GUEST BLOGGER.

Dear Readers,

I've got a little treat for you and I hope you'll make him welcome and post comments below...but I've decided to allow a few guest bloggers on here. The first is "A Soldier" who is fighting the war from the front line in Afghanistan - to protect him we've decided not to name him (as the MOD will string him up by his balls if Terry Taliban don't get to him first!) but his posts are an often insightful and poignant view of the war from the lads and lasses who are out there fighting it. Of course being a soldier his language is often enough to make the Navy lads blush - but then they *are* the more sensitive members of Her Majesties armed forces...so without further a do I give you "Soldier A."

The Ultimate Afghan Army Instructor is...


Ah, another day of good soldiering is over and done with, and we’re enjoying the peace and quiet with a few tunes on the radio, and a spot of weapon cleaning. Much to the annoyance of my long suffering Missus, I could be considered as a bit of a clean freak. For example, she likes to use the floor of the flat as a handy storage area for things like pants, magazines, half finished crap novels about women who ride horses and sleep with stable boys, Dominos pizza boxes and coffee cups, and considers her car not so much as a mode of transport, but more as some kind of handy mobile cupboard to store woman crap in.

Me, I like to keep things in the right place. CD’s and DVD’s go back in the rack in alphabetical order, and in the case of my books, sized off, tallest on the right, shortest on the left. I’d hate to have some sort of CD-finding emergency on my hands, and have to hunt through 300 CDs, just to find that awesome Def Leopard track, or my favourite bedtime reading, Pam 21 – Army Range Management. She thinks I’ve got OCD.

It’s quite fortunate then, that my parents suggested that I should join the Army many years ago. To paraphrase a much better writer, they were very pleased when I joined up. The fact that I hated it seemed to please them even more. But after the traumas of Basic Training, I was soon feeling quite at home in a strange green world, where the fact that soldiers and vehicles are in a neat line is far more important than the fact that none of them actually work.

Anyway, that’s not really a problem, as it’s a well known fact that you can fix anything in the British Army with some black masking tape and a small hammer. And if you can’t, all you have to do is call the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. Sure, they have a fancy Regimental name, but it’s really just Army-speak for “more rolls of masking tape. And bigger hammers”.

I digress. Trying to train the messy little scamps of the Afghan Army in this “neat and tidy” mindset is roughly akin to trying to sweep spunk up a very steep hill - i.e. downright fucking impossible. There’s a genuine cultural divide here that’s proving quite hard to bridge. In terms of fighting ability, most of them are more nails than a Screwfix catalogue, and that’s fair enough. But they genuinely think we’re really odd for spending our spare time cleaning and oiling weapons and maintaining our kit and vehicles when we could be sleeping, or maybe watching pornography.

There’s only one real person I can think of who can actually speak with these people on the same level of understanding, so as soon as I’ve finished cleaning my rifle and topped the oil up on the wagons, I’m going to ring my bosses back in the UK and let them know how it’s going out here.

And then, I’m going to suggest that my girlfriend is shipped out here to train them instead!