: ‘Thank you for your application to RMAS’. RMAS – the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, the British Army’s officer training academy.
    That was how I had got here.
    1 KBR is an American private military engineering and construction company.
    2 In December 2006 on a visit to Camp Bastion, Tony Blair told British troops that ‘here in this extraordinary piece of desert is where the fate of world security in the early twenty-first century is going to be decided’.
    3 Forward Operating Base, the small football-pitch-sized fortified compounds from which infantry ground soldiers patrol in the Green Zone, where the food is in ration packs and there is often no running water.
    4 Predator is an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) – a remote-control plane that circles high above Afghanistan watching, piloted by someone sitting in an air-conditioned office in Las Vegas who clearly has the right idea for earning his war medal.

2
OUT WITH THE SHARP
SUIT, IN WITH THE
MARCHING BOOTS
    I had managed to go through life in the right order. I worked hard at school, got GCSEs, A-levels and went to university, where after three years of avoiding serious responsibility I graduated and took a job at a bank in the City that paid well and made my parents proud. I bought sharp suits, wore power heels, sat finance exams and spent two hours of my day at the clemency of London Transport on the Underground, commuting to a desk in the shiny glass and chrome of Canary Wharf.
    It was utterly soul destroying.
    I went along with it for a while and played the City game. Squandering my enviable wage in bars and clubs on the King’s Road, soaking up the bright lights of London with little to show for it. At university I’d known no alternative. All the big, powerful City firms had come through on their milk round, seducing us with flash PowerPoint presentations and sharp pinstripe suits, and we students clambered over one another to be there. To be