Why I miss my ‘brothers’ in Helmand

I decided last December to visit my former Regiment, the Grenadier Guards. I had served with them for five years in Windsor and Aldershot, on exercises all over the world and on tours of the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan. I had left the Army six months previously to retrain as a barrister but was finding being a civilian difficult.

In September the Grenadiers had returned to Helmand to start another tour and as news of tough fights and casualties filtered home, the comfy student lifestyle started to lose its sheen. Reading letters on the sofa from friends in vulnerable and dusty patrol bases, I felt as though I was somehow letting them down. Once I’d planned the trip, I felt a surge of excitement at the prospect of being reunited with old comrades, even briefly, but it wasn’t shared by my friends and family. “But, you’ve left the Army,” one spluttered incredulously, “why the hell would you go back out?”

The general assumption was that I had gone a little mad. A quiet “oh,” from my girlfriend when I broke the news was an eloquent understatement. She admitted to being disappointed and confused about why I wanted to go in the first place. My mother’s response was a similarly guiltinducing blend of understanding and disappointment. “Well,” she began, “I wish you wouldn’t, but . . .”

It’s idiomatic that men under arms forge close bonds, strange and often incomprehensible to those who haven’t fought. Shakespeare’s Henry V’s “band of brothers” is perhaps the most frequently cited affirmation of this relationship, but it holds true that he “that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother”.

While such strong bonds prove invaluable to the effectiveness of the small fighting units upon which any Army is built, they can prove difficult to reconcile with one’s real family. As a commander, albeit a very junior one, I got no greater satisfaction than when bringing my team home unscathed and felt no greater anguish and helplessness than when dealing with those who had been injured. In few professions are the costs of poor leadership or a lack of trust so high. The only people who didn’t question my decision to return to Helmand were fellow servicemen, both serving and retired. They nodded with quiet understanding and even a faint gleam of envy: it’s a family thing.

When my flight out to Kabul was cancelled due to snow, I managed to get myself on an RAF plane from Brize Norton instead and — after an embarrassing exchange with the duty Sergeant who dissolved into giggles every time he tried to say my first name and eventually gave up and reverted to “Sir” — managed to hitch a lift with the Grenadiers on the same flight.

Within hours I was crammed in the minibus arguing with the Guardsmen over what radio station to listen to and being teased for my “civilian” haircut with all the easy familiarity and comfort with which siblings resume old banter.In Brize Norton, I bumped into another friend. A contemporary of mine who I hadn’t seen for well over a year but with whom the resumption of banter and gossip felt just as easy. Friends from school and university have often remarked, perhaps a little grudgingly, on how suddenly close “Army buddies” become. There is an effortlessness and a simplicity to the relationship between comrades that runs counter to the modern trends for increased private space and instant gratification.

In the most austere of patrol bases, they share everything and often only survive through each other’s selflessness — soldiers do not die for Queen and Country but for each other. I wonder how many civilian friends could honestly say the same?

Out in Helmand, the separation is most difficult for those with children and partners. One Grenadier in (Forward Operating Base) Shawqat, recently a father, confessed to using up his telephone minutes “just listening to the baby down the phone”. Twenty-first century operations link us to home with satellite phones and internet access, but in remote desert bases these facilities are limited and 30 minutes a week is no substitute for the real thing.

When the Americans first arrived in large numbers in southern Afghanistan, one of the biggest drags on morale was the remoteness of the deployment. Troops who were used to the incredibly sophisticated welfare facilities in the huge and established US bases in Iraq found sharing one phone between hundreds and relying on letters very difficult.

But Guardsman Gillespie, a Grenadier who had been injured in Afghanistan in 2007, would rather have gone without the facilities of Camp Bastion to be back in a front-line role. “It’s just not the same,” he told me, recalling that the last time we’d shared a cigarette he’d been on a stretcher waiting for a Chinook to evacuate him to hospital. “It’s comfy and steady and I can check Facebook but, you know . . . ” I did, he’d rather be forward with his team.

Patrolling around Nad-e Ali, scene of some of the fiercest fighting in the last year, I caught up with “Coops”, another of my Guardsmen. I asked him if he missed home, his mother or girlfriend. “Yeah,” he conceded, “I reckon it’s harder the second time, less of an adventure and you know everyone at home is more worried.” Would he rather be at home? He grinned: “Well, you’re not, are you, Sir?”

The day after the ambush I was out on patrol again when I spotted a familiar shock of blond hair and ran to greet a “brother officer”. One of the three guys who had joined the Grenadiers with me from Sandhurst and alongside whom I’d endured rain and screaming instructors in training, Balkan snows, Iraqi deserts, Afghan ambushes and all the drudgery and japes of Army life between.

We had ten minutes to high-five, catch-up and hug (in as manly a way as possible) before I pushed off and he resumed sentry duty. Ten minutes in a long six months which, for him, felt like a family reunion and for me would alone have made the whole trip — freezing ditch included — worth it.

Of course those deployed on operations miss their families, but the support they provide each other has no parallel in civilian life. People often express astonishment that one of the most common responses of injured soldiers undergoing rehabilitation at Hedley Court is a determination to rejoin their units as quickly as possible.

There is, no doubt, something selfish about such comradeship. Only in the past few months have I realised that it is easier emotionally to be the person deployed — for whom a tour is an exhausting six months of challenges of which homesickness is just one of many — than to be the person left behind, for whom the daily routine continues but with a gnawing absence.

Cracking jokes with members of my old platoon in the middle of an operation, exchanging gossip with long-standing friends in the middle of nowhere and winding down with the old team over Christmas Eve cigars in the middle of Helmand, even as I missed the fun and comfort of home, I understood entirely.

Patrick Hennessey is the author of The Junior Officer’s Reading Club: Killing time and Fighting Wars, published byAllen Lane at £16.99

It’s harder for Afghan troops

British troops in Afghanistan complete six-month tours with a two-week break for R&R. It might seem like a long time, but for the Afghan National Army (ANA) soldiers they serve alongside it’s a walk in the park.

Although Afghanistan is “home” for the ANA, soldiers serve unaccompanied and are often posted far from home. For most soldiers of 1st Kandak/3/205, Helmand is as unfamiliar as the Scottish Highlands is to Home Counties man. With most Afghans marrying and having children much earlier than their Western allies a greater proportion of ANA troops leave large families at home.

When I ask them how they cope, there are smiles and shrugs. Every ANA soldier gets one month of leave a year, which they take in a block, often requiring the first week just to make it home, and the last week to make it back.

Many ANA soldiers fear being identified in the Western media after the families of men interviewed by a US newspaper last year were targeted in revenge attacks. Company Sergeant Major “S” has a wife and three children. Last time he had leave, it took him four days to get home.

Once there his time was taken up with all the same things that occupy his International Security Assistance Force counterparts, catching up with his wife, playing with his children, reading school reports (so his eldest son can become a doctor rather than having to join the Army like him) and, on the most recent occasion, celebrating his sister’s wedding:

“They had delayed the ceremony for six months, waiting for me to come home.”

Not all leave is such fun. A quiet, older Sergeant working in the Kandak headquarters explained to me that going home is hard for him. He lost his wife a few years ago and his children live with his brother in Paktia province.

Although he loves seeing them and catching up with his wider family, he always misses his wife. He pauses and fiddles with the weapon that he’s cleaning before continuing: “There is much to do on operations, we are busy and it is dangerous so I am too tired to think of her as much as I do at home.”

When I put it to Captain Qiam — the boisterous heavy weapons commander — that the regime seems hard on his soldiers, not to mention the big family that he’s left behind in Kabul, he waves away the suggestion. “The fight,” he insists, “is more important.”