The Junior Officers Reading Club

November 15, 2010
While no doubt the bravado with which Hennessy frames his account of daily life in a war zone reveals the crucial but often overlooked heart and mind of a soldier, the unsettling results confirm the vapid promises of war: that in battle, there is no context, no history, but only boredom, adrenaline, or grief. "Fun," "thrill," and "excitement" drive Hennessy, and apparently his comrades as well, even after a lot of blood and death; that this fact endures becomes more horrifying than the wars enveloping them. Hennessy's story jumps from daily life at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, to drills in the British countryside, to Iraq and Afghanistan, and the sum of these parts never quite adds up to a cohesive tale, though sections share a hurried disjointedness that occasionally comes off as narrative momentum. The jargon and relentless use of acronyms certainly captures military speech but obscures the basic development of many scenes. Though a glossary of terms is included, flipping for every DTDF, OPTAG NCO, and GPMG would make for more back-and-forth than any attention span would permit.

July 15, 2010

A young Oxford graduate's tale of heat, boredom and adrenaline-rush warfare in Afghanistan.

Now in his late 20s, Hennessey became a captain in the Grenadier Guards at age 22 and soon learned to love combat and its "danger and...startling unpredictability." His irreverent, nonstop narrative offers a revealing view of young British soldiers, many university-educated, all armed with iPods and video games, as they seek wartime glory and action. Telling girlfriends they're off to hunt Osama bin Laden, they initially found themselves keeping tourists happy in London, maintaining the peace in the Balkans and fighting the desert heat in Iraq, where the author and his military-academy buddies launched their eponymous reading club. While sitting around in boxer shorts between shifts, they read fraying paperback editions of Catch-22, Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy and other novels whose surreal aspects had striking immediacy in the strange otherness of war. Their reading—along with video games, the music of Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley and much-needed Facebook fixes—provided a respite between patrols and eventual firefights with "Terry," the enemy, first in Baghdad and then, in 2007, amid sandstorms and head-high poppies in Afghanistan. Relating much of his story in e-mails, Hennessey captures the fear and excitement of combat, celebrating "just how easy it all was, how natural it all felt and how much fun," even as he grieved over the deaths of comrades. Though the frequent use of acronyms and British slang may put off some American readers, the author offers numerous vivid snapshots of his experiences—watching Band of Brothers and Gladiator to learn combat techniques; giant platoon snowball fights in Bosnia; a debate on the best iPod music for their first mission (they select Metallica); futile attempts to train undisciplined troops of the Afghan National Army who couldn't shape their berets, couldn't hit targets with their rusted or broken AK-47s and wore whatever they wanted; and the Bangladeshi Pizza Hut workers' continuing delivery of pies during mortar attacks on a logistics base in Iraq.

An honest, graphic portrait of young men on the modern battlefield.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from September 1, 2010
Oxford graduate Hennessey decided he wanted to do something exciting, so he went to Sandhurst, Englands Royal Military Academy, and then to Bosnia, Iraq, and, ultimately, Afghanistan as a lieutenant and platoon leader in the Grenadier Guards. There he found what he was looking for, and this voluble, kinetic, and often funny book recounts his experiences. Hes cheeky about Sandhurst, describing it as Hogwarts with guns and asserting that military knowledge and leadership were taught primarily through MARCHING, IRONING, and SHOUTING, but he also acknowledges the programs effectiveness. (He became the Royal Armys youngest captain.) His time in Iraq melded boredom and frustration because he and his fellow guards realized they werent going to have a fight in Baghdad; with time on their hands, Hennessey and his fellow junior guards formed the titular reading club. Reassigned to Afghanistan, however, he found his fights, which rivaled Korea and even WWII in intensity. The books pace, never leisurely, accelerates in Afghanistan, as Hennessey vividly describes near-constant battle with Taliban fighters and confronts his reactions: exhaustion, fear, grief, fellowship, confusion, and what he calls the rapture of war. All wars generate fine books. This may be one of the best to come out of the war in Afghanistan.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)