CHAPTER 6
I had a few years of fun, after that. I was really lucky, we were lucky, never to do a tour in Ulster, but Stewie and I got to see Hong Kong a couple of times before it was given to the Chinese, and we had more than a few joint exercises with the Dutch Marines, and more than a few fights, and much, much more than a few beers.

The cloggies are an odd lot. Their troops tend to look a bit strange, some of them with long hair in nets, believe it or not, and they were to do their reputation no favours when they locked themselves in at Srebrenica, but that was all in the future then and we got on well with the Dutch.

Especially after the South Atlantic, they were careful not to take it too far. A Yank summed it up for me. He said “We are told never to gamble, fight or drink with you, and I see why. You play to win, you drink to kill, and when you fight….”

I remember him pausing, looking for the words.

“We have a fist fight, one of us knocks the other guy down, he waves him back up to hit him again. You have an every part of the body fight, and you put the other guy down so hard he never gets up again”

I laughed. “Why should I give him another chance? Getting punched hurts!”

“Yeah, but do you guys have to be so fuckin’ EFFICIENT at it?”

He bought us three rounds, soft bugger.

After the losses on the hills around Stanley, after Legs, Stewie and I got another pairing for our fire team, Dick Clarke and Alan White, and of course they became Nobby and Chalky. There are some forces traditions that you dare not break. My father had touched on one as I set off back down to Plymouth after that first awkward, shuddering period of home leave. After some stumbling attempts at expressing how much he cared for me, that made my chat with Stewie seem elegant, he said

“Just remember, son, the first rule of military life. Rape comes first, then the pillaging. Only after you’ve done those two do you do the burning”

He thought he was funny. He had no idea of what else we had ahead.

We had our play time, one of the best ones being a team leave to a ski resort in Italy. The boys had wanted to go to somewhere Germanic, and I argued successfully that we had done all the Germany bit, eaten the bratties and drunk the Black Tower wine, which honestly I really, really hated. I sold them on Cervinia, as it was high enough to guarantee snow, there were no trees to crash into, and it would be all Alpine Italian cooking, big steaks and cheap wine.

I look back at that holiday, and it really was the end of so many things. Stewie and I were off on an NCO career path that was to separate our previously joined-at-the-hip lives while still keeping us in reasonably close touch. We drank, and we did our morning ski classes like good little boys, and we fell, and drank some more, and every time the weather cleared gawked at the huge bulk of the Matterhorn hanging over us in a looming wall of rock and deep blue ice. Straight skis, not these curvy carving things they use now, and your ball size matched the length of the planks you rode. Arriving by cable car at a little platform that stuck out from Switzerland so far into Italian airspace that it had a line down one wall with a different flag painted either side.

Passports please. No, seriously.

The highlight for me wasn’t the lunatic stuff, but a long, long red and blue run that started at the top, in Switzerland, and worked its way down past two mountain bar/restaurants, before entering a narrow valley where you could swing from side to side, easy skiing and pure joy of movement, as ibex walked along a cliff top wondering what the hell you were doing, and you finally popped out into the centre of the village and the ice rink bar.

Nobby and Chalky approved heartily of my choice once they found out the place was a favourite with the Scandinavian ski set, and there were Swedish and Finnish girls EVERYWHERE. You know what they say about Swedish girls….no? Well, the boys did, and they played the percentages till they found a couple of girls that did, and then we had to play the room rotation game, Stewie and I sitting out in the hotel bar while the other two cemented international relations.

Stewie had fallen to a seagull, and moved out to married quarters not long after we got back from that holiday. She was an odd little thing, all full breasts and raucous laugh, but she got pregnant remarkably easily for a girl in a time of pills and coils, as was common in garrison towns. A serviceman may not have the world’s best wage, but he has a job, and a billet, and a damned good death in service benefit. You saw the girls at weekends, style being something they thought you climbed over to get away from an angry bull. To a young squaddy in barracks, it looked so good; she was up for it, you could see everything she had, and she gave it away on a first date.

By “date” I mean nothing more than a knee trembler in some alley, followed a little later by the impending patter of tiny ammo boots. So there was Stewie, in a grey-rendered block of a house, her belly getting bigger seemingly daily, and not just from the growing baby. I think the only thing that kept her from exploding was her steady consumption of king-sized Rothmans.

Not only did I feel sorry for Stewie, I felt guilty. Had he ended up tied to this person because of lust, or because he was scared of how I felt? We stayed as close as we could, though, and I was godfather to little Lee Diana when she was born. Stewie changed then, and I really saw him love for the first time. His wife had used him as a ticket to the billet, but she had repaid him immeasurably with his daughter. He told me that his dreams had eased after her birth.

“Of course they have, mate, you’ll be getting no time to sleep.”

I was listening carefully to Little Voice by now, and she led me through a series of encounters that ranged from the dreadful to the exciting, but I never recaptured those moments with Emma.
We had moved on, and I was living in the Sergeants’ Mess, and so was Stewie. The “first” Gulf War (Iran-Iraq not count?) passed us by, but his wife’s devotion had swung with the wind. She was living up Plympton now with Lee, and he was therefore ineligible for the billet. I was happy, guiltily so, to have him back, and it seemed our careers were mirroring each other. We both got full screw together, and then the third stripe, all of which meant that we were not in a fire team together, which was not a problem.

My brother George had a little girl, and I decided I could externalise (too much reading) Little Voice, and he took my suggestion well and christened her Melanie Louise. She was a bonny, bonny girl, but I was too far away to see much of her, and I gave my love to little Lee, along with Stewie.

Yes, that was deliberately ambiguous.

The European Union had banished war from Europe forever, hurrah! So they told us, and so they still do, but then they are a lying bunch of self-serving bastards. Define Europe, you ask, and anywhere outside the EU suddenly becomes extra-continental.

Some sharp little fire fights in Slovenia signalled something an awful lot closer to home than Darwin or Goose Green, and then Croatia, and Serbia, and all the rest started to show what happens when you draw a line around a lot of people who have hated each other for centuries and say “play nicely, it’s all one country now”

I remember one image that sums up the whole mess for me, from later on when the Albanians and the Serbs started their own land dispute, and that filthy phrase “ethnic cleansing” came into vogue.

A photo, of a young woman, in a skirt and sensible shoes, in a copse where her column of frightened people had stopped, and she had walked away from them, found a suitable place and hanged herself. No fuss, no drama, just a young woman in a modest skirt and good shoes turning slowly at the end of a rope.

We went into Bosnia in 1995, thirteen years after the rain and the mud, and it was better, but it was so much worse, and that was when I knew I wanted to give it all up.
Things came to a head with Srebrenica, and my father’s joke was just so, so bad. The UN had declared it a safe haven, and the Dutch troops were there to protect the people, and in rolled the Serbs and butchered 8,000 while the cloggies hid in their barracks so as not to get hurt.

I know this s not how they see it, but that was what we saw and heard, and if they don’t like it they can tell it to the families of the dead.

We went in as part of a “peacekeeping” force, and all the politics and crap strangled us, and they took all the men and boys and shot them, and raped the women and girls before pillaging, and only then did they burn.

And “strange fruit” grew from so many trees.

So our lords and masters did the easy thing, and bombed the shit out of them, while we pointed our Warrior turrets at them, and they laughed as the low cloud stopped the bombing from being that bad, and they raped some more.

Little Voice was louder then, so loud, and I realised something, as we came across a field where women in scarves were turning over bulldozed soil to find body parts that might belong to some man or boy they once knew, I realised that I was beginning to hate men. For this seemed to be all men, men killing, men raping, for a mixture of the same bullshit the Argie generals had spouted mixed with good old-fashioned rhetoric about their Great Sky Pixie being better than the one the others followed.

Oh yes, I lost my religion as well as my gender then.

I actually missed the Falklands. There, my enemy was clear. I shot at him, he shot at me, and I didn’t have to stand next to him while he smiled and tried to look friendly as he zipped up after raping a thirteen year old and slotting a ten year old. That was what finally turned me out of the Corps, the way these self-proclaimed soldiers tried to come on to me as some sort of kindred spirit.

No, I will not go into any more details. I spoke to Stewie, told him I had had a bellyful, and we went to see the Skipper.

“Sgt Stevens, Mike, you do know you have nothing to prove, don’t you? You are not the only one. This is not what we were made for, this s not a Marine’s place. I want you to speak to the M.O. before you turn in, but if you wish I can organise a rotation home”

“Thank you sir”

“Mike, I don’t want to lose you. You are one of the old fashioned, honourable men we need at our heart. Go home, rest, find yourself again and come back to the Corps as you should be, as you were”

There was more, and I still see what he meant. People like Stewie, Nobby, that Juliet, we had all been through the real stuff, as had the lads who taught us, and now it was all “peace keeping” where you had to smile with butchers and rapists. That’s a job for a policeman, not a soldier.

I had learnt to cope with the empty eyes of my dreams. This was beyond my powers.

Children, for fuck’s sake.

I went home, served my time, and when it was up I walked out of the gate and went to London. I didn’t look back, and I ran away from Stewie and hid.

I was falling apart, and fast.

M.O.: Medical Officer; doctor.