Oedipus Lex

Today I have invented my own piece of corporo-babble ‘Action creep’. Action creep comes about when you have so many meetings that you can’t action the actions from the last meeting in time as you are in more meetings getting more actions. And so they then build up. Do not get me started on what …

- This is the last in a series of eleven and a half posts leading up to Remembrance Day. The following was written as a guest post for eminent legal blogger Charon QC and can also be found on his website – It is with honour and a sense of trepidation that I have been …

Two Fragments: 1. We were training to become detachment commanders in a mortar platoon. Three of us, one on each tube, each with two other guys in our team. The commander would call out the coordinates and we would shout them back and adjust our mortars accordingly only Stu could never remember them. I would …

*Quick disclaimer* The purpose of these fragments hasn’t been to pull up a sandbag and tell war stories, it has been to give people a glimpse into the life of a soldier in today’s army going through the near continual cycle of operational tours and everything that goes with it. */Quick Disclaimer* We flew into …

I’ve had a few people asking if the wanking story was true, I can honestly tell you that was, as was this one… We had been briefed that there were no working trains in Iraq and the tracks had all been destroyed or stolen so it came as no surprise when we got crashed out …

I had trained my whole career to be in this situation. I had imagined it since I was as young as I can remember and here is was, a war, a real shooting war. I had been there for week, and not a lot had happened. I’d been on patrol a few times but nobody …

We were on a routine eight-hour patrol in Belfast, our main task was to spot and be ready for any public order situations. We were two vehicles, a team of four in each. Other patrols were in the vicinity and a company of a hundred plus men was on stand-by in a patrol base a …

The following was inspired by Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness. Bear with me, it’s an experiment: Imagine driving down a very long, straight highway now devoid of life. The landscape is flat, not a rise or dip as far as the horizon. Neat lines of broken metal hulls flank either side of the road, the …

‘And on your right you will see what is generally thought to be the Garden of Eden made famous by that popular book, The Bible…’ ‘Shots fired…’ ‘We’re being shot at from the Garden of Eden?! Unbelievable! Looks a fucking shithole anyway’

Racing through the thick clouds of orange dust on a single track African road, unable to see further than ten metres in front is a harrowing experience. More so when a lumbering white armoured vehicle appears suddenly beside you , sending you careening off the road into the jungle. The British mission to Sierra Leone …