The Illuminations

2M2H

Early one morning in the summer of that year a troop carrier roared past a melon stall on the road to Maiwand. Inside the vehicle the boys were ribbing each other, the boys of A Section, a pair of fire teams in the 1st Royal Western Fusiliers. It wasn’t strictly an Irish regiment but it had always attracted boys with a sense of Ireland behind them, a number of songs or a father who swore by an old decision.

The cab shook and you could taste the dust. The lads were jammed in the middle of the convoy. Captain Luke Campbell was in charge of the section and he sat in the Vector with his rifle flat across his knees. He was talking about the Afghan servicemen they were meant to be looking after during the mission. ‘The nobs can blab all they like,’ Luke said. ‘There are ANA troops I’d choose over half the Paras.’

‘Too right,’ Private Dooley said.

‘No messin’,’ Flannigan said. ‘I’d take the ragamuffins every time over the Plonkers.’

Luke screwed up his face. ‘But we’re not training the Plonkers, much as they fucken need it. We’re training the Fundies. Keep it clear in your heads: we’re the Operational Mentor Liaison Team.’

‘We’re their Sandhurst,’ Dooley said.

‘Whatever, Doosh.’

They rode along and the air got hotter. Private Lennox had

been up top for two hours with sand smacking him in the face and he was melting when he came down. They passed another stall. The boys’ tongues were hanging out for a cold drink but the boss said they couldn’t stop because every local fucker was probably a roadside bomb. ‘Best fucken army training in the world,’ he said, ‘and you crows are still unconvinced that water is better for you than cans of Fanta.’ Private Flannigan of fire team Delta saw on the gauge that it was fifty degrees inside the Vector and he clocked that Lennox had nearly passed out when he dropped down. The boys from Charlie team pulled off his armour and fanned him and pumped him full of water. Flannigan cleaned his face with a wet wipe and grinned. ‘You’re fucken burning up, our kid.’

Private Dooley removed the boy’s helmet. ‘I’ll just hop off the bus and get him a Ribena,’ he said.

‘Shut up, Dooley,’ Flannigan said. ‘It’s the South Armagh of Afghanistan out there, nothing but Terry Taliban waiting behind the wall to chop your balls off and send them back to your mammy.’

‘Bring it on, bitch,’ said Private Dooley, a big, smiling boy of eighteen with fleshy lips and a bent ear. Nothing surprised him. They all cheered and Lennox sat up. ‘He’s back!’ Dooley said.

‘You were fucken babblin’, man. The heat got to you.’

‘What’s the difference?’ Flannigan said. ‘That’s the way he always talks. A thick gypsy from Belfast, eh?’

‘Shut your face,’ Lennox said, then Flannigan reached inside his tunic and took out a Lambert & Butler, passing the cigarette to Lennox as the vehicle jolted and went on. It had been Lennox’s first tour the year before and Flannigan looked after him when they were pinned down together during a battle on the Pharmacy Road in Sangin. The boys in this section were close and they all

knew it. And the soldiers in the rest of the platoon, travelling behind, they knew it, too. The boys in A Section had their own language and said whatever they wanted.

‘What you got a thigh-holster for, man?’ asked Flannigan. He was from Liverpool and never got tired of mocking.

Dooley looked like he’d barely started to shave. His green eyes were bright and he used a lot of words, some of them wrong.

‘Shut yer face,’ he said. ‘This gear is highly appropriated.’

‘You mean “appropriate”,’ Luke said. ‘Get some more water inside you, Lennox. You’re dehydrated.’

Lennox’s red face was shining with sweat. ‘Have you seen Dooley’s thigh-holster, sir?’

‘You were out for the count a minute ago,’ Luke said. ‘Spark out. Couldn’t take the pace.’

The boys laughed and Luke smiled and turned away. ‘You just keep saving up for your big fat gypsy wedding,’ he said to Dooley.

‘Harsh,’ Dooley said. Then Luke studied the map. The boys loved it when the captain joined in: it made them feel lucky, grown-up, selected. ‘I’ve been thinking of inventing a new thing for the wedding,’ Dooley added. ‘Worst man. Like the opposite of best man. I was thinking of asking Lennox: he’s definitely first choice. He could make a speech proving he’s the biggest gobshite ever to leave the Falls Road.’

‘Your talk makes me proud of my regiment,’ Luke said.

‘Thank you, sir.

Veritas vos liberabit

.’

‘Oh, Jesus.’

‘Regimental motto,’ Flannigan said.

‘Onwards the 1st Royal Western,’ Dooley said to himself, looking down at their boots smeared in dirt. ‘The truth will set you free.’

Luke was always telling Major Scullion that his boys were the salt of the British army. Especially 5 Platoon. They were full of shite, he said, and they talked non-stop, but when it came to fighting these men were the bomb. Luke was a full ten years older than most of the platoon and had spent a lot of time with them at Camp Bastion and in Salisbury. The boys recognised Luke was a bit of a thinker but he wasn’t the careerist kind of officer. They never said it to his face, but they knew, they all knew, that his father had been a captain in the regiment and had died in Northern Ireland.

Sergeant Sean Docherty was driving the vehicle behind, carrying a group of men from the Afghan National Army. Docherty was quiet, thought Luke, a self-made officer who missed his wife and steadily avoided most of the banter around him. Luke was always conscious of the men, checking their positions, ensuring they were ready, and for him they constituted an unconscious world of faith and necessity. You go to sleep knowing these men might be the last thing between you and the shit. They stand up for you. They think your thoughts. They need what you need. He loved the banter and the way the banter brought the boys together. But he felt worried on the road to Maiwand that they were jumpy in advance of the mission. They weren’t coping well with the heat and their brains were soft from months spent doing nothing, killing some imagined enemy on screen, posting rubbish on YouTube, or lying under mosquito nets thinking hard about the car they’d buy if they ever got home.

The convoy stopped on Highway 1 and some of the ordnance blokes got out to check for roadside bombs. ‘That’s fine,’ Luke said to the three soldiers in the Vector, ‘you can get down. We’ve got half an hour. Try not to shit your pants. Eat the oranges but

not too many. This is Terry bandit country and we’re camping right in the middle of their spawn-point here, waiting for them to drop on us.’

‘2M2H?’ Dooley said.

‘No, Doosh. Not too much to handle. Don’t be a prick. I just don’t fancy my crack platoon getting wiped while sitting on their skinny wee arses eating tropical fruit. Keep your peepers open and do what the captain says, there’s a good lad.’

‘Roger that.’

The Royal Engineers had work to do on some of the convoy’s vehicles and the search for roadside bombs took longer than they thought, so they were stuck. Luke radioed to Sean in the vehicle behind, telling him to ask the ANA soldiers who knew the terrain if they had any clues about where the bombs might be. ‘They should do,’ said Sean’s crackling voice. ‘They probably planted half of them.’

LIGHTWEIGHT

Sitting against the trucks, shirts round their necks, the boys had smokes going. It was way too hot. ‘If you don’t know the difference between Death Metal and Thrash Metal,’ Lennox said, ‘you may as well just get out your fucken assault weapon and start blowing your tiny brains all over the fucken desert.’

‘He reasoned,’ Luke said.

‘I mean it, bitches. I can’t believe I’m turtling here in the sand with a bunch of fucken newbs with a low-ping connection to the universe — Dooley, Flange, look at the nick of them — and it’s Game On in this shithole and these fucken ’tards think that “The

Punishment Due” by Megadeth is an example of Thrash Metal. Cop on, bell-ends. Go up the front there and sell that shit to the Gobblers.’

‘What’s the Gobblers?’ Dooley asked.

‘The Grenadier Guards,’ Luke said.

‘Awesome. It’s all Royal Engineers up there,’ Dooley said.

‘The Chunkies,’ Lennox said. ‘A corps of Bennies up there with a single fucken standard grade and a metal ruler between them, pumping up tyres and thinking they’re God.’

‘Fuck them all, man. We got the battle honours.’

‘Fucken right,’ Flannigan said, leaning on the cabin door and closing his eyes. ‘But we’re the ones sitting here for hours going red pigs …’

‘Hot, man.’

‘Like boiling,’ Flannigan said. ‘And the cocknoshes up there, man, the fucken Chunkies, giving it fuck-o-nometry with some cunting Rupert from Bastion nodding all impressed like and we’re sitting up here getting Kit-Kat arse in the sun.’

‘Some officers are dicks and they’ll always be dicks,’ Lennox said. ‘Not you, Captain.’

‘Steady,’ Luke said.

‘Jesus,’ Dooley whispered. ‘I wish something would happen. I want to be all over this map. I want a whole lot of kills and then I don’t give a fuck what happens. They can take me home.’ His voice had gone down a level with the heat and he swigged water from a plastic bottle and then threw the bottle into the road among the rocks.

‘I don’t care what anybody says,’ Lennox said. ‘Megadeth is not Thrash Metal. It’s Death Metal, so it is.’

‘The guitars are gunning, man. It’s Thrash.’

‘Bollocks, it is.’

‘They practically invented Thrash. Them and Metallica.’ Lennox began poking himself in the chest. ‘I’m telling you, man. I was into them before any other kid at St Gerard’s.’

‘Cop on, Lennox, you daft bitch. Get real. You were about two when

Countdown to Extinction

came out.’

Lennox pondered this. ‘I was definitely listening to

Youthanasia

when I was in primary school, so I was.’

So the conversation went, all day, half the night, between joints and scran, boredom and mortars. The time to start worrying on a mission, Luke always said, is when the boys are being too nice to one another. And in a firefight, you only panic when the boys go silent.

He smiled and walked off the road. He could see the wavering line of the horizon and everything in the distance looked like a form of sunstroke. There was a mud house by an irrigation ditch, a smell of shit and rotten hay, a man in a pink turban strolling with his goats. Out there, the ragged mountains appeared like a video still, not reality but a screen-grab. The whole scene looked parched and ruined. A clear picture came into Luke’s mind of a fresher landscape, Loch Lomond in the black-and-white summer of an old photograph at his grandmother’s. He could almost taste a pint of lager, and taste Anne’s art. He didn’t think that any of his Helmand images would end up in a frame.

There was heat inside the heat. Sweat ran down the back of his neck and between his shoulder blades. Luke hated the hours it took to dig out landmines and the wait for incoming fire. Scullion said the mission would be the biggest logistical task of the war. Two hundred vehicles and a shitload of grunts desperate as fuck to get out there and banjo the Taliban. Luke felt weak. Just as

there was heat inside the heat, there was weakness inside his weakness. Everything is dense with itself out there; everything is thick with its own crazed lack of known limits. Things could escalate. You could sense it in your nerves and feel it on your skin.

Jesus, the boys were mad for action. They were mad for wild-eyed bogeymen covered in rags, for teams of degenerates to appear on the horizon wearing beards and mucky sandals, pouring through the heatwave with their sabres held high. By late August the men in the platoon were chin-strapped and breathing through their arses. They needed a story to tell and they needed pictures. They longed for something they would hate the moment it arrived. But they wanted it and their want appeared to seep into the deadly hot distances that surrounded them.

‘Jesus,’ Luke said. They’d given up on the famous victory long ago and now they gave a toss for nothing but the regiment. To everybody it was a cluster fuck where nobody wins.

‘Mad out here,’ he said quietly.

Luke walked a dozen yards away from the convoy. The horizon was a bundle of grey and brown garments, a heap of old linen, surely not stones and mountains. The distance seemed to come and go in the heat, it appeared to liquefy before him and he felt lost on the empty map with the troops and vehicles ranged at his back. At Bastion he’d told the boys to write their last letters. A quick note just in case. Two seconds. They wrote them while waiting for their turn on Xbox.

It began early on that first day. It began with the melting horizon and the threat of forces lying outside his vision. He felt the Kajaki Operation was cursed and he wanted to be out of there. He felt the pressure of his younger self, the one who missed his father, the boy in touch with beautiful ideas. Back then, Luke often

walked through Kelvingrove Park in Glasgow to spend the day with his gran. Anne was a woman who lived quietly and knew how to disappear into her own experience. He could still see her standing near the window with a magnifying glass and an old catalogue, sitting him down to explain things. Even when speaking to a boy she spoke as a person not only ready to invest in you but ready to bear the costs to the end. In Helmand, he already understood that Anne was now ill, and, thinking of her, he realised her quest had long since become part of who he was himself. It was inside him. He didn’t yet know what her quest was, but he had never forgotten that by going round galleries with him and talking about books, Anne had given him the world not as it was but as it might be. He could see himself as a boy on her sofa with a large seashell clamped to his ear. He felt he needed her more than ever, he wanted her close, the person who once revealed to him a world beyond the obvious. He recalled the time she took him to Dunure Harbour. He was twelve years old and they stood holding hands on the jetty, the wind pushing them back as they took great gulps of air. ‘Breathe, Luke!’ she said. ‘You can’t argue with that! Fresh wind off the sea. Oh my. I wish I could catch it with the camera.’

It all felt different now, the ethos, the habits, the taste he and his fellow soldiers had developed for a high kill ratio. Out there, staring into the mountains, it occurred to him that he had travelled far from his old resources, far from Anne Quirk and her mysterious belief that truth and silence can conquer everything. Was she even real in herself, he asked. Or was she just another of life’s compelling hopes? He remembered her bringing books back from the library and then disappearing down to England for weeks at a time. His mother wouldn’t tell him anything about Anne’s story and the books stood, in his mind, for everything

missing. ‘You’re the first officer I’ve met in years’, Major Scullion had told him, ‘who knows that Browning is not just a small arms weapon.’

Luke and the major were now miles from the shared conscience that had once elevated their friendship. Something was wrong. ‘Jesus,’ he said again. ‘This war is dirty as fuck. There’s nothing good here. And we the police are coming to our end.’ He blew out his breath and watched his thoughts vaporise against a wall of daylight. Some crazy box of frogs out here, he thought, goats and fuck knows what, Fat Alberts flying overhead dropping cannon on the wrong people.

MAJOR SCULLION

Some men say they love it. They love the flamingos that once nested in the alkali lakes of Ghazni. Major Scullion could speak a little Pashtun: he was that kind of man, a perpetual scholar of green river valleys, an inspector of old travel books. And now he was a veteran of long hot days spent eating pomegranates in the Afghan mire. Like many people who love walking, Charles Scullion was a professor of his own singularity, yet he preferred to speak of himself as a dot in a majestic landscape. He liked the clichés, the phrase ‘harsh beauty’. In his mind he had reformed all images of blood so that now he only saw Kipling’s vistas of white carnations. The major came with recent memories of Sierra Leone and Kosovo, but it was Afghanistan he loved more than home, and he spoke of the Caspian tiger the way others spoke of the nightclubs in Temple Bar.

‘What’s in the horror-bag?’ said a tall kid from Edinburgh

who’d been in the jeep with Docherty and the Afghan soldiers. They had high hopes for the canteen at Maiwand and the queue was long. Luke’s head was miles away. He turned after a moment and saw the kid.

‘Eh?’

‘What’s the snap, Captain?’

‘Curry, I think.

Private Flannigan scraped past with a full tray in his hands. He winked at Luke, who just shook his head and gave him the finger. The canteen was buzzing, the soldiers ate quickly. Luke went over to a corner mess with Major Scullion and listened, not for the first time, while the major gave a lecture about medieval barbarism. Luke knew it was unreal. What was behind all this talk of the British attempt, whether in Bosnia or Kandahar, to obliterate ignorance with firepower? With the smell of boil-in-the-bag curry coming over the partition, Scullion reminded Luke of the defeat once suffered by the British at Maiwand. ‘Your fucking Jocky ancestors were forming a football team in Glasgow around that time,’ he said. ‘God bless them. They were bog Irish like my own, with hardly a kilo of potatoes between the lot of them. And what do you think was happening over here in that year of Our Lord, 1880?’

‘Death and destruction, I presume.’

‘Correct! A British brigade was massacred by 25,000 Afghan savages. A thousand of our lads. And here we are making ready to bring water to the same ungrateful pigs in their madrasas, still teaching their young how to blow up British soldiers who are out here to help them.’

‘They’re mainly in Pakistan, the kind of madrasas you’re speaking about.’

‘Wherever. It’s all the same.’

‘In any case I would cut that speech, sir,’ said Luke. ‘For the briefing. This is a two-day mission requiring tolerance.’

Scullion was in the mood for firing off questions. Luke had seen it before and knew it was coming. ‘You’ve seen this country from the air a number of times?’ he said.

‘Of course.’

‘What does it look like to you?’

‘Dunno, sir. Empty. Bleak.’

‘No, Campbell. It looks like bundles of brown blankets slung over history. And that is what it is.’

‘You’ve said that before.’

Scullion stood up and took a few steps and drew his finger down some bullet holes in the window frame. A few hundred yards off he could see whorls of razor wire with plastic bags snagged on the blades. The bags didn’t flutter, they were still, it was hot.

‘Did you have a nice time at university?’ Scullion asked.

‘Just normal, I suppose.’

‘And what did you learn?’

‘I learned how to climb. I was in the climbing club.’

‘What else?’

‘I learned how to drink snakebite and blackcurrant. And I learned that nationalism is a false promise.’

‘Well worth the visit,’ Scullion said. ‘I met my wife at Trinity. We used to lie in bed listening to Duke Ellington. Frost on the trees. Early 1980s. The cleaner in the halls of residence used to bring us a lit Carroll’s cigarette and a cup of tea in the morning.’

‘That’s the life.’

‘It was, Luke. It was the life.’

‘You’re upset, sir.’

‘You know something …’ He sat down and his shoulders sank. It’s not ordinary for a man like Scullion to let his shoulders go. He coughed. Luke knew he had recently split up with his wife. ‘A bad marriage can smash a person’s life for years. You haven’t really lived until you’ve been fucked over by a person who claimed to love you. Some people have it in the bag by the time they’re twenty. But most of us get it at forty or forty-five, the lunatic surge, desperate to take you down. They force you out of your own house and claim you left them. Madeleine was so hormonal and dark I think it actually wiped her memory. She can’t remember what she did. The hostility. I never faced a bigger battle.’

‘Come on, sir,’ said Luke. ‘You fought in Bosnia.’

‘Dead on. I’d faced dictators before but none of them controlled access to my dog.’

‘She never hated you, Charlie.’

‘No, she didn’t. Her negatives were just too deeply cooked into the casserole.’ He smirked and sat down again. ‘But she didn’t love me either. She used me, man. She used me as an alibi against the accusation she was messing up her life.’

‘No way, sir.’

‘Oh, yes. She saw me coming along and she thought, “He’ll do. He’s respectable. He’ll take the sting out of it for a while.” It was her father and mother that did it. They were liars, too. By an early age she was totally fucking destroyed as an ethical being. She could speak endlessly about love but her actions were without it. And that’s evil, Luke. That’s badness for you, right there.’

‘Charlie …’

‘They never see it, those people. They never see what they’re

doing because they’re too busy doing it. And when you finally find them out it’s part of their brilliant act to deny it, to pretend they are the victim and then convince themselves of it. That’s the brilliance, Luke. They lie and lie, those people, and never face up to who they are or what they did. And then they move on to the next person and it’s mansions on top of ruins. Thank Christ there are no children to pass this stuff on to.’

‘Let’s think about the briefing.’

‘Every day there are fresh outrages …’

‘It’s not worth thinking about.’

‘Oh, but it is, Luke. You have to keep good accounts with yourself. Because one day the inspectors come round, the inspectors in your head. The moral cops. And you have to be able to show them what you did. You’ve got to show them that you tried to do the right thing.’

‘People can grow apart, sir. It’s nobody’s fault.’

‘I wish we weren’t here, Luke. I wish we were sitting down at home with a couple of drinks talking about good poetry. Housman or whatever or Ezra Pound. Just to sit down with a bottle of Talisker.’

‘The plan, sir. We need to talk about the plan.’

‘I left her with everything and set her free. She could honour me for that, but she doesn’t.’

‘Doesn’t she?’

‘No, man. She acts like life is just the sum total of what you can get away with.’

‘Right.’

‘And on a bad day I do think that’s quite evil.’

‘It’s not evil if you can’t help it.’

He was probably the toughest guy Luke had ever known, yet

simple things were clearly hard for him as he got older. He was a veteran of many battles but life at home was casting doubt over his authority. Luke wasn’t sure the major had got it right about how to live: the uncomplicated things, the comforts. He was probably a nightmare to live with. Their friendship used to be like a winter coat to Luke. In the regiment, Scullion had always had a reputation as a brave soldier, but Luke wondered if that was even true any more. He wasn’t sure. To him the major looked scarred and self-indulgent, unreliable, and whatever had been tough in him was in danger of going softly malignant. Maybe it was Luke. Maybe the war made him question everything.

‘You think it’s simple?’ Scullion said. ‘Domestic life is harsher than Stalingrad. You’ve got a long way to go, Captain. How old are you, thirty or something?’ Scullion laughed and slapped Luke’s back and then drank his cold tea in one go. Luke saw that the major’s hand was shaking as he lifted the plastic cup. ‘The bottom dropped out,’ Scullion added. ‘I had no ambition. I thought she was out to fucking kill me. And all she had in her arsenal was my feeling for her.’

‘Come on, Major. Take these.’ Luke passed him two sedatives from his wallet. ‘See you out there in twenty minutes.’

‘I would like you and the others to forgive me for anything cruel I’ve ever done,’ Scullion said. ‘Just stuff that I might have said or times when I lost my temper. Like the wee things that stick around and before you know it the person thinks you’ve stopped listening to them. I want you to know I never meant to be cruel about anything. It was only life and sometimes you’re not yourself.’ The smell of baked curry and stewed tea was mixed in the air with unsaid things.

‘Army curry,’ Luke said, nudging his plate.

‘You have to taste the real McCoy. You have to go to Calcutta.’

‘Don’t sweat it, Major,’ Luke said. ‘We’re going to get this job done and then we’re out of here.’ Scullion gripped his shoulder and Luke imagined he was talking to all the boys.

‘It’s a great operation this, Captain Campbell. A brilliant thing to be doing. I just feel upset.’

‘Come on, sir. We’re the Western Fusiliers.’

‘I’m the son of a barman, Luke. Believe me. The sons of barmen have taken over the world.’

OQAB TSUKA

Private Dooley was rolling a cigarette at the back of the hall, a breeze-block community centre in Maiwand. The hall was packed and after a while Luke sat in the row beside him. In front a staff sergeant with the new Royal Caledonians was gassing about Scullion and the regiment. ‘And this major’s a total fucking mentalist,’ he said.

‘What’s mental about him?’ asked the lance corporal beside him.

‘Brutal cunt, Mark. He’s about forty-eight. He fought in every fucking battle you can think of since the Falklands. Bosnia, the lot. I’m talking about Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone.’

People change, thought Luke. The world changes. Maybe he’s just not the person he was any more. Maybe he’s sick. He thought carefully as he listened to the Scottish men. Just as likely it’s me that’s sick. It’s me that can’t stand the pace. The major is probably as committed as he ever was and it’s me that’s changed my mind. Every soldier has his ups and downs, don’t they? Every soldier. Maybe Scullion’s just going through a bad

patch in his personal life, like he said, and it’s nothing more, except in your own head, Luke.

‘Iraq? He fought in Iraq?’ asked Mark.

‘Obviously. He was a big man in Basra. Is that when you joined up?’

‘Aye. In 2003.’

‘Right. Well: Scullion. Jesus fuck. He would lift a bazooka to swat a fly.’

‘Cool,’ Mark said. ‘You’ve got to have your team.’ Luke thought there was something familiar about the young lance corporal, but he didn’t say anything and just listened.

‘Aye, well. Scullion certainly knows his team. And he gave the IRA a right shoeing as well. A brutal cunt is what they say. Republicans, Republican Guard: he wiped half of them before they could even get their sandshoes on. Did the whole thing on expensive whisky and a raging fucken hard-on for modern warfare. Knows everything. Goes into battle with a book in his hand. A brainbox. Like Tim Collins, man. I’m talking supersoldier and I’m not kidding on. Goes hard. Could melt a platoon without trying. Half of the pikeys in here would surrender to his fucken verbals alone.’

‘Easy, boys,’ Luke said from behind.

‘What the fuck …’

‘Shut yer cake-hole. Captain Campbell here. Yer in mixed company, boys.’ The lance corporal turned when he heard the Scottish accent, but then he put his eyes front.

‘You tell them, sir,’ said Private Lennox, squeezing into the back row and stealing the captain’s roll-up from behind his ear. ‘Fucken Aquafresh sitting there. A tube wi’ three stripes.’ Dooley said it loud enough for the staff sergeant to hear.

‘That’s enough,’ Luke said. They all enjoyed a bit of

inter-regimental strife, but he wanted to get back in focus.

There was a lot of noise in the hall and every soldier was hungry to get past the mountains and do some damage. Dooley, Flannigan and Lennox kept close to the captain, but he wasn’t paying much attention to them. He was busy waiting for Scullion to come through the door, looking for signs that the major was under control.

When Scullion came in Luke saw Rashid behind him. Jamal Rashid was a good soldier in the Afghan army, a captain in fact, and he had emerged during training at Camp Bastion as a future military leader and an effective speaker of English. He had an eyepatch and it made him seem very distinguished to Scullion. The Afghan captain was a one-man justification for the surge: ‘Look,’ they said, ‘look at him; in ten years’ time the country will be filled with Rashids.’

He was always with Scullion that summer and it sometimes appeared that Scullion’s last great push was to show Rashid the old arts. Only Luke knew how tough that must have been. Scullion had scars in places nobody would ever see and he wasn’t sleeping. He was falling apart. Looking from the back row, the captain remembered a night two years before, a night he spent with the major and a bottle of Bushmills. Scullion had spoken of a terrible thing that had happened in Bosnia. A squaddie had his face torn off by a sniper in Vitez in 1993, right next to the major, who had been friends with the young man. But all that stuff had taken its toll. Luke remembered how the major loved the old ballads and said his mother had sung them at lock-ins in Mullingar.

Scullion had persuaded himself, just about, that creating electricity and irrigating the warlords’ poppy fields was a better idea than blasting the population from its caves. In his heart, Scullion

felt the Afghans had been destroyed by corruption, by keeping faith with sociopaths and fascists. He agreed with those who spoke of an international caliphate, an order of terror, and, in his militant dreams, he believed such murderers might eventually be bombed into civilisation. This was the war. Scullion felt that bomb strikes and ground troops were the only way because these people didn’t respect talks. What they liked was to cut people’s heads off live on the Internet. What they liked was to cut out the enemy’s liver and eat it. He often said this, but he said many things and now he was trying irrigation.

It had taken a while to reach Trinity College, a while to reach Edmund Burke, then Gower Street in London, University College and afternoon walks round the British Museum. It took a while for him to learn that kneecappings and beheadings might be beaten by good will and enlightenment, but Charles Scullion was still arguing with himself. In his heart he was old school. Since Christmas in Helmand he had held the coalition line on peace-building while thinking constantly of the trigger. When Luke examined his face he saw the eyes of a little counter-assassin from Westmeath. They were fogged with humanitarianism and strict orders, but they were still the eyes of a man who knew what to do in a dark alleyway.

Smoke, trepidation, farts. The air-conditioning could do its best but the room was unpleasant. Luke nodded at the major as he lifted the pointer. He was probably going to be okay because he’d got whatever it was out of his system and Luke imagined the Xanax must have dipped his headlamps. He appeared to be breathing normally and thinking straight, his silver hair combed into a neat parting and his eyes blue. Scullion placed a volume of Matthew Arnold’s poems on the table.

Rashid was the only ANA soldier in the room. With the eyepatch and the blue uniform he stood out. ‘Okay, fellas,’ Scullion said. ‘You all have your jobs. Many of you will be cheered to learn that some senior officers, including yours truly, will be on the ground for this mission.’ He was leaning on the pointer with his sleeves rolled up. Luke reminded himself of an old truth about briefings: they are never brief. Yet Scullion could bring the weather in on time. ‘I will be travelling with a section of the Royal Western Fusiliers deployed here in a mentoring capacity. But you all have a mentoring role in this operation: be sure to show our local colleagues how to behave.’ Scullion seemed to absorb a cold look from Rashid. ‘And learn from them, too,’ he added. The hall shifted from one foot to the other and Rashid wiped his good eye.

‘Recent events in this theatre notwithstanding,’ Scullion said, ‘I believe our mission is absolutely clear. This will be a major development project for the Afghan people. Five dozen officers have worked for six months preparing the way. We bring clean water, we also bring culture. Now listen. This is Operation Eagle’s Summit. By necessity and by grand design, our job is to facilitate the onset of prosperity among the peasants. Putting aside our previous efforts to bomb them to kingdom come, we now rectify all political errors by giving them light and water. The operation’s code name is T2. Remember that. You are part of a convoy led by 13 Air Assault delivering a third turbine to the great dam at Kajaki. HET trucks will carry the blessed item in seven parts weighing thirty tons each. Assuredly, these vital organs will pump new blood to the valley. We’re talking fifty-one megawatts of new power. Got that? A great sufficiency of electrical power and enough water flowing through to irrigate 650,000 acres of arid land. Tune your PRRs to channel one for minute-by-minute instructions.’

The troops felt inspired. It was not the job they wanted but they were susceptible to the major’s speech. Inspiration is a con, thought Luke. It always has been a con. People who want blood will always encourage each other with talk of life-giving water. ‘The main convoy is set to avoid Route 611,’ Scullion said. ‘For that place be riddled with insurgents. They have been smashing us for months. Many of you enjoyed this routine in Helmand, being locked down, but this operation can’t fail. The logistics boys have established a route through the desert: Route Harriet. There are more than a hundred vehicles in the convoy. Canadian troops have delivered the parts here this morning from Kandahar. The Western Fusiliers have a role in the command group as part of 13 Air Assault Brigade. We will have attack helicopters providing overwatch, and, as well as the Canadians, we have the Dutch rolling with us and Yanks in the distance.’

A lieutenant in 3 Platoon raised his hand during questions. Luke knew him from the base: he was clever, modern, speeding up the ranks, a counter-insurgency nutter from County Louth. Nobody liked him. He took notes. He looked like a future boss. Luke listened to the guy and imagined he’d been designed by computers at the Dundalk Institute of Technology to get right up Scullion’s nose. ‘We wanted to destroy the dam in 2001,’ he said. ‘Now the Taliban wants to destroy it. So this op is real progress, trying to build things not destroy them. It’s like government-in-a-box.’

‘Just man your guns,’ Scullion said, almost sneering at the boy. Luke could see the major’s contradictions coming gently to the boil. ‘We’ve got a hundred miles of bandit country to cross out there. And the area to the south of the dam, the area called Kajaki Sofla, is crawling. We’re going to have a fight down there soldier, so keep your powder dry.’

‘But building partnerships,’ the soldier said. ‘The aim is to secure and serve the population. Understanding local circumstances. In the long run — just like we did in Iraq — we want to stop Afghanistan from being a sanctuary for transnational extremists. Right?’

‘We’ll see. If we can make it past their IEDs we can start to talk about partnership.’

Luke stood up. ‘Logistics?’ he said.

‘We’ll be dispersed along the convoy,’ said Scullion. ‘And part of 3 Platoon will go on Highway 633 to join a decoy convoy to throw them off. Our group, Captain Campbell, will be part of the main formation over the mountains to the dam. Your big job is mentoring. Show our ANA colleagues how it’s done. I want you at the front and I want you all eyes. We want safe passage to the dam for delivery tomorrow p.m.’

The soldiers filed out and Luke came to the front and was joined there by Rashid. ‘We need more, sir,’ said Luke. ‘We’re setting out. That’s clear. But what are the details? Who’s doing what?’ Scullion lowered his voice and he picked the book off the table and smiled at the emptying hall.

‘Zero pyrotechnics,’ Scullion said. ‘We’re rolling along and protecting the delivery of the turbine. Cool? No fucking drama, Campbell, and no fucking gang-bang and no big deal. Just roll along the road and keep your boys in or alongside the vehicles ready to shoot any fucken Terry daft enough to run at the iron horse as it passes by. Got that?’

‘Should there be any separation of duties?’

‘The decisions are coming from above on this, Luke. Let’s just get through the mountains. It’s a taxi run. There’s beer on the other side. Just stick to your group and keep the signaller listening.’

At that, the keen young lieutenant from Louth came back into

the hall to shake the major’s hand. Scullion had languages, but he didn’t have this soldier’s way of talking.

‘You boys are the decoy,’ is all he said.

‘We can spread the word as we pass through the villages,’ the lieutenant said with enthusiasm. ‘We’ve got terps. We can say that this is all for the good of the community.’

‘I wouldn’t bother,’ Scullion said. ‘Just roll up the fucking road like a good boy. Your job is not to dish out philosophy, okay? It’s to look like you’re delivering a fierce bit of kit to a dam.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘It’s electricity. It’s power. And I don’t give a fuck for the rest of that shit you’re spouting.’

‘Really?’

Luke stepped back to let Scullion lose his temper. He knew it was about more than the boy.

‘Yes, fucking really. Ask Rashid here. Let the American generals say what they like, Lieutenant. The people in these villages would sooner we were delivering fucking Mars bars. And even more than that: they’d sooner we’d let them deliver our no-use fucking arses to Allah. They have no great sympathy for our sympathy, and, believe me, Lieutenant, they would sooner strap a bomb to their firstborn child and throw him at you as thank you for your efforts in bringing them democracy.’

‘This is true, sir,’ said Rashid. ‘The people here do not know this American democracy you talk about.’

‘We’re doing a good thing,’ the lieutenant said.

‘How do you stick him?’ shouted Scullion, looking at the boys standing by the door of the hall. The major smirked and returned his gaze to the young man in front of him. ‘It’s all good. We’re the excellent fucken citizen that helps the poor old lady across

the road. No more, no less. So just keep your men in the convoy and they’ll be back in Shadows Nightclub drinking pints of piss-water in the time it takes you to spell counter-insurgency, sure they will. You with me, Nosey?’

‘This is truth the major speaks,’ Rashid said. ‘Oqab Tsuka, which means Operation Eagle’s Summit, the beginning of the new Kajaki. The people will have justice.’

‘No, Rashid,’ Scullion said. ‘They’ll have electricity. That’s all.’ The ANA captain turned and Luke saw him muttering something as he wiped the board.

THE CROSSING POINT

The convoy had travelled a few miles north when Luke looked down and told the boys to cut the chat. The engine was quiet; other vehicles rumbled and heaved to a stop. A bird screamed up in the trees that stood along the banks of a canal.

The signals guy was called Bosh-Bosh. He had waved three fingers at the captain and now they were at a stop. But Luke knew: he’d been watching from up top and saw the guys at the crossing point hurriedly changing into their police uniforms when they spotted the first vehicles. Luke jumped down and signalled for Sean in the WMIK behind to come out. Then he shouted back to his own Vector for one of the boys. ‘Dooley, come down here. These guys are dodgy. Sling us my helmet.’

‘Right, sir.’

‘Where’s the terp?’

‘With the Leper,’ Dooley said. The captain pulled on his helmet and tapped his radio mouthpiece. ‘And Sean-Sean,’ he said.

‘Bring the terp down here. Walking up to the checkpoint. Over.’

Soon they were all there and Dooley and the captain had their rifles up as they walked forward. ‘Shouldn’t we check the ground?’ Sean asked. They called him the Leper, the Leprechaun, or Sean-Sean. He was the sergeant and he got respect from the boys without trying. To Scullion, Sergeant Docherty was too private and too calm: by that stage of the game the major needed friends who raised the volume and showed their weaknesses, and Docherty was the quiet man of the platoon.

‘Let’s go forward, man,’ said Dooley. ‘These fuckers are crooks but they’re not daft enough to mine their own doorstep.’ The heat went with them, every step of the way. It was baking out there, and a soft, choking dust lay over the chunked-up road. Steam was rising from some of the vehicles and heads appeared down the line, curious for news.

The Afghan National Police guys at the crossing looked suspicious, but to Luke they always looked that way. Dooley was at his side chattering in his big Cork accent about the mess of the checkpoint and the fact that nobody was ready for what was coming. He couldn’t believe the state of them with their blue uniforms half-on and filthy. ‘Fucken idiots,’ he said. ‘Did no one tell you there was a kilometre-long fucken convoy driving through here? Eh? What are ye, a bunch of red-arsed motherfuckers? Totally disorganisational. Waiting for Saint Patrick’s Day or what?’

Luke motioned with his rifle for the policemen in the booth to move aside. One of the policemen had a boot on one foot and a sandal on the other. The guy’s lip was scarred. ‘Fucken shape of him,’ Luke said to Dooley, ‘one flip-flop and one ammo boot.’

‘Cocknosh,’ Dooley said.

Dooley then began shouting at the men as if only increased volume would help them understand. ‘What the fuck are you doing changing into civvies?’ They were babbling and the interpreter was translating at speed but Luke put up a hand and turned back to Dooley.

‘Of course, they didn’t know we were coming,’ he said. ‘Nobody would tell them. Why would anybody tell them anything?’ A plastic basin of stew and dates was on the desk, a heap of okra. Next to that a slab of uncooked meat and two old Russian pistols. Under the desk there was a red-striped cement bag of dried marijuana.

One of the policemen waved his hands and pointed to the basin and said,

‘Karoot Maust.’

‘He offers you food,’ the interpreter said.

‘Nobody would tell them anything,’ repeated Luke.

‘Nobody?’ Dooley said. ‘But they’re ANP.’

‘Afghan Non-Players,’ muttered Luke. ‘These stoners are Tippex Commandos for the fucken Taliban.’ He tapped his radio again and made contact with Major Scullion, who was with Rashid and the ANA kandak further down the line. They sent an ANA sergeant to the checkpoint who immediately began slapping the two guys.

‘We are shamed,’ he said.

‘Forget it,’ Luke said. ‘Just get them out the fucken way.’ He had gone through the drawers and thrown several rolls of money up on the desk. ‘They are bandits. And worse, I imagine. We saw them changing into uniform as the vehicles approached.’

‘We’re from the 1st Royal Western,’ Dooley said, ‘and we’ll bang your fucken brains out.’ He then walked backwards with the cement bag swinging in his free hand. He threw the bag into

the captain’s vehicle. Private Lennox looked out with a huge grin on his face. ‘See what just fell from the choccy tree,’ he shouted down to Dooley.

THE WATCHES

It was slow all the way but eventually they were in the desert. The mountains in the distance were blue, and when the sun began to drop, pink clouds shrouded the tops of the trees. There must be places even here, Flannigan thought, where life isn’t just a horror show. Private Lennox was still going on about the checkpoint and why the whole country was a mess. ‘It’s all just thieving bastards so it is and them that’s not thieving bastards are trying to bomb the fuck out of you.’

‘Well, you should feel right at home,’ Flannigan said. ‘You love a bit of thieving, you and the rest of the fucken tinks you grew up with in the Emerald Toilet.’

‘Don’t speak bad against the Irish,’ Dooley said.

‘Aye. You joined the regiment, mate,’ Lennox said. ‘And why’s that? ’Cause yer daddy once got his wee arse spanked in Portadown?’

‘No, you plank. Because I quite fancied spending my afternoons in foreign places beating up on no-hopers like you, Lennox.’

‘That’s violence, that,’ Lennox said.

Pampas grass. Sweet tea and sandbags. Brown-eyed children smiling by the road. It all seemed so real to Luke. The carnations on tall stalks were straining past the sun and an old lady came up to a stationary WMIK with a helmet full of figs. She tapped the wheel of the vehicle and he saw the helmet was stamped

Twentynine Palms, CA

She was selling the figs and her smile seemed more like a knot. The convoy moved on and crept slowly into the mountains towards Ghorak — helicopters over the peaks — and before it got dark the vehicles halted on a plateau. ‘Come on you chozzies,’ Dooley said. ‘Grab your shit. We’re stopping.’

‘How long?’ Flannigan asked.

‘This’ll be it for the night. It’s slow going. They need to keep fixing the tracks and looking for bombs in the road.’

The captain turned down his radio. He just sat in the corner of the vehicle and watched the boys pulling stuff out their packs. It was the low-level hum of his life, the constant banter, the laughter, the mock offence, the lingo. ‘Have you seen Flannigan’s watch, sir?’

‘Nope. I don’t care about watches.’

‘It’s cheap rubbish. Take your Casio G-Shock. Classic. Totally awesome. It’s been that way since 1983.’

‘Dooley!’

‘An electro-luminescent panel causes the entire face to glow for easy reading.’ The boys were laughing and making to leave the Vector and Luke began chucking their bags after them.

‘I mean it, Dooley,’ he shouted. ‘Get the fuck out the van or I’ll mess you up.’ Luke slammed the door and smiled to himself and then a mortar burst in the valley.

‘

Kaboom

,’ he said.

SANDHURST

Luke lay down and flicked off his helmet. It was good to feel the static falling away, the ops talk, and Scullion. It was nice to

be free of the jeering and the news from up and down the line. He stretched his legs out and pulled a folder from his backpack, a black folder from Strathclyde that had once held his Honours dissertation. Now it held photos and letters that came to the camp from home. He opened it and took out a flattened bag of wet wipes and a packet of sherbet. (From his grandmother, Anne, posted by the woman next door.) He held up a photograph and used a Maglite from the floor of the Vector to help him see. Anne was young in the picture and she looked like the happiest person alive. He searched her eyes and saw evidence of Harry’s presence, the grandfather he had never met, just a glow in her eye, always there in portraits taken by him.

Dear Luke,

This is a wee note to say hello from your gran and we really hope you’re doing well over there. We see it on the news all the time but you probably see it differently when you’re there. Nothing to report over here except the sun is finally out thank God and life in Saltcoats always takes a turn for the better in the nice weather. Gran says to thank you for sending the right address for parcels and don’t forget she says to take pictures if the light is good. Gran’s been getting a bit forgetful but she’s not bad son and coping well since the winter time. Remember there’s plenty of us in here to help with anything she needs doing. Anyway son that’s us running out of things to say so please take good care. Everybody sends their love to you.

All the best,

Gran and Maureen

He could imagine her face at the window. He wondered

if any of the boys had a grandmother like his, a woman with knowledge and secrets and a gentle habit of helping you up your game. He wasn’t a very typical officer, he knew that and so did everyone else, but it had somehow played to his advantage to be different in the regiment. They knew he was a reader but thought he was made of heroic stuff because of his dad. It had been Anne who took up the slack, inspiration-wise, when his dad died, and he supposed he went to see her as part of working himself out. In those days he was always ready to get lost in other people’s ideas, and Gran was a fountain of individuality if ever there was one. There was endless chat about how life used to be, with details missing. The slow-motion world of hinted-at summers and new lipstick and the Pleasure Beach. She spoke to him about Blackpool as if it was New York or Toronto, where she’d also been, and where she’d also taken photographs that were lost along the way.

He lay back and saw the parade ground at Sandhurst. And then he saw his mother, Alice, in a sky-blue hat with tears in her eyes, her new husband Gordon beside her as they gathered their camera straps and her billowing skirt, the day he passed out from officers’ training. Gran arrived in a taxi that came all the way from Gatwick Airport. He was grateful she’d come and Alice had smiled thinly when he said, after the ceremony, that he wanted to take his gran for a walk down to the chapel. ‘We’ll go and find your ironing board and put it in the car,’ said Alice, always practical. ‘There’s no point leaving it for someone else to take.’

The chapel appeared to move, but it wasn’t the chapel it was the trees that moved and once the rain came down the trees got darker and Anne pointed it out, the way the trees darkened in the rain. She took his arm and was proud of his uniform as they

walked up the path. ‘God, Granny, the world’s going mad and you’re noticing the trees.’

‘Well, that’s life,’ she said. ‘If you weren’t looking you missed it. That’s all I know.’

They walked the length of the chapel and sat to one side under a ragged flag rescued from a battlefield, set high up on the wall in a gilt frame. They were quiet in the pews and that was easy. After a while Anne put her hand over his hand and gave him advice. ‘Be true,’ she said, ‘if not to yourself, then to something more interesting than yourself.’

‘I chose the Royal Western Fusiliers.’

‘All men are sentimental,’ she said. ‘Women get the reputation, but we just cry at the radio. Men are sentimental about institutions. You know: buildings. The old bricks, the old mottos. Harry was the same.’

‘We’re going to rid the world …’

‘Don’t say it,’ she said.

‘But Gran.’

‘The task is to see.’

‘Not for a soldier. There’s a lot to be done.’

‘We don’t

rid the world

, dear. We create it.’

‘We make it safe,’ he said. She just nodded at that and the high windows showed their pattern on the pews. Before they went back to join the others she took a present out of her bag. He still had the paperback somewhere, a book entitled

Theory of Colours

.

‘The colour red doesn’t actually exist,’ she said. ‘It only exists as an idea in your head. Always remember that. You create it yourself when your imagination meets the light.’

His attention flickered as he lay in the Vector. Looking at the letter, he heard another thud down in the valley. The summer

remembers nothing of the winter and nature is a kind of amnesia. He stretched out further and kicked off his boots, considering whether memory is just one of our little sicknesses. It was the sort of topic he used to discuss with Scullion in their happier days. His grandmother had stood up in the chapel at Sandhurst and tapped his cheek.

‘Send me one of your mugshots,’ she said.

And that’s the one she put up on her wall. He saw it the last time he was home on leave, when he went to see Anne in secret. At the time nobody was talking about dementia or anything like that, but he noticed a change. Her mind was wandering as they spoke, and, by the end of his visit, she seemed miles away. She sat in her favourite chair by the window and said the lights on the sea were very festive. Luke imagined she was joking but then he saw the concentration on her face. She said she could feel the cold coming on but this was the sort of Christmas she had always wanted, just me and her and two glasses of sherry.

It was the beginning of something and he knew it. He stayed the whole evening and they spoke about old times. She reminded him of an exhibition they’d seen together, famous photographs of tenement houses and poor children in the Saltmarket. ‘The exposure wasn’t right,’ she said, ‘and the children are blurred for life.’

‘That’s an odd phrase,’ Luke said.

He had gone his own way, but an interest in ‘seeing things’, as Anne called it, was what had made them close. At her flat in Glasgow, when he was young, she set up what she called his ‘little conchological cabinet’ — a term out of Charles Dickens, she told him — which was where he kept shells he’d found and bits of broken plate from the sea. The glass cabinet described their

shared interest in the gathering of facts, their attempt to know life not only by our mistakes but by artistic ordering. When Anne returned from her travels in England she would often bring a new shell or a fancy nugget of Victorian crockery. And she always brought sherbet or a stick of rock from one of the sweet shops. ‘Remember, Gran,’ he said to her last time he was home, the time with the sherry, ‘remember that group of starfish we put in the conchological cabinet?’

‘I liked the stars,’ she said. ‘And one time Jayne Mansfield came to turn on the lights in Blackpool.’

He took her hand by the window. She looked down as if their joined hands formed an element with a life of its own. ‘No, boss,’ he said, laughing. It was the first time he knew she must be getting ill. ‘I’m talking about something in the shape of stars. I mean these creatures that are shaped like stars in the sky and I found them on the beach, remember?’

There was puzzlement on her face for a second and then she smiled as if all the confusion had now cleared from her mind. ‘I know what you’re saying,’ she said. ‘I’m not daft. It’s about the shape of things.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You trained my eye.’

‘I know the cabinet you’re talking about. We made it together.’

‘You guided me.’

She smiled and drank the sherry down. Then she peered into the window glass and said, ‘I lost you.’

‘It was all art, you said. The cabinet.’

‘Giving shape.’

‘Knowing what’s behind appearances,’ Luke said. ‘That’s the photographer’s gift and you have that and it’s a wonderful thing.’

She pecked like a chicken and gave a kiss to the air. ‘We knew the right thing to do with the shells and that’s why we’re pals, why we’ve always been pals,’ she said.

‘And plates,’ Luke had said. ‘You brought those bits of broken plate with the tiny blue patterns and the plates had been washed in the sea for a hundred years or … just fragments. Tiny bits. But I used to imagine them as whole plates laid on a Victorian table with a family sitting down together.’

They looked at each other. He knew he’d be off to Helmand in a few days and wondered if she’d ever be the same again. She raised a finger as if he had finally struck a chord. ‘I could take a picture of that dinner you’re talking about and you could help me,’ she said.

‘I’d love to. Will we do that? Will we get out your cameras and make a brilliant picture?’

Luke lay in the heat of the Vector and wondered why his mother and his grandmother had never clicked. His gran had made too much of the men in their lives, and so had he, and he began to see it as a form of harassment that had affected his mother. Yet he and Anne were friends. He lay back mulling it over and tipped into the kind of sleep where ideas feel like revelations until they slip so easily away.

THE RIDGE

Private Flannigan always set out his tent like a perfectionist. Mosquito net, maggot bag, folded corners: a big lumberjack of a guy pressing down his little corners. He was a born soldier. ‘What’s happening?’ he said when Luke appeared in the camp rubbing

his hair. The captain was carrying a book and he leaned on an old stone wall.

‘Nothing much.’

‘Did you get the head down?’

‘A few zeds, aye.’ Luke began to smile when he saw the delicate way Flannigan was handling his kit. ‘Hey Flange,’ he said. ‘Is this you preparing your evening

toilette

?’

‘Bite me,’ Flannigan said. There was evening primrose in the cracks of the wall and Sergeant Docherty was scraping off a sample for his collection. He was also finishing off an argument, just as Luke came in. ‘They thought they were going to get Belgium in two years,’ he said. ‘Turns out they might get Bangladesh in thirty.’ The boys took the piss out of Docherty for being a square-bear and being pussy-whipped, but in secret they admired him, at twenty-six, for what he knew.

‘Oh, look,’ Major Scullion said. He was sitting on a petrol drum. ‘It’s the fucken sleeping beauty. Want a brew, Captain?’

‘No, I’m fine. Thanks.’

Scullion had the menacing look. And he never made anybody tea. ‘While you’ve been lying in your wank-pit, Captain Campbell,’ he said, ‘the boys and I have been arranging a party. A very private party, you understand. Private Lennox here, of the small stature, the ludicrous complexion and the ginger nut, has procured for the purpose of our evening entertainment a bag of the old Afghan sweet stuff.’

‘Dead on,’ Lennox said. ‘Proper clackie, so it is.’ He kicked the cement bag full of weed over the ground to Luke.

Another of the men in the platoon, a Paisley boy, chuckled like a monkey and peered with his mates over the top of a neighbouring tent. ‘Fuck sake, sir,’ he said, ‘you don’t even need cigarette

papers. Just spark up the end of that bag and ye’ll be toking a Superking.’

‘Be quiet, McKenna,’ Luke said.

‘Yeah. Shut it, McCrack-Whore. The captain here’s just getting his shit together after a small constitutional.’

‘That’s a walk, Doosh, not a sleep,’ Flannigan said.

‘Who cares? The captain will be joining the party in jig time. So fuck off, McCrack, and get on with unrolling your farter. And fuck off, Flange, with your

Oxford English Dictionary

.’

They were talking about food. It was usually girls or cars or watches or gaming, but tonight: food. Dooley’s girlfriend sent him packets of Super Noodles and a box of Dairy Milk and it made him glad he was marrying her because she knew the score. ‘Remember American Night?’ Lennox said. He was talking about the Thursday cookouts at Camp Shorabak when the Americans would pitch a scoff-house between the tents. ‘Gatorade. Chicken wings,’ Lennox said.

‘Beef jerky,’ Luke said.

‘That was proper plush,’ said Lennox. ‘You’ve never seen so many fucken rashers. American Night. I fucken love America. They’d have like Hershey bars and M&Ms to kill. Mounds of them. I’m talking chicken and beef motherfucker and those MREs falling off the truck, Meals-Ready-to-Eat. They were super-plush.’

‘And films,’ Dooley said.

‘That’s right. Lethal with the films. I love America. Stuff that isn’t even on at the cinema for like a year.’

‘Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream,’ Flannigan said. ‘Buckets of it. How do they even get that stuff over here?’

‘It was the same in Iraq,’ Dooley said.

After an hour it was dark except for lights in some of the vehicles. The reefer glowed orange as it went round but it was the moon that picked out the ridge and the low buildings along the track. Scullion said a few fires in the distance were oil-drums burning in Ghorak, nothing sinister, just elders playing chess probably or Terry twisting wires and making their wee roadside contraptions. ‘That’s the thing,’ Scullion was saying. ‘You all think you know the terrain ’cause you’ve seen it playing video games.’ Half his face lit up as he smoked the joint and sniggered. ‘But don’t give me points man; give me a body count any day.’

‘Same,’ Lennox said. ‘I came here to get my fucken gun on, not to sit watching hexi-telly.’

‘Speaking of which.’ Dooley bent down and lit the Hexamine tablet on top of the low stove. Quickly it burned blue and the boys all gave a whistle and some of them asked for whoever it was to hurry up with the joint. ‘You’re all going blind,’ Lance Corporal McKenna said as he walked into the camp. ‘Between staring at the hexi-telly and playing with your dobbers, you gimps will soon be applying for invalidity.’

‘We’ll have to join the queue,’ Flannigan said. ‘Behind all the pikey horror-pigs in your family.’

Luke just watched them. Scullion was right. Younger soldiers often thought they knew the battleground; they saw graphics, screens, solid cover and fuck-off guns you could swap. It wasn’t all they saw but it was part of their understanding. They saw cheats and levels, badass motherfuckers, kill death ratios, and the kinds of marksman who jump up after they’re dead. Luke knew they all struggled, from time to time, to find the British army as interesting as its international gaming equivalent. They had run important

missions with their best mate from school and called in air support, over their headsets, from some kid in Pasadena they’d never met, some kid like them in a box-room. They’d beaten the Russian mafia with the help of club-kids from Reykjavik and bodyboarders from Magnetic Island. They’d obliterated the

A-rabs

They’d topped the board. They’d stayed up all night smoking weed and drinking huge bottles of Coke and ordering pizza before they cleared the civilian areas. The boys wanted action. They wanted something real that would become the highest level, the one they couldn’t reach on their consoles back home.

‘If they’re gonna hit us, I wish they’d just hit us,’ Lennox said.

‘Maybe it saves lives,’ Scullion said. ‘The war in Ireland might have ended sooner if those wee Provo kids could’ve blown up chip shops on screen.’

‘No, sir,’ Flannigan said. ‘It’s recruitment. I’m telling you. That’s the big new thing about it. Gamers are ripe. They’re fucken jumping to get out and stretch their legs. Every guy in this regiment has served time on

Call of Duty

Every one. Am I right?’

‘Even the educated ones?’

Luke smiled. ‘We started it,’ he said. He took the joint off Lennox and walked up to the wall. A smell of rose petals was coming from the field on the other side. He could make out the furrows and a yellow hosepipe. ‘The MOD has a game now called

Start Thinking, Soldier

.’

‘Yep. That’s right. That’s recruitment,’ Flannigan said. ‘Grab the little fuckers by the thumbs.’

‘There’s always been that sort of thing,’ Scullion said. ‘I loved

Top Gun

I loved fucken

Full Metal Jacket

John Wayne before that. Little boys with their eyes wide, wanting a gun. It’s all recruitment.’

‘It’s different,’ Flannigan said. ‘If you’ve got PlayStation then you actually know how to drive a tank. Jesus. I’m not kidding. The manufacturers have changed the controls on the new Challenger to be more like a video console. It’s exactly the same.’

‘Fuck off!’ Dooley said.

‘Look inside one. It’s a fact. Walk up the line now and look inside one, Doosh. I’m telling you.’

‘It’s true,’ Scullion said, taking the joint. ‘The CIA are putting in money nowadays to start up gaming companies.’

‘They used to put it into brainy magazines,’ Luke said. The major looked up and his smile was nostalgic.

‘

Encounter

,’ he said.

Sergeant Docherty had taken off his boots while staring at the hexi-telly. ‘Your hoofs are fucken rank, buddy,’ Lennox said. ‘Jesus, Leper.’

Docherty ignored him. He was never going to endanger his peace of mind with too much talk, yet he caught the officers’ attention after he calmly put down his boot and spat into the fire. ‘You’re talking about simulators,’ he said. ‘I think it’s ironic that the people who flew those planes on 9/11 taught themselves on flight simulators in Florida.’

‘Ooh.

Ironic

,’ Lennox said.

Scullion nipped the end of his tongue with two fingers and offered a bleary laugh in the Leper’s direction. ‘Everything now is pre-experienced,’ he said. The men weren’t listening. Another burst of machine-gun fire went off in the valley and Docherty stood up holding one boot. Scullion then went off at him and nobody could work out why. ‘I can’t stand the way you fucken stink,’ he said. ‘The smell of you … it’s unbearable.’

‘What?’ Docherty said.

‘You,

personally

,’ Scullion said. He was suddenly over at Docherty and right up in his face, swaying in front of him. ‘You reek of sweat, the smell of you, what, it makes me fucking puke.’

‘I wash, just like everybody else, Major. I use deodorant. What do you want me to do?’

‘Nothing. You can’t do anything. You smell vile and it drives me mad.’ The sergeant just stared at him and then he went to arrange the night guard.

‘Put your boots back on,’ Luke said to the others. ‘We’re in a state of alert up here and I want everybody ready.’

‘Papers?’ Lennox said. He was talking to the group and fondling the cement bag and giggling. But the boys ignored him. They were too stoned and they just stared at the low blue flame. Time passed and Scullion stood up and came out with some complicated nonsense. They all wished the stars could lift them up or else come down to play.

‘I’m fucken stoned out my gourd,’ Dooley said.

‘No messing,’ Lennox said.

‘Champion weed,’ said Flannigan.

Luke just watched the soldiers and felt warm for the cold night, or cold for the warm night, lost in some little question about whether the world was round or made of putty. He smiled and felt his mouth go dry and then rootled in his pack for a stick of gum. Flannigan went over to the wall and took a piss then zipped up and looked down the edge of the plateau and saw bursts of green tracer. ‘They’re having a crack down there,’ he said. ‘Eat fire, you bitches! Eat metal, you Terry scum!’

‘Hey, wind it in. You’ll wake the babies,’ Scullion said, stretching out on a groundsheet and putting a bunched-up smock under his head. ‘Five billion stars and we still can’t find the knives and

forks. Get them a bloody knife and fork and they’re yours for life. People will believe in the transition if they feel their lives are getting better and that starts up there.’

‘The major’s talking pish,’ said Lance Corporal McKenna coming into the camp. He had two Afghan soldiers with him. ‘Talking pure pish. That’ll be the top-notch Asian

cigarettees

,’ McKenna added.

‘Drop dead, McCrack-Whore.’

‘Is that the price? Too dear. How about a Bounty bar and a packet of Turkish playing-cards?’

‘Done.’

They smoked and looked.

‘There’s a lot of fire down there.’

‘Who gives? If it’s not coming towards you, you don’t give a fuck,’ McKenna said.

The Afghans spoke not a word and smoked as if the weed was like a fresh supply of oxygen. Their teeth were knackered and they looked sixty but were probably thirty. ‘Dam is good at Kajaki,’ said one of them after his brain fogged over and the high settled in and the mellow scene shaped up like a welcome.

‘That’s right. We don’t give a fuck,’ Dooley said.

Luke examined the red returning fire — red was Allied, green was Terry — and thought of those strings of lights you get at fun-fairs. He followed the dots and thought of Ayrshire nights when the amusement arcade became the brightest thing on the coast. Lennox put

Natural Born Chaos

by Soilwork on his iPod. Usually he just listened with one earphone, but he had mini-speakers in the camp and he jacked the sound up. The guitars went off and everybody smiled, the Afghans too, not like their normal faces but actual smiles breaking out, and Luke stared up and

imagined the tracer fire was firing in time to Lennox’s stupid music. Yes, Luke thought, it was nice to be here with the smell of roses coming over the wall and the men showing the Afghan squaddies how to play air guitar and some of them falling asleep in their boots. Luke lay back giggling when he heard Lennox talking about the girl who was going to marry Doosh. He was rolling out the abuse, saying you’d think Dooley couldn’t pull the ring off a can of Red Bull but it turns out the girl’s as fit as a butcher’s dog.

LET THEM KNOW

The ambush came early that night. Docherty was up and talking to Bosh-Bosh the signals operator and sticking his fingers in a muesli pack when the radio went berserk. ‘Incoming on the crane side. Sniper fire. Over!’ McKenna had been on guard with the two Afghans, but the Afghans couldn’t be found. Luke was half awake. He felt he’d almost known it was coming, as if the enemy had been getting closer all day. His boots were on and he grabbed his helmet and smock and was zipped up in seconds. He never thought about how to distinguish himself in battle; that’s not what good officers think. They think about the men. And then they think about how to obliterate the threat.

Flannigan was tossing sandbags. ‘Over there, over there,’ he kept shouting. Lennox pulled the machine-gun off the wagon and soon they were directing fire into the trees behind the old wall.

‘Lennox, get your fucken helmet on,’ Luke said.

‘Over there!’ shouted Flannigan.

The snipers were few and quite far off but fear of snipers shrinks distance: they are on top of you. They are here. Luke’s eyes narrowed as if they were telescopic and his hands grew jumpy and his instincts made an instant grid of the ground. ‘Against the wall! Dooley, Lennox. Get the gun propped in that corner. Bosh?’

‘Captain?’ the signals man said.

‘What they saying?’

‘Incoming fire from below. Quite heavy. Here’s your set.’ Luke put his helmet on and fixed the earpiece and immediately heard the crackles and the news that several dozen insurgents were under the plateau trying to poke holes in the convoy. The men around him were still shouting and bawling and sending out a great deal of fire. That was the thing you always forgot later — the shouting, the noise, the great thunder of lads in your ears. Gunsmoke was spreading eerily over the land down there like mist on a childhood morning. Luke shivered to see it, the white smoke coming from the poplar trees.

‘Air cover?’ he said.

‘Air cover coming in,’ Bosh said. ‘The Yanks are on it. Ops says stay up high: they’re going to scoop the valley and fill it with cannon.’ The men of 5 Platoon were firing and reloading and Luke heard barks of excitement as they shouldered the wall and poked their bang-sticks over the top. A single shot came whizzing over their heads and fucked into the side of a truck, which sent them wild. They were shouting and swearing and pushing at the wall. ‘Over there! Fucking Terry cunt at eleven o’clock. Doosh, get down! Get fucken down! You can see his fucking rag, man. Flange. In the gap to the right. Go for it. Smash the fuck out of him!’

Docherty at some point came up behind Luke and told him he

thought the major was pretending to be asleep. He was inside one of the vehicles, crouched down.

‘What? Are you messing with me?’

‘He’s in the Vector.’

‘What you talking about? Get him out here: he needs to direct this shit and support the boys.’

‘He threw up.’

‘Are you fucken having me on, Leper?’

‘No, sir. He’s not well.’

In seconds the boys would notice. Luke knew they would notice and he feared their bottle might collapse if they heard the major was hanging back in the van during a fire-fight. Yet he knew something was wrong with Scullion and he’d felt it since they left Bastion. ‘Holy fuck,’ Luke said. ‘Am I medicine man to the whole platoon?’

‘Let’s cover for him, boss,’ Docherty said. ‘It’s a bad week for him and we can easily cover it.’

‘What is it, his fucken period?’

‘It’s going to be fine here.’

‘Is it? I don’t know what bins you’re looking through, Docherty. But mine tells me there’s Terry crawling up our fucken arses.’

‘It’s fine, sir. We’re covered.’

‘Not yet we’re not. Scullion’s losing it. I’m telling you, Leper. He’s out the fucken game. He’s supposed to be over here commanding his soldiers. He’s the CO. He asked to be out here: he could be back at headquarters eating fucken Pot Noodle, like a normal. But he wanted to be involved with my section and now his head is fucking erupting with crap. You’re seriously telling me he’s fucken sweating his bollocks off in the back of the Vector? To hell with the turbine. It’s about the boys.’

Luke got on the radio. ‘What I’m saying is we’re in the open here and request urgent air cover to the north side of the ridge. We’re just a group. Yes. We’re a short section. The rest of our platoon is manning other vehicles.’ He looked at Docherty and read his thoughts. He flicked the mouthpiece on the PRR down for a second and breathed deeply. ‘But bearing up and holding our position. Over.’

Flannigan was ordered to set up a mortar battery and was now pounding the poplar grove, laughing his big Scouse laugh. ‘That should keep their cakey arses quiet for a bit, lads,’ he said. He looked round at Luke. ‘Eh, Jimmy-Jimmy! Fucking hardly out of my gonk-bag, man. Hardly opened my fucken eyes and these badasses are burning our toast!’

‘Hardly had time to grab my cock,’ Dooley said.

‘That might’ve held us back for a while,’ Luke said, reloading. ‘Waiting for you to find your cock.’

Dooley darted his eyes around the camp. A bullet banged into the metal drum and it spewed diesel but didn’t explode. ‘Get that out of the fucken way,’ Luke shouted to some men at the back. ‘You in 5 Platoon! Ross. Private Bawn. Move it! Get that fucken drum cleared before we have a fucken Guy Fawkes party out here.’

There was a pause. Kind of horrible, the pauses. Luke got back on the radio and tried for more information. His hair was drenched. ‘Roger that,’ he said and looked along the wall at the boys.

‘Where’s the major?’ Dooley said.

‘He’s checking maps,’ said the captain.

‘You what?’

‘I don’t know. Maps.’

‘What’s he checking maps for? We know where we are. We’re up here and they’re down there.’

‘Wind your neck in, Dooley. Just leave it.’

The two men looked at each other and Dooley nipped his bottom lip with his teeth. He got it. ‘No problem,’ he said, a blush perceptible in his manner if not on his face, which was coated in white dust. ‘The major’s always been deadly when it comes to the maps.’

‘Just cover me,’ Luke said. ‘I’ll go and pull over the rest of the platoon.’ But before he moved an inch and before Dooley could turn back to the machine-gun and start pounding the trees, a pair of Apache helicopters found their way into the valley and hovered above the ridge. They were high up but gunning the hell out of the mountainside. Luke shouted at the men to cover their heads and get down. ‘Let’s get the club classics going!’ he shouted. ‘Good life. Good life. Good life. Good life.

Good life!

’ He sang the song with his face down in the dirt and it was bedlam all around. The cannon was tearing up the grove and splitting the trees and Flannigan crouched under his equipment and laughed into the broken wall.

‘

Good life!

’ he returned.

‘Any fucker in those trees isn’t coming out again,’ Dooley shouted.

‘Not for Christmas,’ Flannigan said. The men laughed at this and Lennox passed a cigarette down the line. They had to keep low and the guns didn’t stop overhead and Luke started off the Band Aid song about Christmas. The weird thing they would all remember was the warm, empty cartridges falling from the sky on top of the camp, glancing off the vehicles. Docherty took a few and stuffed them in his pack. The boys smiled as if the fight

was all they had ever wanted and the cartridges fell like golden hail as they shouted a song about feeding the world. ‘Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?’ It was like American Night at Camp Shorabak. The Yanks never stinted on anything and the boys knew they’d be happy to tear up the fields all morning if it meant having one more kill.