Out in the Army: My Life as a Gay Soldier (20 page)

It’s true that no matter what, regardless of how much time passes, your friends stick with you and drop everything to help you in an hour of need. In the hour that followed my meeting with the doctor, I rang an old friend from London, Donna, and told her everything that had gone on. Donna was a civilian groom within the Blues and Royals when I’d been based in London, and we’d enjoyed many a late adventure in Soho. We hadn’t seen each other in twelve months, but she dropped everything and came to my help. I would never have got through that week without her.

It was a messy week. Donna and I had always been big
drinkers
and the way in which she helped me forget about Thom, and indeed Iraq, was by picking me up and taking me out, distracting me from everything in the process. She helped me pack a few things and took me back to London. I checked into a hotel – I could afford to after my three months in Iraq – and we hit the scene. I wasn’t at all interested in men. There wasn’t a man in the world that could get me over Thom; I was just there for the company and the drinking. I’m ashamed about how much money we just threw away in the days that followed, and about the state I was walking around in. I was in a complete daze, buying new clothes daily and living out of a hotel room. Donna would return home and sleep and I’d just go back to my hotel room and slip into a drunken coma, waking the next morning to try and piece together what had happened.

Mum went mad worrying about me over those few days, so much so that she decided to travel down to see me. Mum didn’t usually travel anywhere to see people, people always travelled to her; she was clearly very concerned about me. I had one last full day partying with Donna on the scene and returned to Windsor for the arrival of Mum and Phil the following day. They were even bringing Nan, who was also very worried about me and had insisted on joining them. I worried I was in for it, and that they were travelling to tell me off and put me back on the straight and narrow. I was happy with the medication I was getting from Donna and London; I’d even messed around with a random guy in my hotel room on our last night out. I must have been getting over Thom. It must have been working.

When the three of them arrived they didn’t start telling me off and giving me grief about how I’d been behaving. Nan took charge from the start and they were all very compassionate about my situation. Mum was worried I was in the process of throwing away my career and Nan kept saying how much of a ‘slut’ Thom was. I’d never heard an eighty-year-old use words like that before.

‘During the war, people who did that while their soldiers were away fighting had their heads shaved off in the street!’ It was great seeing the family, but I was still in a complete daze. I’m so glad they came to see me. The weather throughout my time back in the UK had been great. It was sunny, very hot and not a drop of rain had fallen. Before my family returned to North Wales, the four of us had a day out in Brighton, on the beach. Mum told me that she was desperate for me to go back to Iraq. Bizarrely, she felt I was safer away, having a job to do and something to focus on. Back in the UK she could see what was happening to me. I was blowing all of my hard-earned cash on drinking and
partying
and soon I’d pay a big price for my actions. I promised her I’d go back, although I really didn’t want to. My life was just stress
followed by stress. I hated that my time off had been completely ruined and that I was heading back to the rocket attacks without having had a proper chance to forget about them. I hated Thom and everything he’d done to me and, although I’d never met the lad, I hated with a huge passion the hippy, veggie-loving idiot Thom had left me for.

With my flight back to Basra delayed, there was time for one final go at London with Donna. I checked into a hotel, and we hit the scene for one last session – a session that lasted
forty-eight
hours and involved a lot of partying. It was two days of trying to forget my recent past and also my impending future.

I said my farewells to Donna and thanked her for helping me through everything. I’d had a great time, albeit in a state of depression and sorrow, and she’d really prevented me from falling into a complete hole of despair. I’ll be eternally grateful to Donna for being a true friend over that difficult period.

I
n the three weeks I’d been out of the country, Iraq had changed considerably for us A Squadron boys. A battle group had pulled out of Basra Palace, a previous home to Saddam, which had in turn reduced the number of rocket attacks everyone else was suffering at the COB. This was all part of the gradual reduction in strength the British Army was moving towards in southern Iraq, eventually leading up to us withdrawing in 2009. A SQN was being re-rolled to the port of Umm Qasr in the extreme south to act as port security and a local show of force.

The SQN was totally reorganised over the course of three days before moving via helicopter to Umm. The five-troop-sized squadron was reordered to three ‘super’ troops and one HQ troop. Soldiers found themselves working with lads they weren’t used to working alongside, myself included. There was a lot to get used to and not a lot of time to do so.

I returned to A SQN after my extended break. The boys were all brilliant, as were the seniors, but I could tell people were
walking
on eggshells around me. A senior NCO called Warren was the first to really approach the subject of Thom. He told me that I should feel able to talk with him or the others and that just because I was in a gay relationship it didn’t make the
circumstances
any less real. I appreciated his words of encouragement,
even if they were a little to the point. He was from a generation of soldiers who’d lived through homosexuality being outlawed in the forces. Warren would later tell me that as a young
corporal
, instructing new recruits in basic training, he was forced to terminate a young recruit’s career because he’d told Warren he was gay. He said it was the hardest thing he’d ever had to do because the lad was the best recruit in his platoon, but the army was very strict about homosexuality and Warren was risking his own career by not informing the chain of command.

‘People did used to lie about it too, Spicy.’ Spicy had become Warren’s nickname of choice for me. ‘People would say they were gay if they didn’t want to be in the army any longer, especially in basic training. It was a very quick and easy way out of the military. But this lad was different. He was an excellent soldier and I knew he loved his job; it broke my heart reporting him.’

The corporal major was, characteristically, less compassionate. He welcomed me back but then immediately told me he wasn’t ready to give me all my weapons. He didn’t trust me alone with a rifle and 120 rounds. I was outraged by this but there was little I could do. This meant I was exempt from guard duty and the like. Kempy also had to accompany me to the welfare village if I fancied a pizza or something; he was more than happy with the responsibility.

In the reshuffle, I was moved out of 1 Troop and placed in squadron headquarters for the remaining three months of our time in Iraq. I was to be a radio operator, communicating with the troops on the ground and plotting their positions on a huge map for the squadron leader. It would be quite a change from what I was used to. I was taking a back seat, and at that point, before stepping foot into Umm Qasr, and not knowing what kind of environment we’d be faced with, I worried I was going to miss out on lots of action.

My new boss was Corporal of Horse Parker, the chap who’d laid on top of me when I was caught without my body armour in the cookhouse that day, and working alongside me were two other lads, Wilko and Cardiff, the latter an obvious nickname for a Welshman. The three of us would share the day manning radios. I’d never worked in a busy operations room before and the thought of the task both excited me and worried me in equal measure. I feared something awful would happen and it would all be my fault for directing a troop down the wrong road or something.

We closed down our business in Basra and over the course of forty-eight hours moved our operation to the port of Umm Qasr, quite unsure what state we’d find it in.

It was a fairly quick trip down to Iraq’s only maritime asset on the British fleet of Merlins; the same Merlins that had ferried us back and forth to the desert much further north. The buzz of activity helped me take my mind off Thom a little, who was moving on with his life back in the UK. I was still, however, unarmed. We landed in a market area of Umm and were picked up by the soldiers we had come to relieve. They were heading back to Basra to end their three months on tour.

I got to the operations room, where I would be spending eight hours of every day, and familiarised myself with the new surroundings. I’d never seen so many radios all set up on different frequencies and networks. In just two days I’d be responsible for operating them all. I was shown to my new living quarters, which were quite an upgrade from what I’d been used to in Basra. It was the Ritz compared to roughing it in the desert, too. Wilko and I were sharing; Cardiff managed to bag his own room somewhere else in the compound.

Our new base, Umm Qasr North, was a brick building surrounded by a large perimeter wall dotted with tall watchtowers
every hundred metres. The towers were known as sangers and had to be manned twenty-four hours a day by members of the squadron. Each sanger had a radio to the operations room. It was quite a well-defended little fort but on our first day in Umm, the local Iraqi police commander came to the operations room to tell us they had heard the local militia were planning to
overthrow
us while our busy handover commenced. Immediate panic set in as everyone prepared for an imminent attack. Warnings couldn’t be taken lightly, especially from senior Iraqi officials. I told the corporal major that I wanted my ‘fucking guns’ back at once. I was the only person, it seemed, in the whole of Iraq who wasn’t carrying a gun and that had to change immediately if we were to be attacked.

An extremely anxious evening of waiting and hoping that the police commander was wrong followed. The mixture of being in a completely alien environment and under the threat of imminent attack didn’t go well. Widespread panic set in across the
squadron
as I sat in the operations room with the squadron command element, waiting to see how the night would unfold, but, as would become normal, the threat was just a threat. There was no attack, but it made everyone wake up to the fact that in Umm we were pretty much alone. Our only support would be from an American base a few miles away called Camp Bucca.

A week later, A SQN had completely settled in. The task was different from everything we’d done before and, actually, anything we’d trained for. One troop would be constantly on sanger duties, providing security to our compound; another troop would be ‘stood by’ ready for anything to kick off – this would turn out to be the task of preference for the majority, as it mostly involved playing on a Nintendo Wii, waiting for a call that seldom came. The final group would be the ‘tasking’ troop, who had to carry out menial tasks in the AO (area of operations) – mostly admin
runs to Camp Bucca or to a large hill some thirty miles away to make contact with the soldiers based there. There wasn’t much threat of rocket attack at Umm North due to us being a relatively small compound right next to a mosque and a number of other settlements; it would be too easy to miss and destroy something they liked.

I was satisfied with my new job. I’d either be on duty from midnight until 8 a.m., 8 a.m. until 4 p.m. or 4 p.m. until midnight. The three of us rotated for the remaining three months of our tour, swapping shifts weekly. I also had the added job of
exchanging
all the faulty radio equipment every ten days or so, giving me a regular helicopter trip back to Basra on a two-day stopover. The occasional trip back to Basra would be a pleasant break in the daily routine of the operations room, and I felt sorry for the boys who had to spend hour after hour with a machine gun in the sangers.

Two weeks later, during a day shift, I was first introduced to Sammy. Sammy was an American soldier who was doing the same job as me in an operations room in Camp Bucca and who had to travel to us at Umm Qasr North once a week to update the American radio in our ops room, enabling us to listen in to their movements. He’d travel up in a small convoy of Hummer vehicles and he’d work away at his radio while the other soldiers in his team would grab a coffee or a milkshake at our NAAFI (the camp shop). Sammy was, like me, twenty years old but slightly shorter with a shaved head (his hair, I could tell, was blond), and had an athletic slim build. I’d later find out he was from New York.

He walked into our ops room and saw me marking something on the map. I looked over and I guess my eyes widened or
something
; Sammy stopped dead and, for a second or two, we stood in silence.

‘Can I help you?’ I eventually said.

‘I’m here to change our radio, that one there.’ The American pointed and I nodded. I moved out of his way, though I really didn’t want to, wishing he’d squeeze past me, and stood admiring him from a few feet back. He turned back and asked if I was OK.

‘Would you like a coffee?’

I watched over him working away at his radio while I made us and my senior, Rich, a coffee. The tension in the air was notably different since the guy had entered the room. I felt a lot of the communication between us both was unspoken. I handed him the coffee and introduced myself.

‘Hey, I’m Sammy,’ he said in response.

Sammy! Sammy was perfect and I immediately fell in lust. We continued with the small talk. He noted that he’d never seen me before and I explained that we’d only just taken over the job at Umm and this was the first shift I’d done with the American radio visit. He told me that it was his job to come weekly and it was his only opportunity to get out of his own ops room. I told him I had the excitement of flying to Basra just over once a week with broken radios and he looked thrilled for me. I noticed Rich’s eyes raise from behind his book and scout over the two of us nattering away. We’d both stopped working and continued to make conversation. I asked him where he was from and he told me. I told him I was from Wales and he laughed.

‘I’ve heard of that place.’

I asked him how long he’d been in Iraq. He told me and I returned the same information. The Americans served a lot longer than us on tour. The usual would be an eighteen-month posting. In Sammy’s case, he’d already been in the country for six months but still faced another year from home. Unaware of this fact until then, I used it as a chance to pry more into Sammy’s backstory…

‘Jesus, that’s a hell of a long time to be away from home. I bet your family really miss you. Do you have a girlfriend waiting for you?’ Sammy hesitated and then looked at the ground. The
question
was probably a little too direct.

‘No… I don’t have a girlfriend.’

Inside I was screaming ‘DO YOU HAVE A BOYFRIEND?’ but even in the buzz of meeting Sammy I had better judgement than to just come out with it. I also knew that though Rich had his head in his book he was really listening to our conversation.

After my abrupt question, his focus returned to the task in hand: the American radio. A few moments later he finished his effort and returned the station to how it was. For the final five minutes of our meeting there was an awkward silence while he finished his coffee, more out of politeness than thirst. Maybe my questioning was a little too near the bone. What if he did have someone waiting for him back at home and he was trying to put it out of his mind? Eighteen months was a hell of a long time to be separated from a loved one. Thom couldn’t even manage three months waiting for me.

He told me he’d be back the following Thursday at about 1 p.m. and Rich made a note of it in the occurrence book. I walked Sammy to the door and offered my hand as he bade farewell.

‘It was really refreshing seeing a new face, Sammy. Maybe I’ll see you next week?’

‘Yeah… I hope so!’ And off he went.

I hope so. What did that mean?

All week I thought about our meeting and those final words. He hoped to see me again. He must have liked me. Then I considered the American situation and remembered that being gay in the military wasn’t allowed. Crazy. But I still wondered.

Our meeting drew many similarities to a random hook-up in a West End bar. I’m sure he looked me up and down as I did
exactly the same thing to him. The flow of conversation between us in the short time we’d spent together was more than I’d spoken to some of the lads in 1 Troop for the entire three months we’d been in the desert; there was certainly some chemistry – even if I had put my foot in it.

As soon as the door was shut, Rich put his book down and looked at me with a huge grin on his face.

‘I saw what happened then! Got a little friend, have we?’ Rich, who was a warrant officer, was a large chap who spoke with a very thick cockney accent. We got on well and I really admired his calm approach to the job. He was right. Sammy and I had made friends and we’d flirted our way through twenty minutes of time. I smiled to Rich and insisted I didn’t know what he was talking about. From the second I closed the door on Sammy, though, I started counting down until he’d next be playing with his radio in the ops room and we could carry on our little chats.

With Wilko taking the day shift the following Thursday, I told him I was getting increasingly bored during my sixteen-hour rest time every day and offered to cover him for an hour or so while he worked out in the makeshift gym that had been assembled. Wilko jumped at the chance to get out of the ops room for an hour. I’d got myself in for the arrival of Sammy.

The following day I sat and awaited Sammy’s arrival. Wilko had told me that the Yanks had been in touch on their radio to say they were on their way and due to arrive at any moment. On the desk in full view I planted a copy of
Attitude
which had a semi-naked actor from the TV show
Skins
on its front cover.
Attitude
had continued to send me a copy of their latest
magazine
while I was away, ensuring I was kept current on all things gay. I’d showered and even smartened my hair a little. I was ready!