Book description
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 Officers' Reading Club is the story of how one of
these soldiers was made, through the testosterone-heavy breeding
ground of Sandhurst, into the war-pockmarked, gritty Balkans, out into
the nightmare of Iraq and Afghanistan's Helmand Province, pinned down
by the Taliban, living only from moment to moment. Written in spare
and lucid prose, it 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 a world that needs it and a society that
no longer understands it.
Patrick Hennessey was born in 1982 and educated at Berkhamsted School
and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read English. He joined the Army
in January 2004, undertaking officer training at the Royal Military
Academy Sandhurst where he was awarded the Queen's Medal and
commissioned into The Grenadier Guards. He served as a Platoon Commander
and later Company Operations Officer from the end of 2004 to early 2009
in the Balkans, Africa, South East Asia and the Falkland Islands and on
operational tours to Iraq in 2006 and Afghanistan in 2007, where he
became the youngest Captain in the Army and was commended for gallantry.
Patrick is currently studying to become a barrister and hopes to
specialize in conflict and international humanitarian law.
