James Jeffrey

The 9/11 anniversary marks a painful moment for squaddies

(Getty images)

The sweet salvation of the summer recess over, we returned to Sandhurst for our final term of officer training. It was 11 September, 2001 – a day that started with a hike in the sunshine and which came to define my time in the British Army. The events of 9/11 would lead to my own deployment in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the loss of dear friends and comrades.

Of course, on that September morning none of us knew how events 3,000 miles away – and the political decisions taken in the aftermath of those terrible attacks – would have such a momentous impact on our lives. After the buses dropped us off, the hike started jollily. The 90 or so young men on the cusp of their twenties, at the peak of their fitness and powers, who in three months’ time would commission as officers into the British Army to lead its soldiers, were more like a gaggle of schoolboys. We just had to walk, and it wasn’t raining! We couldn’t believe our luck.

But as the day progressed, text messages on Nokia phones told of an incident in New York involving the World Trade Centre and maybe even a passenger jet. At the hike’s end, the cadets and directing staff crammed into a small pub. Watching the images on the television news, how could we realise that the scenes unfolding before us would shape and manipulate our years in the army yet to come?

Things were obviously going awry

It was some time before my own involvement in the ‘war on terror’. In the months after 9/11, I was deployed to Kosovo after all the hard and dangerous work was done and the conflict’s darkest days, when pregnant women were crucified with stomachs slit open, were long gone. The restored peace seemed to indicate military invention – the type that inspired me to sign up to the army in the first place – could work.

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