British soldiers from the First Batallion The Royal Regiment of Fusileers rest at Camp 'Stables' after an all-night foot patrol north of al-Basrah on Wednesday 2nd July, 2008.

The Sunday Times review by Christopher Hart

Soldiers who can write are as rare as writers who can strip down a machinegun in 40 seconds, but Patrick Hennessey is one of the few. He read English at Oxford before joining up at the age of 22, rising to the rank of captain in the Grenadier Guards. He is only 27 now, but in those five years the British Army has seen some of its fiercest fighting in decades. His account of being on the modern front line is a powerful, compelling and unapologetic memoir of a young soldier’s life.

He takes us through officer training at Sandhurst, which, he soon realises, aims to develop leadership, character and intellect by “MARCHING, IRONING and SHOUTING”. After a brief pause, including deadly dull parade duties at Windsor Castle and the Tower of London for the benefit of the tourists, it’s on to the combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan.

He and his comrades can’t wait to start fighting, after all that training and running about in the Brecon Beacons. Beforehand, “All anyone wanted to know was: were we going to be shooting people? and: would we get in trouble if we did? The answers, to ­everyone’s relief, were ‘yes’ and ‘no.’’’ Soon, “we’re bounding gleefully from the vehicles and firing…actually firing our weapons in glorious and chaotic anger”.

There is an evident satisfaction in shocking the civvie reader with such feelings, and the value of Hennessey’s book as a whole lies in this grim candour, expressed in such a slangy but powerful, resolutely unprettified style. Their grandfathers may have fought in Burma or North Africa or Normandy, as Hennessey points out, but their fathers’ generation knew little but Ulster and getting drunk on the Rhine. Now he and his peers are seeing face-to-face combat of an intensity unmatched since Korea in the 1950s, perhaps even the second world war. Their standard response is not a tearful farewell to wives and girlfriends, or anxious debates about the rights and wrongs the war on terror, but just a big hurrah!

These latest conflicts in the Middle East and beyond throw up any number of surreal, comic or disturbing moments. “A bunch of Canadians playing roller-hockey in the middle of an airfield”, impassioned debate about what to play on the i-Pod for their first ­mission (Metallica win), and the Yanks spraying “Widowmaker” on their Hummers before rolling out of camp. At the same time, the absurdly luxurious American camp is filled with slogans such as Liberty, Freedom and Victory.

Hennessey remembers scoffing with his girlfriend back home at the film Blood Diamond and its portrait of manly, hard-won, soldierly wisdom, telling her that there’s no way “Leonardo DiCaprio could look down the street and dodge the oncoming RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades]”, a ridiculous “Hollywood notion”. Then, in Helmand, he discovers that you can as he does a “last-minute dive underneath an oncoming RPG”. “I could distinctly see the f***er as I hurled myself down and then bounced back up off the incredible adrenaline surge with a roar of ‘f*** me!’ [and] a beaming grin of manic proportions”.

There is no doubting the nastiness of the enemy, yet even here there’s the blackest comedy, such as the “vehicle suicide bombing of a school football match where the f***er actually drove right into the middle of the penalty area (and was offside)”.

The British soldiers do what they’ve always done and give the enemy a contemptuous nickname, in this case, Terry Taliban. Quite possibly such a comic caricature is a psychological necessity if you are then going to pull the trigger and blow his head off without feeling paralysed by remorse afterwards.

Hennessey piles up the sense of brutal exultation in relentless detail. “The A-10s roar low overhead and smash in and blast the black-turbaned f***ers back to the stone age where they belong…well-tooled up Pakistanis and ­Iranians oozing life into the muddy water of the ditches…quickly bustled away by the smiling local villagers for the undignified funerals deserving of the murderers of teachers and rapists of little boys.”

Like all wars, the one in Helmand consists of long stretches of boredom punctuated by such flurries of panic and extreme violence. The boredom is dealt with by the Junior Officers’ Reading Club of the title: more military history and Joseph Conrad than Jeanette Winterson. There is no suggestion of any conflict between book-loving humanities graduate and enthusiastic soldier.

Apart from fighting the Taliban, there’s the Afghan army to train. “They had no discipline. They smoked strong hashish and mild opium. They couldn’t map read…I loved them.” The trouble is, in keeping with the new liberal imperialism, the British troops are out there not only to help the Afghans destroy the Taliban and build a few hospitals, but also to make them more like us, and worry more about things

such as health and safety. To this end, Hennessey finds himself leading not a fighting force, but an Operational Mentoring and Liaison team. “The potential for fun was incredible, the potential for f***-up immense.” The Afghans already know how to fight. They shout Inshallah! and charge. Yet Hennessy is supposed to be teaching them safe weapons-handling and vehicle checkpoint drills.

In the end, though, he isn’t nearly so interested in politics or ideology as extreme experience and comradeship. One anecdote had me howling with laughter: an exchange with some squaddies just back from Singapore, with Hennessey trying to explain that “the nice girls they’d met in Singapore’s infamous four floors of whores weren’t necessarily ‘girls’, to which the unabashed reply, with a grin and a shrug, is, ‘Did it anyway, sir!’ ” Did what exactly?

Hennessey has now left the army. As he explains, after Helmand everything else would be an anticlimax, and he’s afraid of getting hooked on the gruesome thrills of endless combat. An Afghan said to him, “They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.” But for now he’s evidently keen on some calm, and is training to be a barrister.