Two soldiers with stories to tell arrived in my life in one week. One was a man who had joined up to serve his country and support his young wife and child after leaving school without many qualifications. His short, brave adventure in a foreign land had left him a shaking wreck, trying to survive on an inadequate disability pension. We met in a pub where he was hardly able to lift his pint to his lips without spilling it. The second soldier was a smart little officer who was chauffeured to our lunch date at the Ritz. Since leaving the British Army he had become notorious for building a highly profitable mercenary force which was rumoured in some quarters to use ‘excessive force’. I’d met prefects like him at school and had always made sure to give them a wide berth, but I thought it would be interesting to find out what he had been up to – a sort of real-life Flashman.
One of these soldiers talked with painful honesty about his experiences while the other was evasive, constantly alluding to things that he ‘couldn’t talk about’, and apparently very pleased with himself. Neither of them was anything like any of the stereotypical British soldiers I had been brought up to expect.
Having had a ‘good war’, my parents were very well disposed towards the armed forces. Many of my relatives were full-time servicemen who had reached high ranks. I had read Biggles (albeit not enjoying his escapades as much as the Scarlet Pimpernel’s and Dr Syn’s), and watched John Mills, David Niven, Kenneth More and other British gents behaving very finely in the black and white films we were shown at school on alternate Saturday evenings during the winter terms. Many centuries of romantic tales of noble knights and fearless warriors provided the building blocks for the mythical figures that were paraded before us then, and those that still stride around the imaginations of new generations in the militaristic computer games that sell by the million.
No one, it seemed from listening to these two soldiers and several others who came forward to tell their stories in the wake of successful authors like Andy McNab and Chris Ryan, had had anything close to a ‘good war’ since 1945.
The horror of guerrilla warfare and improvised explosive devices, the bullying by the Americans with their ‘Napalm in the morning’ in Vietnam and ‘shock and awe’ in Iraq, and the relentless crushing of every small country that stood in the way of the Soviet military machine, had left men with terrible tales that were very different to anything I had heard or read during my childhood.
After being part of a highly successful operation in Iraq, Andy McNab and Chris Ryan had both turned their personal ‘knights’ tales’ into bestselling thrillers and themselves into publishing brands. A great many other soldiers strove to follow the same path. Meanwhile senior officers who would once have written dry battlefield accounts with stiff upper lips were forced by modern readers’ tastes to talk more about the emotional side of warfare and soldiering, draining still further the heroic myths that had grown so powerful during the first half of the twentieth century, with the help of Hollywood.
The public will always want heroes but now they expect believable, rounded ones. It’s all right for soldiers to talk about fear and pain and missing their families, just as it is all right for other people to talk about unhappy childhoods in other autobiographies. Heroes now tend to be mavericks rather than ‘military machines’ as they might once have been proud to be known. The recruiters can no longer expect to get away with the same blatant, one-dimensional propaganda they might have been able to use a hundred years ago because the potential Western soldier is more knowing, better educated and has become able to show a more human face to the world just as warfare itself has become more technological and less human.
The potential power of these modern soldiers’ stories, however, did not escape the notice of the Ministry of Defence, who called me into their inner sanctum to meet one particular man whose story they felt summed up the modern stresses and strains of soldiering particularly well. He and I were sucked in through one security zone after another until we found ourselves sitting together in a room, which felt distinctly padded, with a coffee machine and a code number should we want to escape back out onto the street.
I liked him and I liked the story so I prepared a synopsis for them as requested. The publishers we approached, however, smelled a propaganda rat and did not take the bait.