Dead Men Risen by Toby Harnden

Let’s deal first with the elephant in the room. In these days of closing bookshops, kindles and the cloying, ubiquitous mediocrity of the celebrity memoir, few publishers can dream of the double sales and publicity coup of having an entire book run bought and pulped by the MOD for “security” purposes. Toby Harnden’s Dead Men Risen seems to have benefited from, at the very least, some oversight and a little bungling at the over-worked and under-resourced MOD departments that deal with this sort of thing. This topic has been debated heatedly elsewhere on these pages, but a reading of the book itself doesn’t suggest any dark conspiracies – indeed it loses nothing from those lines obviously redacted (which perhaps suggests deleting them might not have been such a problem either).

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None of which should be allowed to detract from what is a very strong addition to the growing library of books on contemporary operations (for which this reviewer would like to propose the new umbrella term of TiC Lit’). Harnden’s account of the Welsh Guards Battlegroup on Op Herrick X is better than most at balancing overview with detail and is accordingly as accessible and informative to someone approaching the subject for the first time as it is familiar and accurate to those well acquainted with the ditches and shattered compounds that are its stage. Harnden’s opening chapters are particularly impressive in summarizing in broad but pretty accurate and eloquent strokes salient details of both the history of the Welsh Guards and Operation Herrick.

As many of those on this site will already know, the Welsh Guards suffered casualties at all levels of the Battlegroup; an attached Guardsman and Private, a Lance Corporal, a Lance Sergeant, a Platoon Commander, a Company Commander and, for the first time since the Falklands, the Commanding Officer himself. These moments, although perhaps more emotionally than strategically significant, provide an effective structure for the book and a personal counterpoint to the strategic backdrop of Operation Panther’s Claw. Though previous media attention has tended to be focussed on Colonel Rupert’s seniority and Lieutenant Mark Evison’s well-publicized diaries, Harnden is to be commended for weighing each subsequent blow evenly, and in context. Exhaustive homework has been done and the scenes are painted vividly and harrowingly, certain passages will be difficult to read for those who knew the men or have been in similar situations and Harnden, a friend of Thorneloe’s in particular, must have found certain passages equally difficult to write.

The effect, however, is rightfully powerful. Harnden’s prose is readable and his style direct, he captures the soldiers’ voice well and the accessibility of the book belies its near 600 pages. Harnden, formerly in the Royal Navy, has a perhaps more instinctive feel for soldiers than more “civilian” writers who have attempted similar exercises. His unsparing accounts of IED strikes intermingle with moments of particularly squaddie humour and lightness – the Guardsman striding determinedly towards a primitive and pungent loo with a gas-mark and a laptop brought a particular smile and has the ring of authenticity beyond the usual tour clichés. That is not to say there aren’t some of those, but it is the nature of clichés that they tend to be true. Acts of courage that begin to seem commonplace with repetition; the frustrations of trying and all too often failing to engage with the locals; the tensions that exist between companies, battlegroups and Brigade. To one extent these are increasingly familiar tropes of books about Afghanistan, but that is surely because they are recurrent themes. In an effort, largely successful, to humanize his individual suspects, Harnden dwells on background: the Welsh Guards officers public schooling (or lack thereof) and “Hollywood” good looks will possibly be of greater interest to the lay reader than those from within the military. Similarly, for this reviewer at least (albeit, without an intimate knowledge of the sub-units involved) the “soldiers as drama-merchants back home” narrative was slightly played-up. No doubt that some of the best fighting men are not the best camp soldiers, but the vague impression of a preponderance of Wellington era vagabonds seems more at home in lazily scripted BBC dramas than a fine study like this one.

The usual criticism will be levelled at the author of what is essentially a unit history: the focus is unashamedly on the Welsh Guards, although Harnden does better than many in acknowledging and discussing contributions from those attached to the Battlegroup and in the wider Brigade – his chapter on the exploits of the 4 Rifles sniper team may have discomforted some when widely serialized in the Telegraph, but is an excellent part of the book. Equally the difficulty of enduring life in the rear-party is well treated and some of the most moving scenes are those played out in Aldershot and Wales in front of grim faced Casualty Notification Officers.

Most six month tours of Afghanistan start with tempered optimism and a sense of determination, endure extreme highs and lows and finish with a proud but all too often saddened home-coming. Dead Men Risen is probably not the definitive ‘Afghanistan’ book, but nor does it set out to be. It captures the trajectory of a Battlegroup’s tour effectively and is a valuable contribution to this growing body of work and if it ends up posing more questions than it answers then it does so because that is the nature of current operations in Helmand.

Four Mr Mushroomheads.

rasselas



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