After the previous controversy surrounding the publication of Dead Men Risen (see the video above), we always receive any new material about the book with a certain amount of excitement, today being no exception, here is a short but very interesting interview with the author Toby Harnden discussing the book:
Yesterday, here on the Quercus blog, we ran the first part of our interview with Toby Harnden, author of Dead Men Risen.
Today, we run part two…
Mark Thwaite: What is unique, do you think, about the Welsh Guards?
Toby Harnden: At the risk of stating the bleedin’ obvious – the Welshness and the fact that they are a Guards regiment.
I should explain further. About 95 per cent of non-commissioned Welsh Guardsmen are from Wales. With the officers, it’s a different story; they’re mainly drawn from English public schools and the officers’ mess is sometimes known as the regiment’s “foreign legion”. Very few other regiments draw from such a small area of Britain and no other Guards regiment (a significant proportion of Scots and Irish Guardsmen are English). I’d hazard a guess that the only others that could compare in terms of the purity of their gene pools would be other Welsh regiments like the Royal Regiment of Wales and the Queen’s Dragoon Guards.
This means that the Welsh Guards are incredibly close-knit and there’s hilarious banter between the North Walians (many of them native Welsh speakers) and the South Walians. There’s an emotionalism about the Welsh and this comes through in the soldiers. When they’re up, they’re really up and when they’re down, the chins can drop. That was a factor when their commanding officer was killed. There’s a love of song and of family and a yearning for home that you don’t get in most other regiments.
Guardsmen have a ceremonial role – known as “public duties” – and so a premium is put on order, smartness and discipline. That affects the way they fight. A Para would tell you it leads to inflexibility, bullshit and that time spent outside Buckingham Palace is time that could have been spent honing infantry skills. A Guardsman would tell you that attention to detail on the parade ground means discipline in battle and an instinctive understanding of the need to do things properly. The stature and bearing of Guardsmen is something that hits you whether they’re from the Grenadiers, Coldstream, Scots, Irish or Welsh. I saw that bond in Helmand when the Grenadiers took over from the Welsh Guards.
The Welsh Guards were founded in 1915 and are therefore the newest of the Guards regiments. Their recent history is dominated by their experience in the Falklands War, when 36 Guardsmen were killed and many others horribly burned when RFA Sir Galahad was hit by Argentine bombs. There were accusations that the Welsh Guards were not as fit as the Paras and Royal Marines and that still rankles. If you’re in the mood for a fight, try floating this idea in a bar in Cardiff. I think the Helmand tour of 2009 largely put the Falklands to rest for the Welsh Guards (three Welsh Guardsmen who were in Helmand had been on board the Sir Galahad. Two of those have now left the Army and the third is unlikely to return to the battalion). But it certainly affected their psychology when they were out there. I think the Falklands, when there was a feeling amongst some that officers had made mistakes and ordinary Guardsmen had paid the price with their lives, played a part in Rupert Thorneloe’s approach to command.
Mark Thwaite: How long have you been writing for Toby?
Toby Harnden: My first manuscript, written when I was about seven, was called The Adventures of Private Murphy. It remains unpublished. After school in Manchester, I joined the Navy, which sponsored me through university, where I studied Modern History. Journalism had always attracted me but the prospect of joining a ship in Hong Kong in the summer of 1988 persuaded me that remaining in uniform for a bit longer might be worthwhile. I ended up staying another six years.
During that time, writing became a hobby. I wrote about historic buildings for a local paper in Edinburgh and then managed to get a slot doing theatre reviews for the Scotsman during the Edinburgh Fringe in the summer of 1990. It involved seeing three or four plays a day and wiring 200-word reviews on each. I’d type them out at night and then cycle to the back entrance of the paper in Fleshmarket Close and drop them off. The next day, they’d be in the paper. That’s when I got the bug.
I had a place on the City University postgraduate journalism course when I left the Navy in 1994 but by that time I’d got my foot in the door at the Telegraph so I thought it was best to keep it there. It was touch and go at the time though. After a few weeks as a junior news reporter, I got a letter from the then editor Max Hastings. He told me that he was terribly sorry but the job he had promised me was no longer possible because the newsroom was already over budget. The only thing he could suggest, he said, was that I went to work for a regional paper and then tried my luck at the Telegraph a few years later. I was down to one news shift a week but I ignored the letter and kept ringing up for more work. Two months later, I had a full-time contract and that letter was never mentioned again.
Mark Thwaite: Is there anything you feel you can’t do well as a writer that you’d like to be able to do?
Toby Harnden: If I’m not careful, this could be a very long answer. There are many things. Having spent more than 16 years as a news journalist, I find it hard to write descriptive passages. News can be a straitjacket. I think the discipline it gives – the need to be fast, accurate, logical, clear etc and the old who, when, what, why, where questions – is great for a writer but sometimes it is hard to step back and let the words flow naturally. There can be times when I am more comfortable with the opinions or the testimony of others than my own.
Mark Thwaite: What do you do when you are not writing?
Toby Harnden: My wife Cheryl and I have two young children, Tessa, who will be four in June, and Miles, who was two in January. So any parent will understand where most of my non-writing time goes!
Mark Thwaite: Did you have an idea in your mind of your “ideal” reader? Did you write specifically for them?
Toby Harnden: My ideal reader would be a 34-year-old unhappily married housewife living in Surbiton. Seriously, I wrote the book thinking of concentric circles of readers. At the centre would be Welsh Guardsmen, their families and people associated with the regiment. Moving out from that would be soldiers, former soldiers, wannabe soldiers and the military market. The people I really want to reach are in the outer circles – those who do not read war books or want to read one thing that will inform them about Afghanistan or the modern Army. I particularly want women to read the book and I think the depth of the characters, the way so many soldiers open up emotionally and the passages about the knock on the door (told from the point of view of the officer who knocks, as well as the wife being told she is now a widow) will I hope make the book appeal beyond men.
Mark Thwaite: How do you write? With pen or pencil? Straight onto a screen? Revision after revision or fairly spontaneously?
Toby Harnden: My handwriting, once very neat, has become shockingly bad over the years. It has a very short sell-by date – if I don’t decipher it within a week, even I can’t read it. So with a book I am meticulous about going through my notebook scrawlings, written with whatever writing implement I can find (I probably lose several pens a day and occasionally have to borrow them from interviewees), at regular intervals.
For Dead Men Risen, I taped everything I could. The little digital tape recorders fitted with a USB connector are incredibly good. I find that during an interview there is so much that I potentially miss that going back and listening again is invaluable. There’s a programme called Express Scribe that’s downloadable for free. It’s an excellent way of transcribing audio files. I used it all the time. I also spent a significant portion of my advance getting the most important interviews transcribed professionally. Without doing this, the sheer volume of audio (I totted it up and it was 246 hours – more than 10 whole days and nights of interviews) would have made it impossible to cope with.
When getting down to write the manuscript itself, I typed directly onto my laptop. I took unpaid leave from the Telegraph to do the bulk of the writing and hid myself away at a remote cabin in north-west Maryland. I wrote about 12,000 words a week. I am a night owl so my routine would be to get up around 10am and usually spend the period up until mid-afternoon reading and thinking. I’d then get into my writing stride in the evening and be really motoring by the early hours. I’d go to bed around 3am and do the same thing again the next day. I was pretty self-disciplined. The only breaks I had each day were to walk the dog (Finn, a Belfast stray I’ve had since 1998) and go for a four-mile run at 6.30pm followed by one episode of Seinfeld (while running, I’d use headphones to listen to audio of a Welsh Guards interview). After a few weeks, I bumped into a neighbour who had concluded that I was either writing a book or was part of a witness protection programme.
Once the first draft was down, I went back to the text again and again to make changes and add things, right up to the last possible moment (as my Quercus editor Richard Milner will attest!). I felt the process was like polishing a stone.
Mark Thwaite: What books most influenced Dead Men Risen?
Toby Harnden: Probably the main one is We Were Soldiers Once . . . And Young by Harold Moore and Joe Galloway (1992). It was made into a Mel Gibson movie. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a 1990 collection of short stories, and his 1973 memoir If I Die In a Combat Zone, were also major influences.
Few people writing about war can fail to have been affected by another Vietnam book, Michael Herr’s 1977 classic Dispatches. David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers (2009), about a US Army battalion in Baghdad during the Iraq surge, is superb. It deals with a unit of similar size to the Welsh Guards Battle Group and so was very instructive. I’ve always loved Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948) and for the grim reality of war you cannot beat Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). Antony Beevor’s D-Day (2009) helped guide me with ways to relate ground-level action to grand strategy. Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down (1999) set the standard for meticulous re-recreation of the chaos of combat. On Afghanistan, I’d single out the books of Antonio Giustozzi, Patrick Bishop and Stephen Grey and the war dispatches of Anthony Loyd.
Mark Thwaite: Do you have a favourite quotation?
Toby Harnden: I have two :–
“If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly” and “Rules are for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools.”
Both were impressed upon me by my father. My children seem to have a healthy disregard for rules. Maybe it’s genetic.
Mark Thwaite: Anything else you would like to say?
Toby Harnden: Please buy my book.
Toby Harnden is a veteran foreign correspondent who has reported from all over the world. He has covered the Welsh Guards in Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan over the past fifteen years. His last book was the critically acclaimed bestseller Bandit Country: The IRA & South Armagh (1999). Harnden currently lives in Washington DC, where he is the US Editor of the Daily Telegraph.
Mark Thwaite: How and when did you first find yourself in Afghanistan?
Toby Harnden: I first went to Afghanistan in January 2006 to report for the Sunday Telegraph. At that time I was their Chief Foreign Correspondent. British troops were about to be sent to Helmand and there was a lot of interest in what they would face there. I flew to Kabul and then got a UN aid plane to Kandahar. I travelled with another journalist, a fixer called Muhib and a translator/driver called Tahir, who was to be kidnapped by the Taliban in 2008 and held for seven months before escaping.
For the trip, I was advised to wear a shalwar kameez to blend in as best as I could. I hadn’t shaved for a week or so and had this Afghan outfit on but I doubt if I was kidding anyone for more than a split second that I was anything other than a Westerner. At the time, the Taliban were spreading their tentacles throughout Helmand. There were IEDs targeting Afghan security forces and locals working for American contractors. Everyone knew the British were coming and although we drove around and walked the streets there was definitely a degree of risk.
For the 90-minute drive from Kandahar to Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province, I lay down on the back seat of the car. In Helmand, we went to talk to poppy growers about how they feared their livelihood would disappear. On the streets of lashkar gah, we bumped into a local warlord called Abdul Hakim Jan, a legendary mujahadin fighter. He was sauntering along with an entourage of 30 men armed with colourfully painted AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Several of them wore eyeliner, a Pasthtun tradition. We joined them for a kebab lunch at a local café. Jan, an anti-Taliban militia leader, was to be killed in a suicide bombing at a dog fight in Kandahar two years later.
We stayed at in a guarded compound used by American contractors who had seen several Afghan colleagues killed. There was a sense of foreboding among them about what was going to happen. I remember one saying to me that the Taliban would strike hard against the British troops when they arrived by using IEDs. “They’ll hit them on the roads,” he said. We drove all the way back to Kabul – a journey that would be impossibly dangerous these days and to be honest it didn’t feel great back then. I was just about to get married and was keen to make it to my wedding day. Arrangements were being planned during all this and I remember having an animated discuss via satellite phone about whether to have paper or linen napkins at the reception. I seem to remember we chose linen.
Mark Thwaite: When did you next go to Afghanistan?
Toby Harnden: September 2009. Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe, a friend of mine from Northern Ireland in the late 1990s, had been killed by an IED on 1 July. The Welsh Guards had suffered heavy casualties and been in the thick of the fighting during Operation Panther’s Claw. In the days after his death, some mutual friends began suggesting to me that there was a good story to be told and that there might be a worthwhile book in it. My agent Julian Alexander thought it was a very promising idea and the Welsh Guards were immediately enthusiastic. To get out to Helmand and have access to the Welsh Guards, I needed to sign a contract with the MoD.
At this stage, there was a feeling among some at the MoD that the book could be done without my going to Helmand, basically from interviews with the soldiers once they got back. This was a deal breaker for me – I would not embark on a book unless I could go there. Seeing the guardsmen in action was imperative from the point of view of gathering the facts and being able to describe what the place looked, smelled and felt like. I’ve always found it hard to write about places I haven’t seen – perhaps I lack visual imagination.
There was also a credibility factor. How could you write a book about what it was like to be in Helmand in 2009 when you had not been there yourself? Added to this, soldiers open up much more readily when you are going through some of the experience they are. There are patrols, long periods sat waiting for helicopters or in the backs of vehicles. These are the times when people really start saying what they think and feel.
I made it out to for the final month of the tour and went back to Afghanistan twice more during my period of book research.
Mark Thwaite: On a day to day level, what is it like being a journalist in the field? Do the soldiers resent your presence?
Toby Harnden: The Welsh Guards were a one-off. Everyone knew I was researching a potential book and the agreement was that I would not be writing anything for the Telegraph while I was out there. This took the pressure off me and them. I was able to say: “Don’t worry, none of this will appear in print for at least 18 months.” Soldiers relaxed a bit once they knew they were not going to see a headline the following week saying: “Army slams Gordon Brown for equipment shortage.”
I had the advantage with the Welsh Guards that I knew them already. I’d been to one of their bases in South Armagh in 1997 and had been embedded with them in al-Amarah, Iraq in late 2004. It was incredible how many of the soldiers, especially the older ones, had read my book Bandit Country: the IRA and South Armagh, which had been published 10 years earlier. It had become a bit of a cult book in the Army and the Welsh Guards had a lot of South Armagh experience and featured in Bandit Country. I had lots of discussions about South Armagh. Quite a few times I thought to myself: “Bloody hell, I wish someone had told me that a decade ago!”
In general with reporters on embeds, soldiers are a lot less suspicious than you would think. Before I was a journalist, I spent nearly 10 years in the Royal Navy. So I understand servicemen and women and why they want to join and what motivates them. Being cooped up on a ship for weeks on end means you learn how to get along with all sorts of people no matter what their rank and status. I think the Welsh Guards realised that I wanted to do this thing properly and was not going for a superficial newspaper story. In addition, these men had been through some incredibly harrowing and life-defining experiences. They were still facing terrible dangers when I was with them. Without being overly dramatic, no one knew for certain whether they’d be alive by the end of the tour or the end of the week or sometimes even the end of the day. Almost to a man, the soldiers wanted to open up and they wanted people to know what they had been through. Several times, guardsmen wept as they recounted what had happened. By the time the book had been completed, there had been many tears shed. As I write this, I’m choking up thinking about some of the things people told me and that are now in the book.
In general, embeds can initially be quite tricky. When you arrive, it feels a little bit like that first day at a new school when everyone knows everyone else and you know no one (this happened to me twice, when I was nine and when I was 14). I remember turning up at a US Army base in Sadr City in Baghdad in 2004. I was immediately asked if I wanted to go on “a mission” that was just about to leave. Naturally, I said I did. I was told to jump in the back of a Humvee. Sitting next to me was a sergeant, grimy and unshaven and with a tanned, weather-beaten face. He had a bandana on his head and was chewing tobacco. When I introduced myself, he didn’t even look up. These soldiers had been in Iraq a month and had already lost eight of their comrades. I felt like I’d wandered onto the set of a Vietnam movie.
A couple of hours later, we were driving at breakneck speed through the streets, dodging burning barricades and RPGs that were whooshing past the vehicle. My seatmate was happily firing away on his M-16 and screaming: “Yeehaah! Come on! Get some!” We did a u-turn to prevent getting trapped and the sergeant was whooping: “Let’s do it baby, let’s do it! Hell, yes! Come on! I wasn’t feeling very loved. I hadn’t got shot at in a while.” Safely back at the base, the sergeant turned to me and said sheepishly: “Sorry about that. Sometimes I get a little too into it.”
There had been bullets hitting the dust around my feet that day but I felt strangely untouchable. It was the first time I’d been properly under fire and I was pretty naïve. I’d risked my life by running from a Bradley fighting vehicle to the Humvee because you couldn’t see anything from a Bradley. I’m glad my epitaph wasn’t: “He died for a better view.” I’ve now got a much more acute sense of my own mortality.
Mark Thwaite: What gave you the idea for writing Dead Men Risen?
Toby Harnden: Rupert Thorneloe’s death was the definitely the trigger and my sense that it was the right thing to do was underlined when I heard that Charlie Antelme was being sent out as his successor. I had been out on patrol with Antelme in Iraq and had also met him socially in London. He had a reputation as one of Britain’s most operationally experienced soldiers. For the Army to pluck him out of his anti-terrorism staff job (the first time he’d been behind a desk in his career), promote him from major to lieutenant colonel and get him out to Afghanistan made it clear that things were pretty serious.
Thorneloe was the first British commanding officer of a battalion to be killed in action since Lieutenant Colonel H Jones VC in the Falklands in 1982. The Welsh Guards had also lost a company commander (Major Sean Birchall) and a platoon commander (Lieutenant Mark Evison). It was the first time that leaders at those three key levels in the same battalion had been killed since 1951 and the Korean War. That made the experience of the Welsh Guards unique in modern times. I was very wary of writing yet another book about yet another tour so as Dead Men Risen developed it expanded into being about the universality of the soldier’s experience of war, Afghanistan, the regimental system, British strategy in Helmand and the Army in modern British society – amongst other things! At the moment, my hit rate is a book a decade. I don’t believe in doing things by halves (see favourite quotations below).
Mark Thwaite: What was the most difficult aspect of writing the book? How did you overcome it?
Toby Harnden: The process of review by the MoD and the subsequent pulping of the entire first print run was pretty tough but that’s been written about extensively elsewhere so I won’t go over that ground.
When things are so recent there is an almost endless amount of material available. This makes synthesis incredibly difficult. The best example of this is an incident in which a Viking tracked vehicle rolled into the Shamalan Canal on 29 June 2009, trapping seven Welsh Guardsmen inside the rear cab as it filled with water. They were eventually rescued with about 30 or 40 Guardsmen and members of the Royal Tank Regiment being involved. I must have interviewed at least half of those and virtually every account differed in significant aspects. It underlined to me how memory plays tricks on people, how it distorts some things while blocking out or amplifying others.
The incident was also a pretty big cock-up so some people wanted to avoid blame for it or to blame others. Some individuals did not really cover themselves in glory in terms of the way they behaved that day. Some sought to exaggerate their actions. Some genuine heroes played down what they did. Several felt that their careers and reputations were on the line over what happened. Even now, I am unsure about which category some people fall into.
Put this all together and it’s pretty damn hard to be sure about what happened. Replicate elements of it across events throughout the tour and you’ll have some idea of what I had to grapple with.
David Archer examines what the UK Government’s efforts to censor a book manuscript tells us about the conduct of the War on Terror:
Last week the entire first edition print run of the book Dead Men Risen by Toby Harnden was pulped under the supervision of the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD).
Citing the Official Secrets Act the MoD paid Quercus books 151,450 pounds sterling (c273,000 AUD) to have the 24,000 books destroyed. The book which was due to be published on St David’s Day will now be released in an amended second edition on St Patrick’s Day.
Dead Men Risen tells the story of the Welsh Guards 2008 tour in Helmand, a tour infamous for the intensity of its fighting and the casualties which ensued. It was the first time in half a century that a British battalion had lost officers at three key tiers of leadership. Lieutenant Mark Evison, Major Sean Birchall and Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thornoloe were all killed in action. Almost no rank was spared as the soldiers fought their way up the Shamalan canal, yard by bloody yard, in Operation Panchai Palang.
Harnden is uniquely qualified to tell the story as compelling and comprehensive, unadulterated non-fiction. He was a military officer himself; he has a First in history from Oxford; he is an experienced journalist who is currently The Daily Telegraph’s US editor. A decade ago he wrote Bandit Country, the acclaimed story of the notorious South Armagh brigade of the IRA. That was another book which caused palpitations in UK Intelligence circles and led to him landing in hot water with the Bloody Sunday tribunal…
The Telegraph has an interesting article today about how the “Ministry of Defence and Britain’s two top generals sought to stop the publication” of Toby Harnden’s Dead Men Risen “because of concerns that it might prompt a Nato ally to pull out of Helmand”:
General Sir Peter Wall, the Chief of the General Staff and head of the Army, stated that he feared “huge political embarrassment” over the book. He suggested it could affect the outcome of parliamentary elections in Estonia, held on March 6, and lead to the Baltic nation withdrawing from Afghanistan.
The MoD later paid £151,450 of taxpayers’ money to buy the entire first print run of “Dead Men Risen: The Welsh Guards and the Real Story of Britain’s War in Afghanistan” by Toby Harnden, citing concerns about security and safety of personnel.
But the statements of two generals and a senior civil servant confirm that political considerations were at the heart of the MoD’s concerns. An inquiry into MoD’s handling of the “Dead Men Risen” affair has been ordered by Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary.
The book was reprinted after about 50 words in the manuscript were amended. It is now on sale and includes most of the material the MoD demanded be excised…
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