An Officer and a Gentlewoman (26 page)

My feet were killing me. These heels may look gorgeous but my God they were hurting my feet. I wanted to slip them off but we were standing in a bar and I might get thrown out for being barefoot. I peered down and slid one foot out of its high-heel hell to inspect the reddening around my scrunched toes. Ouch. Why did I do this? I was supposed to be on holiday. I suffered enough pain in my day job; I shouldn’t be subjecting myself to more in my spare time too. I picked up my glass from the bar and lifted the straw to my lips, draining the remaining cocktail with a gurgling slurp; sucking at any trace of alcohol that could be remaining between the crushed ice. Perhaps more alcohol would numb the pain.

It was Ann’s hen party, and there were a crowd of us, about thirty girls in total, all teetering in heels in the downstairs bar of Mahiki, the Mayfair nightclub. Ann and her fiancé George had been together for nine years now. They met on their first day at university and are a perfectly matched pair. Their eventual nuptials had never been in doubt, and their wedding would be the third I’d been to that year. As each invitation arrived in the post, I felt as though my personal life was frozen at Sandhurst. My friends were all busy moving on, getting married and having babies, while I didn’t have time for anything else. On the few snatched weekends I got away from the Academy, I was too tired to start bothering with a boyfriend and army commitments had made me unreliable when it came to social engagements. Joining the Army had forced me to
put my job first for a while, just as everyone else my age was settling down. Such is the nature of a military career. It is not a normal nine-to-five job. At junctures you are forced to put the Army first, while the rest of your life sits on hold.

Around us the club quickly filled with revellers and I found myself jostling for space, being bumped back and forth, which was not helping the high-heels situation. We moved to a standing table at the edge of the still empty dance floor and a couple of the girls made their way onto it, trying to get the party started. In the corner a DJ started his set and the speakers pumped out a good tune; I would’ve joined them in a dance if my feet could have borne the pain. Instead, I picked up my purse and headed over to the bar in search of another round of cocktails, squeezing my way through the throng to the end of the bar where the good-looking barman was working. He smiled and nodded as I arrived and I waited while he finished making someone else’s drinks. Mahiki is
Polynesian-themed
and some of the exotic cocktails come in impressive pineapples and coconuts, complete with fruit slices and paper umbrellas. It’s dreadfully kitsch, but somehow manages to pass off as cool.

As I waited I could see an argument erupting between a girl and her boyfriend at a small table beside the bar. She was getting animated and pointing her finger at him accusingly, flicking her long brown hair and shouting. She was clearly quite drunk and he tried to soothe her, but she was having none of it. Suddenly she stood up and threw the remains of her drink over his shirt, in a splash of ice and sliced lime. She then turned on her Jimmy Choos and stormed through the club, barging people angrily out of her way, knocking over a chair and Ann’s drink as she went, which crashed to the floor behind her. She didn’t care and didn’t even stop to apologize.

How rude.

I’d forgotten how often I used to see this sort of obnoxious behaviour in London. Arrogant adults behaving like spoiled
children in public. Acting with impunity, leaving everyone else to pick up the pieces after them. It used to exasperate me. As I watched her pass me I wished someone would do something about this petulance. And then before I knew it, I found myself walking towards her and grabbing hold of her wrist.

Oh my God. What was I doing?

‘Excuse me,’ I said, rather more confidently than I felt. ‘You’ve just knocked over that chair and my friend’s drink.’ And I calmly pointed to the chair lying on the floor next to the broken glass of Ann’s spilled drink. She lurched towards me, bringing her face up against mine; I could smell the Red Bull and vodka on her breath.

‘So what,’ she challenged. She snatched her wrist out from my grasp and glared at me. Behind her I could see her boyfriend walking towards us, a look of dread crossing his face. Perhaps I shouldn’t have confronted her. I don’t know why I did. This was not normally the sort of thing I would ever do. I hate confrontation. But I hated her loutish bad manners too. Plus the alcohol in my system had given me a little Dutch courage. For the first time in my life, I felt the need to intervene in something like this. Stepping in to defend the public order. Maybe this was because I was in the Army. I felt it was my public duty to police the situation.

‘Well, I suggest you pick it up,’ I said gently. ‘And buy my friend a replacement drink.’

Her drunken eyes rolled around, while she took in what I’d just said to her. ‘And who the fuck are you?’ she demanded, as the boyfriend came over to take control of the situation.

‘I’m a customer in here, the same as you,’ I said, holding my ground. ‘And I suggest you find some manners and stop tearing this place apart before you get thrown out.’ I was on a confidence roll. Beside us, the boyfriend was apologizing to Ann and picking up the fallen chair, clearing up after her. He looked over to me, his eyes pleading for me to let it go. Over his shoulder, I could see a big burly bouncer by the door, with an earpiece in and his eye on
us. I didn’t want to ruin Ann’s evening over this. The boyfriend reached for his girlfriend’s arm, but she shrugged him away.

‘Fuck off,’ she said. ‘Fuck off the lot of you.’ And with that she continued to storm through the crowd and out of the club, her boyfriend chasing along behind her. I turned back to the bar, slightly incensed by her behaviour, but quickly forgetting it as the handsome barman came over to take my order.

In the Army we were expected to live our lives according to a set of values and standards that were being drilled into us at Sandhurst: selfless commitment, courage, discipline, integrity, loyalty and respect for others. In reality these are all common sense to decent well-meaning members of society, but to the officer class they are essential. If the Army are to trust us to command soldiers, it needs to know that we have the moral framework in which to do it. Evil triumphs ‘when good men do nothing’ as Edmund Burke said. But what I didn’t realize was that applying these values in policing public order situations like Mahiki’s drunks, was exactly the sort of soldiering that I would be doing once I returned to Sandhurst. Because when I got back the war finally got relevant, and a hell of a lot more complicated.

So much of the Sandhurst commissioning course felt entirely irrelevant: the marching, polishing, ironing, show parades, areas, lessons in waiting; none of this was going to help us command British soldiers to win wars. It might have given me a stubborn resolve and personal pride, but this alone was not going to defeat the Taliban. If blitzed in a nuclear strike I knew I would at least die with shiny shoes on my feet and a tidy bedroom, but I was still fairly confident that in Iraq and Afghanistan there were no nuclear weapons to worry about. But when I returned to Sandhurst for the third and final, Senior Term, it was as if the previous two terms of
teaching hadn’t occurred. Because as I got back to New College, the last eight months of learning were effectively discarded, as finally the relevant lessons began.

Assaults on German villages, trench warfare, NBC drills, slogging advances to contact, all were parked to one side to make way for counter-insurgency (‘coin’) and peace support operations. Finally, we were going to be taught what the British Army really does. What the colour sergeants had actually done themselves. And what the British Army has largely been doing for the last fifty years, in Malaya, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Iraq and now Afghanistan. From now on the enemy were no longer the formally organized Russians advancing from the east, but baddies in balaclavas and burkhas that were all around us. Whereas the Cold War had been all about chemistry and physics, now the clashing civilizations of modern war forced us to understand the social science of where we fought out battles, as we became ‘nation-builders as well as warriors’,
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switching from what the United States Assistant Secretary of Defense called ‘professional killers to armed diplomats’.
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And it was a hell of a lot harder than digging a trench.

The exercise where we applied all this new counter-insurgency teaching was Exercise Broadsword, which took place in a
purpose-built
village in Hampshire, or ‘Hampshiristan’ as it became in the scenario – the ‘ungoverned space’. What had once been constructed as a mock-up of Bogside and the Falls Road to train troops for Northern Ireland had now been converted into an Afghan village. The pub and betting shop had closed, the end-of-terrace murals had been painted over, and instead there were prayer mats and tea drinking, while a dome had been placed on top of the church turning it into a mosque.

It was a total revelation.

Broadsword was nothing like the exercises we had done before. There were no slogging advances to contact, no digging shell-scrape coffins, no sleeping outside under a poncho or living in a woodblock triangle, because instead we occupied a patrol base next to the village, just like British troops do in Afghanistan. Living among the people and the enemy. The enemy had changed too, as the former clear-cut, black and white of previous exercises became a murky grey, blending and merging from nice convenient boundaries on the map into a less defined battle space. There were women and children to worry about. Fraught tribal divisions, important religious leaders to engage, corrupt governments, refugees, angry mobs, looters, and all to be dealt with under the scrutinizing glare of the media. Every action had a consequence, and for the first time each decision had a repercussion, as it was no longer about turning up and killing everyone. No more blunt military operations like the ‘shock and awe’ of the US Marines in Fallujah, destroying the city to save it. Now, it was about understanding the human terrain, engaging with the local civilian population and winning the war for hearts and minds.

Rather than the waving enemy Gurkhas that we had become accustomed to shooting at on exercise, there were actors playing starving refugees, rape victims, tribal leaders, hostages and rebel generals all thrown into an intense pressure-cooker of civil unrest for us to police (Mahiki’s had just been a dry run). And it was all relevant, because unlike the other Sandhurst exercises, Broadsword had been written by the academic staff from Faraday Hall, who based it all on real-life incidents, using true scenarios faced by British forces during three decades in Northern Ireland, six years in Bosnia and the last four years in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was all the bad bits from the Shankill Road to Sangin, Pristina to Rumalia, and it couldn’t have been more relevant without sand.

Patrolling ‘softly’ in berets rather than our normal hard helmets, we had to consider cultural sensitivities and tribal frictions, as counter-insurgency became a complex conflict ‘amongst the
people’.
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Gunmen melted back into the populace just as farmers in Afghanistan put down their AK47s and return to their crops. The constantly changing situations we faced required the judgement of Solomon as one moment the locals liked you, and then the next they were throwing rocks. But Broadsword wasn’t about killing everyone who stood in our way any more, because for every shot fired and innocent civilian harmed, more of the local population turned against us.

On our final afternoon in the village, I was patrolling through the increasingly hostile local population, trying to ignore their chants and taunts when I saw a large agricultural lorry arrive. The lorry was delivering a consignment of potatoes, and these were being distributed into small strategic mounds positioned around the streets. Tensions with the villagers had deteriorated since a hostage incident in the mosque and we all knew what this was building up to. A speaker outside the gates of our patrol base even played the Kaiser Chiefs’ record to remind us. That night a large braying mob gathered outside the patrol base, hammering against the fence and launching rocks into the compound in protest at our occupation. They kicked loudly at the metal gate and tore down a road blockade like the frontage of a McDonald’s in Trafalgar Square in a May Day “protest”. Trapped inside, the riot gear was handed out and I braced myself for what was going to be a lot more than a pillow fight.

The public order riot is still the main event on Exercise Broadsword. A throwback from the days of training for Northern Ireland, it is an intense test of controlled aggression that cannot be qualified in any other environment. Pumped full of adrenaline and wrapped in riot gear, with batons and toughened plastic shields, the whole of Imjin Company finally left the patrol base in the dark hours of the following morning. Ready to face the music. The village was quiet. The previous night’s protests had died down and everyone was subdued or sleeping. As we stepped outside into the murky darkness an eerie stillness hung in the morning mist.
Nothing moved. Not a shuffle, nor sound. The leaves hung lifeless on the trees and clouds remained motionless in the sky above. Everyone and everything was waiting, savouring the last moments of tranquil calm. Inside my stomach was doing acrobatics the tension was so high, but around me not a word was uttered. Just the gentle sound of clomping boots on the wet road could be heard. We were in the eye of the storm. This was the calm before the fight, our backstage moment, and soon it would all be shattered.

As we marched over the brow of a hill into the village, I could see fires ablaze. Cars lay wrecked and burning, their flames glinting in our riot shields. At a street corner a cluster of people had assembled, gathered closely like a halftime hockey pitch huddle. We walked towards them line abreast, a six-foot high frontier of riot shields, visors and batons. Organized and trained. Psyched up and fizzing with aggression. Waiting for the crack of the first move. In the distance I spotted an ambulance arrive, parking ominously to a flank ready to patch up the wounded.