6:00pm Thursday 29th July 2010
By Andrew Ffrench
The Junior Officers' Reading Club by Patrick Hennessey is published by Penguin and priced £9.99. Guide readers can get it for half price throughout August from Waterstones in Oxford and Witney with the voucher printed in every Thursday's edition of the Oxford Mail.
THE BOOK: The Junior Officers’ Reading Club had an unsual start in life, as the author explains in the acknowledgements.
Patrick Hennessey’s memoirs started out as emails to friends from starting Sandhurst in January 2004, to the end of a tour in Afghanistan in 2007.
He then wrote two pieces for the Literary Review before literary agent Jim Gill spotted their potential and encouraged the Grenadier Guards officer to write the book.
The author has won rave reviews for these recollections, which capture war in all its terror, boredom and exhileration, and he can often be heard as a commentator on military matters on Radio 4.
Hennessey focuses a great deal of attention on detail when recalling his training at Sandhurst, before moving on to describing his tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He uses the language of the barrack room to tell his no-nonsense version of events, and you get a good impression of what it’s like to be an officer in the Army in the 21st century.
Military acronyms are planted like IEDs throughout the text but there is a helpful glossary at the back to help readers.
The prose is lively, detailed, and bang up-to-date and there can’t be many better introductions to the life of a modern soldier, although I would also recommend the works of Anthony Loyd and Captain Doug Beattie.
Anyone in Oxford who has seen the repeated repatriations of soldiers killed in Afghanistan should take an interest in Hennessey’s observations.
The author sprinkles black-and-white pictures throughout the book, but I found them an unwelcome distraction.
Hennessey is a confident narrator and I believed every word I was reading. But should we consider his war stories to be the gospel truth?
The writer offers an interesting explanatory note at the start of his story, which says: “No two recollections of an event are the same, especially an event as frantic and emotionally charged as a battle or the loss of a friend.
“As Anthony Swofford puts it in Jarhead: ‘What follows is neither true nor false but what I know.’ “Occasionally I have turned to colleagues for their recollections of certain incidents or to official after-action reviews and reports. Some names have been changed.
“An element of confusion is inevitable and is, in places, intentional – the only realistic sense of the moment.”
THE AUTHOR: Patrick Hennessey, left, was born in 1982 and educated at Berkhamsted School and Balliol College in Oxford, where he read English. He joined the Army in 2004, undertaking officer training at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, where he was awarded the Queen’s Medal and commissioned into the Grenadier Guards.
He served as Platoon Commander and Company Operations Officer from 2004 to 2009 in the Balkans, Africa, South East Asia and the Falklands.
He also served in Iraq in 2006 and Afghanistan in 2007, where he was commended for gallantry.
Hennessey left the Army last year and is studying to become a barrister.
He hopes to specialise in conflict law and international humanitarian law.
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