Rural Yorkshire was a place without provisions; the main job prospects were the dreaded Baco, the local bacon factory. Our lives were dominated by fighting with each other, trying to snare girls, talking about fighting, and seeing how many drugs our giros could buy while not starving. A few people I knew joined the army and I thought that this might be a good idea too, and then binned it. The drugs and hijinks were much more compelling at that age.
As I started to spiral out of control I had gathered a gang of miscreant, small-town friends – some of whom are now dead or in prison. We once went to a neighbouring town in search of adventure. But after an evening of the usual chavvish revelry, matters became fraught. Our de facto leader Fried Aaron pointed out that Dodgy Barry, another of our number, was renowned and had been banned from that town. In order to get rid of him, we went to the police station hoping for a lift back, but no one was there, just an unmanned phone. We rang it and the operator helpfully told us that there were no police in the area. With there being no police we decided to nick a car. Finding a Vauxhall Nova down an alley, we got it open but managed to snap the locked steering wheel with a metal bar. Having failed in this endeavour, we fled and decided to hike back the ten miles or so cross-country. Between the two towns lay Flamingo Land, a theme park and zoo. As we crossed ditches and climbed fences, great, black, steaming shapes closed in around us. We had stumbled into an enclosure full of buffalo it seemed. We fled again and made it back as the sun came up. In those shitty little towns this was the kind of stuff we did to pass the time. Our lives were full of bullshit talk about what we were going to do, and how we would escape, but very few of us did.
I fled that town owing money for pills and got my first job as a live-in waiter in a posh hotel near Rievaulx. The novelty of minimum-wage labour faded quickly. Our clientele varied between wealthy, tweed-clad shooting parties, American retirees, and so on. Not having been shaped by teachers and school hierarchies, I saw no reason to hold my tongue, and I was constantly in trouble for answering back to the management. This job lasted a few months until I got bored. By this time my mother had been sectioned and released and was beginning to recover. Meanwhile I ended up in another hostel in Norfolk. I met a girl there and we moved in together. I took up kickboxing and fell in love with it, becoming teetotal for those years and training and fighting as often as I could – trawling the martial arts magazines for weekend tournaments.
Then one day in America planes flew into towers. At the time I did not grasp the antagonism and extremism which had led to this moment, but it seemed to me the call to arms of the age; of my age. I very vaguely knew of the Taliban and Afghanistan. They were names mentioned on the television between more interesting programmes. When news of it came over the radio, the man I was working with, a Falklands veteran, nodded like a sage. The world had changed, he said.
It was around that time that the media seemed to assure me that I and all other Westerners had been attacked by brown, Muslim terrorists who liked killing women with rocks. There was no hint of a rationale leading up to the event that I could identify, they just attacked one day. Although I knew very little about these things, and they seemed so far away, they still made me very angry. I thought again about being a soldier, and for the first time it seemed like a truly moral choice rather than just a way out of boredom. But, once again, I put the feeling to one side. I had a girlfriend then and wanted to train and compete in kickboxing. Those things were my whole life at the time. I thought that maybe I would join one day. I was still young.
By twenty-two I had ambition but little sense. I felt the need to be involved in something, to be involved in something bigger than myself. I considered university – a degree in politics or writing – but I had no qualifications. I had moved to Ipswich by that time and for a while I volunteered with the local refugee group. Ipswich was a ‘catchment area’ for asylum seekers. For the first time I met people from places I’d only heard about on television: Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Somalia. I asked these people about their lives and how they came to be there in this small East Anglian town. They asked me about my life and I felt compelled to go out and be involved in the world they talked about, which in all honesty sounded as exciting as it was tough.
I befriended an Albanian Romany kid a little younger than me, and later on his family became my family. They were very fine people and like so many of these newcomers they were hospitable despite having nothing. These displaced people lived under the constant spectre of being interred in one of the refugee detention camps dotted around the country and then deported back to wherever or whatever they were fleeing. I disagreed with this: I wanted to make the world better, but at that age I didn’t want to debate at university or become one of the flaky NGO types I occasionally met at the Refugee Council. I wanted to be at the sharp end.
I repeatedly came back to the idea of the military. I would be paid and there would be the ‘three meals a day and roof over your head’ that every young man needs. I’d have a uniform and I was sure that girls would queue to swoon over me and my soldier friends. Yet, as I considered joining the military, my mother marched with the two million in London to oppose the government and its plans for war on Iraq. We did not discuss the politics of it. I held a dangerous view that a government was some kind of benign, impartial organization that looked after its citizens. I was a chump ready-made for the army, indifferent, apolitical and working class. The Ancient Greeks called anyone politically uninterested an idiot, it is the origin of the word, and back then I was an idiot by those standards. I was sure that if we were prosecuting wars, it was because the government had identified a need. It must be right. The war drums pounded out through the media and a recruiting sergeant made a convincing case. The question of right or wrong never came up.
In 2003, I wandered into an army careers office where the recruiter – a helicopter pilot with embroidered blue wings on his chest – told me all about military life. In the careers office they offered shiny brochures, tea and polished talk, and it looked a lot more interesting than what I was doing at the time. I did a psychometric test – which asked me to turn cogs the right way and that sort of thing – and scored averagely. I selected three jobs from a list: engineers, cavalry and medical corps. I was offered a place in the engineers and given a starting date for basic training. They switched all my options at the last minute and I ended up going in as a logistics specialist. They said that kind of detail was easy to change later. This was a lie. As it turned out it was extremely hard to move jobs and when I saw the officer in charge of changing trades he assured me I would have to linger around training camps for a long time. I’d spent hours outside running, readying myself. In my leaving card from the restaurant I worked at one of my colleagues wrote ‘make sure you kill some ragheads’. I told him I would and it still shames me, and I went away to learn war.
I reached the small Surrey train station in the sunshine to find a horde of other recruits. You can spot them easily, even when you are one of them: we were all jittery, with cropped hair, and trying to butch up. We were led onto a bus and delivered through the gates of Army Training Regiment Pirbright to begin the Common Military Syllabus (Recruits). Rallied by an ancient, shouting corporal, we were marched through the camp to our accommodation. We were out of step and looked ridiculous; we knew nothing about anything here. Then we were fed and issued with a whole number of green and camouflaged items, many of which we never learnt the use for: a confusing mass of camouflage clothing, webbing, pouches, aide-mémoires, straps, respirators (gas masks), chemical warfare suits.
The base itself was spartan, industrial-smelling and every building and fixture seemed worn by either a lack of care or perhaps too much scrubbing, polishing and sweeping – it was hard to tell. Everything was ‘bullshit’ according to the other recruits, or at least the ones who spoke to us, because there was a hierarchy based on time spent here. The recruits who had been here the longest looked at us with scorn