They haven't even won my heart and mind

I feel the JACKAL sway below me, the dust-red road unrolling in front and the stunted mahogany scrub flashing alongside. We pass women bent double under towering loads of firewood and are passed by young men on mopeds in turn. I make it a point to always wave - with my left hand only, the right stays welded to the .50 cal.

You can always tell there’s a village ahead because the trees start to thin and the umber houses begin to multiply. They could have been built yesterday or a hundred years ago and the only thing that changes is the age of the squatting men or women outside. The children are eternal.

I am the third vehicle in the patrol so my cupola is always pointed right, the others cover their own arcs and together we create a lethal bubble, a pinprick of British-owned ground that roams back and forth across this continent as we please, or must. We’re currently heading north-east so if one were to fire an imaginary round it could in theory carry on to Niger, or Chad, or (curving slightly) even Kenya and the sea. I’ve spent a lot of time in Kenya – at Nanyuki or Archer’s Roast - and it’s so like here and so different I struggle to put into words exactly why.  

I often imagine what it would see, that bullet. Miles and miles and miles of much the same – sand or jungle or scrub but always sweat.

West Africa is nothing if not consistent.

*

Except when it isn’t, of course.

I passed the Dogon cliffs once and saw their houses chiselled by hand from the rock, a conveyancer’s nightmare with a housing chain that stretches back to history. The people there waved back, most of the time.

I haven’t been to Djenne yet, and the pictures of the mud mosques seem underwhelming. I am from a people of great grey stone cathedrals and to honour God with mud seems lesser, although again I couldn’t tell you why. Still, they get bums on seats, or woven mats to be precise, while my own church echoes.

I watched them pull that mud from the river once, our patrol idling on the hill above. They do it by hand: men in great pirogue canoes dredging it to the shore while others load it by the shovelful onto Toyota trucks, more dent than metal. Perhaps that is the secret - they must always shore up the cracks and labour is itself part of the prayer. Probably that’s just bollocks, and they work like I do, for people and purposes they don’t quite believe, for money that’s not quite enough, because that’s the way it’s always been and that’s the way we always are.

However, I have something else. My blue helmet and the white paint on the sides of my wagon say I am the servant of a high and noble cause. We are here to keep the peace.

Never mind that we only keep it in small blue squares on a map and on the smaller blue roads that connect them. The red squares slip around anyway, money and murder in their hearts, with AK47s hidden in bundles of wood and carried by young men on mopeds probably.

I’ve been briefed - sometimes I even believe it - that somewhere down that confusing chain from the words announced in Paris to the papers signed in Whitehall to the oil-slick machine-gun in my hands there is a plan. That plan holds the secrets to “peace” and perhaps more importantly prosperity, although the plan is vague about for who.

I’ve heard that one before, twice. It didn’t work then and it got a lot of people fucked up in the trying. Bloody pointless, bloody embarrassing.

You mustn’t say these kinds of things in front of the senior NCOs mind. They fought and sweated and lost legs and friends and lives, although for what they too will struggle to say. When they’re drunk it’s different, the tears and anger come, followed shortly by smashed glasses and maybe a bit more blood for good measure.

You mustn’t really say anything at all in front of the Officers - the real head-shed - not your Troop Leader, who’s just as baffled as you. The real officers, the signet-ring and school-tie wearers, have been taught to bluff from birth and now they do it for a sport (nothing so vulgar as a living). Questioning them will mark you as bad egg, a quaint name for career death sentence.

It's best to keep quiet. Do your time. Look out for the lads.

*

Still, peacekeeping isn’t so bad. We do our patrols and it’s just like the ads really. You’re finally out on the ground, soldiering. It’s nothing like Afghan or even Iraq, that was some real kinetic fun you missed out on. But you were too young for that, and this is better than Cyprus or another round of freezing your bollocks off in Estonia.

This is what you’ve always wanted, to soldier, to be a soldier. You’ve said it since you could speak, it was all you ever wanted but for some reason nobody ever took it seriously. You’d been small and sensitive and soft.

It hadn’t been easy but now you were big and fit and tough. On the outside at least.

Inside you still cracked when you saw the little bodies wrapped in little white sheets.But still, tough outside was enough in this line of work… for a while.

Mum and Dad weren’t happy, but that was a given. Your brothers and sister had the brains or the drive or the luck and they’ve got nice sensible jobs. Mum had wanted you to be a journalist, to use your brain and write about politics or society or what people wore to fancy parties.

They’d still never quite processed it to be honest. Describing life in the army might as well be like describing life on the moon. You told the funny stories but even they didn’t quite translate, what with having to edit out all the good swearing or turn all the acronyms and argot into something resembling English.

Most of all it was hard to capture that it was a different world with different rules, just like out here. Funny that, how the different worlds all stacked atop one another.

You could say and do and be things that just wouldn’t fly back home, and you liked it as much as you hated it. For every funny story or minute behind the gun there was an ocean of tedium and institutional autism to swim through. Somebody had described it as an abusive relationship and everyone had laughed, but it rang true.

It rang true because when it was bad it was the worst and when it was good it felt like flying.

You wonder if your family could picture you now: your feet resting on the stacked and strapped ammunition below you, the wind catching the de rigeur shemagh wrapped around your face. You’d show them some of the pictures but you’d see in their faces it didn’t quite parse – this was a film, or someone else.

You supposed it didn’t really matter; it wasn’t like you cared to picture their lives, not truly; tapping away on keyboards or having meeting after meeting. Your brother had told you he’d spent two hours discussing what type of font to use once.

Christ.

You think about that bullet’s path again. A bit like your own life you suppose, a lot of noise at the start and then a parabola – rising, rising until you hit your peak before the world pulled you down. Was this really your peak, how could you tell?

It wasn’t holding off the Russians at the Suwalki Gap but it wasn’t being a peace-chest either so perhaps that’s not so bad.

You’ll at least try to tell Mum and Dad about it when you’re back. You’ll edit it, of course. You’ll tell them about the landscape and the people and their music and the lightning storms that feel like Mufasa in the Lion King – a poor simile for something that seized your chest so entirely.

You won’t tell them about your interpreter’s wife, about how she was only twelve for fuck’s sake but apparently that’s just their way, you won’t tell them about the Malian soldiers back from a punitive patrol, the smoke and the screaming still stinking out their uniforms.  

You won’t tell them about how you suspected from the start it was all so fucking pointless.

*

Timbuktu is in Mali. You knew you’d never see it.

The insurgents/freedom fighters/terrorists/bandits/future government owned it and it was tough to articulate why that was such a bad thing, some analyst or Minister had decreed that this group of arseholes weren’t our sort of group of arseholes and so they must be opposed. Until of course something changed somewhere and they must be supported, they had always been supported.

Still, as routines went this wasn’t so bad. Your family and friends back home in that green-and-grey country wouldn’t ever see this red-and-ochre one. You got to live it, a little piece of history and adventure for a little while and you think that that’s probably more than most people get.

Maybe a few years from now you’ll have a new routine, one that they can picture in their heads.