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The Junior Officer's Reading Club by Patrick Hennessey: book review



The Junior Officers’ Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars (2009) is a personal account of training in, and fighting for, the British army. It is set from 2001 to 2007 and focuses on the Royal Miltary Academy at Sandhurst, and the war fields of Iraq and (mostly) Afghanistan.

Hennessey writes of boredom and inactivity, as well as the realities of field operations. ‘There were bursts of sustained intense activity, Sandhurst and Brecon had been unusually extended examples of these, although even those courses had been punctuated with moments of drifting calm, but these came at odd and inopportune moments, and the rest was, well, the rest was extraordinary.’

After 27 months of training and preparation and waiting, he was deployed to Iraq. Amid the tragic reality are his witty insights, such as when a helicopter crashes in Iraq, ‘so, as long as we don’t walk anywhere (landmines), drive anywhere (roadside bombs), stand still anywhere (snipers and mortars) and now it seems fly anywhere – it’s perfectly safe.’

Did the title state a reading club? Yes. Established by Hennessey and a few soldier mates, the club and its reading material are mentioned throughout the text – On War by Carl Von Clausewitz (1832), Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 (1961), Wilfred Thesinger’s The Marsh Arabs (1964) of southern Iraq, Michael Herr’s Despatches (1991) about the Vietnam War, 18 Platoon by Sidney Jary (1998), Michael Rose’s Fighting for Peace: Lessons from Bosnia 1984 (1999), The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst (2005) about class, sex, and money in London during Margaret Thatcher’s period as Prime Minister, and Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad (2007). But this novel is not a review of books, nor their impact on the soldiers.

Films are mentioned too – A Bridge Too Far, Band of Brothers, Gladiator, Platoon, Saving Private Ryan, Full Metal Jacket, We Were Soldiers, Tumbledown, Heat, Apocalypse Now, Jarhead, Black Hawk Down, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp …

But it is less about books and films as it is about real war – 33% of his 36-soldier company were lost in Afghanistan, three (50%) of them officers. However, the book is not about the macho war soldiers of movies, but of everyday men who are someone’s son, brother, or lover. It is about the bonds of brotherhood in tight-knit platoons and it is about the Oxford boys of Britain gritting their teeth to develop ‘leadership, character, and intellect.’ It is about the transition to action and its implementation. The final chapters are on decompression, and relieving the pressures of life back home where its safe but stressful.

With black and white photographs, it is a mixture between memoir and documentary, but it is not a history of the British army in Iraq and Afghanistan. It does move quickly from Iraq to Afghanistan and, if you blink you’d miss it. There are also some loose threads in relation to whatever happened to soldier X or soldier Y, but overall this is a great book – honest, realistic, under-stated rather than over-stated, and down-to-earth rather than exaggerated.



MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).


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