Patrick Bury - Callsign Hades

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2010
A CBS COMPANY

Copyright 2010 by Patrick Bury

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.

The right of Patrick Bury to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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End paper images provided courtesy of the author and Richard Pohle, 2008.

Pictures provided courtesy of the author, excluding pictures 3,
Crown copyright, and 10, 13, 15 and 16 which are provided courtesy
of Richard Pohle, 2008.

A CIP catalogue for this book is available
from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-84737-859-0 (hardback)
ISBN : 978-1-84737-860-6 (trade paperback)
eBook ISBN: 978-1-84737-861-3

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Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays, Chatham ME5 8TD

Dedicated to Ranger Justin James Cupples

7 Platoon, Ranger Company, The Royal Irish Regiment

Killed in Action, Sangin, 4 September 2008

And to 7 Platoon

Get A Fire Goin

O shining Odysseus, never try to console me for dying. I would rather follow the plough as thrall to another man, one with no land allotted to him and not much to live on, than be a king over all the perished dead.

Achilles soul to Odysseus, Homers Odyssey

This book is not a Whos Who of Helmand 2008. Nor is it history, strategy, politics or an analysis of foreign policy.

It is not meant to glorify 7 Platoon, Ranger Company or myself, nor denigrate anyone. I have tried to be honest to every character I have seen through my own, imperfect eyes.

It is not meant as a statement of fact; more, these are my thoughts and feelings as they happened.

It is not meant for those who serve bravely in the infantry, for I fear my observations are too soft for men who need to remain hard.

Please do not think that any frictions or mishaps portrayed in this book were unique to Ranger Company. I guarantee they are being played out in other FOBs, in other units, in other armies across Afghanistan as you read this. They are what happen when men go to war.

For this is simply a story of war and men. About what men do in war and what war does to men.

That is all.

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love.

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

W. B . Yeats

I stared at the rows of flagstones standing grey against the large conifers. Shadows fell across them. In other places sunlight lit the graves. Chance had played its part even here. Under the pines and firs of the dark evergreens, weathered and mouldy headstones glared enviously at their bright, clean neighbours in the sun. Did the dead really mind where they were buried? I thought so. I wanted a clean, bright stone that a schoolchild might tend perhaps once a year. They might remember me for the rest of their long lives. Id be their personal link to the past. Their contribution and mine linked for ever in a veil of understanding. For them my flagstone would signify a real person, alive. But dead.

The Brookwood Necropolis train line delivered Londons dead to their final resting place in the countryside. A sombre, macabre train dressed with dark curtains to keep grief in and awkward compassion out. It left the private station beside Waterloo, and made a strange spectacle; mourners packed on the platform as caskets were loaded on to one of the eight separate carriages. As the engine built up steam, pistons working and wheels creaking, the eleven-thirty would pull out of its terminal to arrive an hour later at its special passengers final destination.

Almost every day, for nearly a hundred years, this ritual was obediently followed, an administrative answer to the Victorian problem of death, space and the ever-expanding city. A whole industry sprang up in the village of Brookwood, Surrey. At its height it had numerous funeral homes, undertakers, florists, stonemasons, all in a village of a thousand inhabitants. Soon the army saw the attraction and began burying its dead there too. Brookwood became the largest cemetery in the world. By 1918 it was the capital of death. A one-stop shop for the grim reaper. Until chance again intervened.

It was only right that war, having profited Brookwood so much, would lead to its downfall. In the early hours of 17 April 1941, a German Heinkel bomber, intent on flattening London, dropped its lethal load on Waterloo Station and destroyed the Necropolis terminal. It was never revived. Now all that remains is a small stretch of track between todays Brookwood railway station and the cemetery. It was this piece of track I stepped across in my crisp camouflage, gleaming black boots and blue beret of a Sandhurst Officer Cadet. I didnt know it at the time, but I may as well have been crossing the Styx.

We visited some time in the first five weeks of training, a whirlwind of sleep-deprived stress and information intake. While we learned how to work our weapons and trained with blank ammunition, our masters had rightly determined that the real cost of war needed to be hammered home to us. It would awaken us to the ultimate sacrifice our chosen profession could call on us to make. And yet as I whiled away my time through the rows and rows of flagstones, looking for anyone with the same name as me, or, when that failed, anyone from an Irish regiment or even Ireland, death still seemed distant, cool, still part of the game that was Sandhurst and training with blanks. War was clean, fun. Everyone came back to life at the end.

Not that I was ignorant of the implications of what I was getting myself into. Since I was a boy I had been enthralled by the army and war. I had read, watched and studied at the altar of war all my life. I had seen and thought I understood the tears of veterans. I knew, I thought, the horror, the bleakness, the pain and the dirt. In fact, I was in awe of it. Transfixed. And maybe I could understand it. But I hadnt felt it. Just like you havent. And that made all the difference.

I couldnt find any Bury. I couldnt even find anyone from the Royal Irish Regiment. In a way it felt that some emotional link had been stumped.

But I found many dead Irishmen. And there would be many more.

Lightning flashes
Across the sky,
Youre only young,
But youre gonna die...

Hells Bells