Harry Flashman and the Invasion of Iraq Read Online Free PDF Page A

officers and watchkeepers, the artillery (or “Arty”) desk would be a pretty central feature. With a bit of luck and a following wind I could arrange for the desk labelled “Armour” to be next door to him, which would at least mean I wouldn’t have to speak exclusively with Royal Marines morning, noon and night. A seasoned artilleryman, he had been attached to the Brigade since its return from Kabul a year earlier and was on good terms with almost everyone in the headquarters, and wasted little time introducing me to most of the gaggle involved in that afternoon’s conversation.
    By early evening the bar had filled up significantly with a variety of souls mainly sporting combat clothing. The Royal Marines have a peculiar obsession with hygiene and widely consider it inappropriate or downright rude to dine without washing and changing first. (Fortunately the Army is a little more pragmatic and has no such hang-ups about eating in work clothes.) Sure enough, as the dinner gong drew nearer, they began to depart, returning en masse a few minutes later sporting jackets and ties and smelling faintly of soap.
    I made my way to the bar to line up a last pint before supper and was startled by a swift punch on the arm and a thunderous “Hallo!” I turned around to be confronted by the grinning face of a disgracefully irreverent media liaison officer with whom I had got into several scrapes in Kabul a year earlier. I shook his hand like a man being rescued from a sinking ship. A demon skier, the man had initially been commissioned into the Army back in the 1980s but had transferred his Commission to the Marines almost on a whim after just a few years’ service. He had long since been discharged and retrained as a solicitor. But after a short time in civilian life he had joined the Reserves, risen to the rank of major, and become a seasoned war-tourist volunteering (insanely, in my opinion) for deployment after deployment on the basis that it was more interesting work than life in his law practice. He was truly his own man, someone who did as he pleased and took nothing in life too seriously. Keeping him in check was practically impossible - his CO once remarked that he would rather administer bollockings to anyone else in his unit, since it was a racing certainty that they would be ignored, which was not only frustrating but served to visibly undermine his authority too. I noticed that he was walking awkwardly and remarked upon it.
    “My back’s trashed,” admitted my media liaison chum. “I broke it skiing last year. Total nightmare. Had to spend months in a body cast so I’m weak as a kitten at the moment. Can’t run either - it hurts too much. Hope no bugger asks me to carry a bergen on this trip, because I don’t think I’ll be able to lift the thing, let alone walk anywhere with it.”
    “Then what the Dickens are you doing here?” I blurted out. “Surely you should have been medically downgraded by now?”
    He met this outburst with a wry smile. “Of course I should. But I couldn’t let the opportunity of a good old-fashioned war pass me by. And the quacks at Chilwell are atrocious, everyone knows that. (3) Admit nothing and they’ll never find out for themselves. So I kept schtum, told a few half-truths and ta-da! Here I am, S02 Media.” (4)
    “You must be bloody mad,” I told him. “A perfectly good excuse to avoid this idiocy and you not only volunteer for it, you hide the fact that you are crippled in order to join in.”
    We agreed to differ and shuffled through to dinner. In fairness to Stonehouse, one of the absolute joys of being based in Plymouth is the extraordinarily friendly nature of the mess staff. A posse of largely middle-aged women make it their mission in life to fuss over the officers as if they were spoilt children. Nothing is too much like hard work, everything is delivered with a smile and an old-world charm which I have seldom seem matched in the best London establishments, let