Dimensions
144 x 222 x 33mm
For the first time in a generation British soldiers are once again fighting at close quarters, coming under sustained and vicious firepower, losing friends in some of the most violent fighting the modern army has endured. Yet the same soldiers also serve on international peacekeeping missions, or counter insurgency. Sometimes they do all three in the same country.
The Junior Officer's Reading Club is the story of how Patrick Hennessey, one of these soldiers, was made. From the testosterone-heavy breeding ground of Sandhurst, into the war-pockmarked, gritty Balkans, out into the nightmare of Iraq and Afghanistan's Helmand Province, he ends up pinned down by the Taliban, living only from moment to moment.
In spare and lucid prose, Patrick describes with alarming vividness not only the frenetic violence of a soldier's life, but the periods of stifling and (sometimes) comic boredom, living inside an institution in a state of flux; an Army caught between fighting wars, keeping the peace and staying alive.
