TRASHFUTURE - *UNLOCKED* Britainology 24: The Army (feat. Joe Glenton)

Episode Date: November 12, 2021

This week, Milo and Nate speak with British Army veteran, leftist organiser, BJJ enthusiast, and all round comrade Joe Glenton (@joejglenton) about Britain's relationship with its Army and the different types of nutters who serve in it. Joe has a book out now entitled VETERANHOOD: RAGE AND HOPE IN BRITISH EX-MILITARY LIFE that you should order here: https://uk.bookshop.org/books/veteranhood-rage-and-hope-in-british-ex-military-life/9781913462451 If you want more Britainology, sign up on the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture Also, we have new Vonk shirts available to pre-order until 17 November, so get them while they're available here: https://www.trashfuture.co.uk/shop If you’re in the UK and want to help Afghan refugees and internally displaced people, consider donating to Afghanaid: https://www.afghanaid.org.uk/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo live dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, Trash Tutor listeners. Please enjoy this unlocked Britonology featuring Joe Glenton on the topic of the British Army. Important note, Joe's new book entitled Veteranhood, Rage and Hope in British Ex-Military Life, is available from Repeater Books. I am linking to it in the show notes. It is now on sale. You can purchase it. You should purchase it. If you like this episode, you are more or less obligated to purchase it. I will link to it in the show notes to this. Please enjoy this unlock. Also, bear in mind, just as an aside, we have some Johannes von K themed t-shirts. They are also on sale now. Pre-sales going on until Wednesday, the 17th of November. If you want those shirts, make sure you click

on that link in the show notes as well. Have a good one. Hello and welcome to yet another edition of Britonology, the show where we analyze Britain, a normal island filled with normal people doing normal things. I am your host, Mike Roberts. I'm joined by my co-host, Nate Pathay. Hello. It's another strangely unseasonably warm, lovely day here in London. We're getting summer at the end of summer instead of actual summer. Yeah. Keeping you guessing. Exactly. It's like a sort of Tarantino movie of seasons, like just mashed up. Well, it's three months where weather like this is a possibility and nine months where it most certainly is not. Nate and his feet are uncovered on the table.

Lots of lascivious podcast camera angles being used. Yeah. I've just told Milo to not be a square, but I didn't say the word square, I just drew it and somehow it ticked little boxes on the screen. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Everyone's saying the n-word. It's being skillfully edited out of the podcast. But we are in fact joined by a subject matter expert for our topic today. We are going to talk about the British Army and we are joined by British Army veteran, leftist, journalist, writer, thinker and MMA enthusiast, Joe Clinton. Joe, how's it going? Good, lads. Good to be in touch. Good to hear your voices.

Yeah. And MMA enthusiast isn't a euphemism. He just genuinely does MMA. We're not just seeing anything about his character. It do be JJ, actually, which is probably even more culty and fucking weird and full of old weirdos and vaxes, to be honest. Oh, fuck. So blowjob judo. Yeah. The pajama crowd version of MMA. The sleepy MMA. I knew a guy from home who worked on the oil patch in North Dakota for a while and then got super radicalized and was like, for a while, was a BJJ guy in Los Angeles and working

like private security. And one time he went on this rant about like, you know, all these people in America, they want to fucking have socialism, but I know people from Sweden, which is a socialist country and they fucking hate it. They all want to move to America. I'm like, dude, the only Swedish people you're meeting are guys who do Brazilian jiu-jitsu in Los Angeles. There might be some selection bias there, just possibly. Yeah. And it is crank. It is crank central. I love the sport, but it is absolutely full of fucking weirdos. I'm not going to lie. Yeah, I can only imagine. It's on me every day, every day. You're hoping that it's going to be Anthony Bourdain, but it's mostly just Jair Bolsonaro.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And people talking about the pandemic agenda and all this shit around. I'm like, they don't even train. They just sit on the edge of the mat talking about weird conspiracies shit. That's when it gets really Brazilian. You're skeptic about the coronavirus. You've got a huge ass. Yeah, yeah. And just obviously the Brazilians are like white middle class Brazilian playboys who are like massive Bolsonaroists very often. So is that another brilliant element of the sport? I remember seeing a thing during the Brazilian election where Bolsonaro enthusiasts around the world were going to like the consular voting booths or whatever at various embassies and voting by pushing the button with a gun and taking pictures of it.

I love Brazil. Such a sane country. Well, we're going to talk about a different kind of sane country today. We're going to talk about Britain and Britain's armed forces specifically the army and to Milo's got a list of topics. Can we get the color sergeant drop here? Oh, fuck's sake. Well, before we actually, I'll tell my color sergeant story at a certain point because that one's fun. But as sort of like a opening up thing, the thing that really surprised me was that in America, you can join the army with your parents consent when you're 17. You can't deploy to combat till you're 18. I don't think you can even be posted abroad until you're 18, but you can sign up when you're 17. And I was somewhat surprised to learn that in Britain,

you can in fact enlist when you're 16. Obviously, this country has a different set of rules with regard to like what when you enter adult trades. And a long time ago, that was pretty standard that you would enter a trade when you were 16. But it's just weird to me now. And I think there's a similar rule that you also can't really be posted anywhere until you're 18. So I was going to say, Joe, before we start talking about the big overarching view, I have to ask, did you ever have to deal with fucking 16 year olds? Because anyone I know from the army in the US was like, fucking 17 year olds in basic training, the dumbest idiots you've ever met in your life. Like it's just a nightmare to deal with.

As opposed to 18 year olds who are smashing it. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's weird because they start at 16. And I think they can actually join up just before they're 16. So they get to basic training when they're 16 with parental consent. But yeah, loads of guys in basic training, there is a separate, the child soldier, Britain has a child soldier factory in Harragur, which is the poshest part of North Yorkshire. The Queen's resisted something. Yeah. So there's two like streams, but some of them also end up just in basically adult basic training. Some are like the ones who are nudged in 17, I think, have turned 17. But yeah, very, very regularly, you get to the unit, you get when I first got

to my unit, I joined up a bit old, I was 22. So I was like granddad, granddad of the troops, kind of a wizened, old Yoda character. But yeah, there was loads of 16, 17 year olds, most at least 17 year olds in my first unit, who were just, they start on every outcome and every metric, the guys who joined that young come out of it really badly. One of my jobs is at forces watch and like we have, we look at the statistics like everything, mental health, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, homelessness, you know, people who end up in prison on every metric, it's a really bad idea. But Britain continues to insist that it must have child soldiers. And it also means that every time, every time at the UN, someone's like North Korea or the public

of Congo, because there's only a few countries around the world who do this, every time they say North Korea, you must stop doing this. North Korea says, ah, but Britain. So it gives an excuse to all kinds of people to just carry on recruiting children, basically. And it's true they can't, I think in Northern Ireland, there was too many 17 year old squads dying. So they upped the age to 18, which is terrible. It's a terrible age to die 18 apparently. So yeah. We're not missing out on March, are you in Britain? No, no, no. Weirdly, a couple of, on a couple of occasions, we did an FOI and a couple of 17 year olds did actually accidentally get deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. They kind of crept under the radar,

but were quickly found out and sent home. But it also is no guarantee they won't be deployed because the British Army is just an impossibly clumsy and ridiculous organization, which does things like that. It's a difficult third in betweeners movie, that one. I just, I just recall when I went to airborne school, I was a cadet and I was 20 and I looked really young for my age, but there's a sort of a system in the US Army Airborne School where you, the youngest member of the class, they look at all the dates of birth of the members of the class and the youngest member gets given like a ceremonial sort of like the shiny version of the airborne wings that you'd wear in a dress uniform. He's called the ring bearer and he or the wing, the wing bearer rather.

And he has to keep them on his person at all times. And when I went through, it was actually a kid that I was just like, our roster numbers were right next to each other. So we were always in formation next to each other. And like very nice kid was from like Arkansas, was just like, grew up like country as hell and was going to be, you know, being a soldier was about the only real option besides working at Walmart where he was from. But when I say this kid looked like a kid, I mean, like not only was he not shaving, like he basically looked like he looked like a cyclist who shaved his legs. He was like, he looked like a child, like an absolute child. And he was, you know, 17 and like a half. And by the time that he was done with training,

he was going to go to the 82nd Airborne and he was going to a brigade that was going to deploy. And like, he would eventually go to Iraq and be like 18 and one month old or something like that. And I never knew what happened to him. But like, that was the thing that really shocked me was like, this kid was super motivated. But like, what's my friends who joined that young or joined right out of high school, like did not come back from Iraq normal. And I always think to myself, like, yeah, great, great idea. Child soldier and great idea. However, we're going to talk about the overall institution of the British army. And Joe as veteran and someone who also criticizes the military and works at forces watch, I feel like you have a unique perspective on the institution

itself and also Britain's relationship to it. So Milo, I'm going to hand it to you, the person who wrote the notes. Yeah. I mean, I shrink away from making myself seem qualified here. I did. I opened a Google doc and I wrote some things down in it that occurred to me. I thought a good place to start would be public perception, because I think people are very aware of the US army and how it's perceived and the American's relationship with their beloved troops or not or not so beloved, depending on the case. Because I think the way that British people conceptualize the army and interact with it is very different. Because I think that and Joe feel free to interrupt me or chip in with anything at any point here.

Like, despite the kind of culture war effort, like the army still doesn't really loom that large in the public imagination in Britain in the way that it does in America. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's right. I think we have a I've described it in this book as a kind of manic depressive relationship with the army. We in Britain, we actually traditionally love the navy. The navy is the is the thing which we adore because see very nation and all this stuff. And we have this weird relationship with the army where we don't really like it, except during periods of war, maybe just before and just after. And so the army is not I don't think it's traditionally popular because it's very expensive. And it kind of hangs around like the navy, you

don't have to see it that much, because it's normally floating around somewhere else in the world. But the army is this kind of annoying, expensive thing. And it doesn't in a weird reaction away. Having a standing army doesn't really chime with the kind of John Bull English fantasia, like the way we think about ourselves. I think standing armies traditionally in this country have been seen as a kind of a kind of European thing and a bit of an alien thing, having loads of soldiers, a bit of feminine standing army, standing army, there's loads of blokes. Yeah, what they're doing over there. Yes, we have this weird relationship. Certainly in the last 15 years, there's been this weird attempt to basically because the

wars were deeply unpopular, there was an attempt and there are documents about this. And Gordon Brown fronted one called the recognition of our armed forces inside report about and it basically tried to make the are the wars popular by conflating the wars with the armies. It's that kind of American, very American kind of like disrespect the like criticizes the warrior disrespect in the troops. And so we tried to transplant the kind of the kind of American model of soldier worship to Britain with varying degrees of success because it doesn't really work. Yeah, yeah, because we do have a different relationship. And the kind of stiff upper lip stoicism, you know, the trenches and the song,

which is how we kind of formulate our ideas about the army, I think, is very different to the kind of shrieking at the first sight of camouflage in the airport lounge thing, which I suppose is at least my perception of the American approach. And there's been an attempt to kind of take this, which developed in the wake of Vietnam, obviously a lot of the because they assess different countries, ways of popularizing the military in this one report. And they look to the French, they look to the Canadians, and you can see they're particularly taken by the American idea. And they talk about Vietnam, they talk about the wake of Vietnam. And they chose, for various reasons, the American model, obviously, it's

the biggest ally. And my sense is that this is the Gordon Brown government, this isn't the Tories, the Tories carried it on with great gusto. They tried to take this model and just transplant it onto Britain. And that's when you see the, the kind of real kind of poppy shagging, kind of a British version of, you know, support the troops really come to bear. But because it doesn't really fit, I think with the kind of our perception of ourselves, our kind of the way we formulate our own relationship in our heads to the military, it doesn't really work that well. But nonetheless, they've pressed on with it. And so we see hints of it, I think. But there are problems with trying to just copy it.

That was sort of, I mean, just from a kind of like layman's perspective, having sort of like grown up in the UK, very much in the era of the war on terror, sort of my, and then looking back on it now, my perception of it is that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were much less popular in Britain than they were in the US. Like while French fries were busily being renamed in the US, there was like... Yeah. I mean, I was something that I would throw out there is, it's weird to me because my dad was in the army. So I, you know, grew up around army bases and, you know, in sometimes in certain parts where I lived as a kid, everyone's parents were in the military. Whereas in other places, I was the only person whose parent was in the military.

And what I noticed was, you know, after Vietnam, there was definitely a kind of call it upper middle class, upper class sort of distancing from the military. I mean, I don't think a lot of people were particularly sad when, whether it was the pretext of the Vietnam War, which caused Harvard to get rid of ROTC in the 60s or as an opposition to the fact that Don't Ask, Don't Tell violated universities, anti-discrimination policies by the time of the late 80s, early 90s. There was this absolute distancing of the sort of elite. So in Britain, my impression is that being an army officer is still a very like respected upper class pursuit. Whereas in the U.S., it's very much, there is a sort of like liberal grasping at sort of like, oh, we have to

be responsible stewards of this global hegemony, but it's not really that popular. In fact, very few people who go to elite schools wind up joining the military. But the point I'm making here is, as a kid, I recall the weirdly sort of ambivalent relationship that the U.S. had towards the military by and large, despite the fact that like, yeah, the military was still doing stuff abroad, versus 9-11 obviously changed everything. But there was a subtle change before 9-11. And I would say it started with a lot of the really almost overdone, almost like messianic interpretations of the 50th anniversary at the end of World War II. And stuff like Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan, that's all pre 9-11. And that was all formulated. And so there

was starting to be this kind of mythologizing about World War II is the good war and us is the good guys and the good army and blah, blah, blah. And that was kind of like, to some extent, I mean, the yellow ribbon thing started with the Iranian hostages in the 70s. And then it got kind of turned into a troop thing for the Gulf War. There were deployments, the Gulf War, Panama, Grenada, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, stuff like that. But 9-11 obviously changed all of it. But the big takeaways that I had was that America was kind of ambivalent towards the military, at least in my perception, until the late 90s and then 9-11. And then obviously like, there's still a lot of elite discomfort about sort of the idea of your kids joining the military,

for example. Like it's very much sort of a them, not us pursuit. And so to me at least, looking at this in Britain, like the impression that I've gotten is that American journalists would probably not get on their Twitter and be like, oh, I saw some people looting a fucking Aldi, send the army in and put them all down, which happens here. But at the same time, there is so much pantomime, so much like pageantry around, respecting like public recognition of the troops in America. And that's even gotten worse in my lifetime. I've watched obviously with 9-11, but even post 9-11, you didn't see like military flyovers at fucking football games or like salutes to the troops at like a regular season hockey game, like it's

bizarre. Or a high school graduation. Or a high school graduation, you saw that too, yeah. The funniest one was at the high school graduation. They got everyone who was intending to join the military to stand up and get a round of applause. So they were actually getting applauded for like the intention of doing it. You're getting respected as a future US Army soldier. Yeah, you were just respecting a future US Army soldier. And so, and then the one thing I would end it on too, and feel free to react to any of this, Joe, is that I've also heard people tell me, people who grew up in Britain say that people who are about my age, I'm almost 37, that when they were kids or young teenagers, remember on Sunday,

was absolutely sort of, it felt more like a, let us talk about the folly of war and not about, you know, poppy shagging. And that has gotten worse and more ostentatious and weirder in their lifetimes. And that tracks with my experience as an American, like 9-11 not with standing. I think we were starting to do that already before 9-11 happened. Yeah, it's, because remembrance is so just all consuming now. It's sometimes hard to remember what it was like before. But I'm pretty sure there was almost definitely the sentiments were never again. And I don't mean among kind of left wing people, which I suppose it was leftist and angry anti-war veterans coming back. I think that's where that comes from originally.

It was just a general sense of probably indifference growing up. But that's definitely obviously changed as part, I think as part of this, I mean, the centenary, the World War on Centenary provided a perfect opportunity to kind of advance that the ideas that were coming out of the recognition of the armed forces in our society report. And it was definitely jumped on by big charities like Help for Heroes, the Murdoch Press, Tom Newton Dunn was a leading figure in popularizing Help for Heroes. And the military, of course, so it's definitely, it's definitely shifted over the last 20 years or so. Also, there is that thing where, yeah, I suppose part of it is kind of World War II nostalgia, which is really pronounced here.

And I think what people are trying to infer, the people who are doing this stuff are trying to infer is that, obviously, most of our wars, all of Britain's wars basically are profoundly immoral and always have been. But the one moral war, which you can make a case, fire fascism, yeah, fair play, I'm down, whatever, they try and kind of, they're trying to make out that the same people who kind of stormed the beaches at Anzio and Normandy are the people who are kicking indoors in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that's kind of what they're trying to, they're trying to conflate these two wars. And these two profoundly different, one is a massive conscript army. And the old core of the army, which is deeply reactionary,

had a lot of trouble with loads of conscripts, because people would come in and they didn't think they weren't professional soldiers. For them, I think Alan Allport, who's a historian of demobilization writes about this a lot. For the people doing it, this was like temporary, it was kind of cosplay almost, but with live bullet. And they had no intention of kind of buying into the system of the military entirely. So these are two, the modern British army and the British army World War Two, which we try and conflate with my army, if you like, completely different organizations. Some things have the same names. I mean, there are Grenadier guards and a fucking RAF regiment and paratroopers now and there were then, but beyond that,

these are two entirely different organizations. And it's really important to kind of critique that. And they're still the Brecken point. Still the Brecken point, the Brecken point is always, it's the enduring gesture of the British army. Yeah. So I think part of this thing is this weird nostalgic attempt to conflate the army I know with the army of World War Two. And these are just objectively completely different, different organizations on every level, except a couple of names of things, I guess, and the Brecken point. This is quite interesting because it plays in something which I think you were alluding to earlier, Joe. And I think it was something that Nate was sort of touching on a bit as well, which is that, and I think it's worth bringing out that

I think that in America, the defining war in people's minds is World War Two, whereas to a certain extent in Britain, it's more World War One, or certainly a lot of the traditions that we have around the army and around Remembrance Sunday in particular are like extremely and very deliberately grounded in World War One. And so it has slightly more that character of like, it's much harder to sell World War One as a glorious victory against anything in particular. It also seems like with the advent of the fact that you're at the point now where there are no surviving veterans of World War One, it becomes apart from the boomers, of course. Yeah, of course, the other boomers fought at the Somme and the Passchendaela.

I did the Somme and Passchendaela. I died four times in World War One. That was just in Basildon. It does seem to me like, yeah, they invoke it, but they invoke it as sort of a cudgel, like, how dare you complain about social and political conditions in this country? Did you know that it sucked in the trenches? It's like, yes, we do fucking know that. But I think for America, at least, it's interesting to see because for our participation in World War One was pretty much under duress, and they had to reinstate the enforcement of sedition acts passed in the Civil War and put people in prison for anti-war activity to sell World War One as a cause because it was deeply unpopular in America, and we didn't enter the

war until 1917. Whereas, obviously, in World War Two, we didn't want to get involved at all, and then Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and so all of a sudden, I still hold to my position that if Germany hadn't honored its pact and hadn't declared war on America, that America wouldn't have wanted to fight the Nazis because just as the sort of British liberal and conservative establishment were pretty cozy with the ideas of the Nazis, so were a lot of Americans, and there was a whole lot of fucking race superiority shit directed towards the Japanese that wasn't directed towards the Germans, but the Germans declared war, so we decided, well, we're going to fight the Germans as well. And I look at this stuff, and I'm always taken aback by it because

what I see here, I think the thing that shocks me the most is there is this—what's the right word here? I don't feel as though any of this stuff ever seems to be related to the actual troops in the British Army today. I don't really see them being invoked that much. There's a little, and there's some iconography and stuff, and things around Help for Heroes, but by and large, it seems like my vibe as an outsider, and I've only lived in this country three years now, is that it feels as though so much of it is about kind of stimulating a feeling of what World War II means, or World War I means, or the general nostalgia for being relevant, and it has almost nothing to do with actual guys in uniform. Whereas in America, it's so much about our troops who

are being disrespected somehow, who need to board the plane first, and so on and so forth, who are standing in uniform, who are in church in their battle dress for some reason, like that kind of stuff. That, to me, is the disconnect, and I don't know, Joe, if that's jive with your experience. I know you talked to a lot of veteran organizers and left-wing veterans in America, and I imagine some of that must come through in sort of the difference in cultures. It does, yeah, yeah. I feel like you're a long way down a road that we're just kind of starting on with the kind of transportation. I think we try and do that stuff, and in that report, which I'd recommend any of your listeners read, they actually kind of dig up

some moral outrange examples, but they're really stupid. They're talking about Vietnam, and they're talking about how the soldiers were spat on by hippies, and they're trying to come up with these, you can see them trying to struggle to come up with these examples of moral panic about how the troops have been treated, but they're so sublimely Anglo, like how the troops being spouted by hippies in America is some fucking officer, and they won't name him into Harrods, because he's in uniform. Paul Hugo can't get his hamper for the officer's ball, and it's like this, and things like that, all soldiers coming back into an airport, and they have to get changed into civvies to walk through the lounge and stuff like that.

Hamid Al-Fayr is still furious about Suez, not letting anyone in. Yeah, the level of reaching for moral panic things is unbelievable, but yeah, I feel like, I feel like the stuff, we've borrowed so much stuff from that, the way the Americans have done things, and I just feel like it doesn't really work very well here, that kind of thing, but they do try, they are trying their best to make that stuff work. I also think, because I think, I don't know if it's the same in the States, but a lot of military people and veterans actually don't really take any of that stuff that seriously. Some do, clearly, and some the guy who did three months in Northern Ireland as a chef, Ken, in our mar, who's obsessed with

the self-loading rifle, that guy will get angry about it, the kind of guy who's in a blazer and bury it, every opportunity will get angry about it. That guy can assemble and disassemble an omelette blindfolded. Yeah, the audience for the shit isn't really military people, it's civilians, like the worst jingoists we have in this country, all civilians, and it's the guy who died in both world wars, it's that guy. That's who this is aimed for, a stone up. Most military people, I don't know, aside from, I call them blazers, just after their sartorial choice, because they're always out in blazers. Apart from them, most people are pretty fucking indifferent to a lot of this shit. The target audience is like civvies, really, a particular kind of

civvy, I would say. Yeah, it's interesting how that's changing now, because this sort of goes back a bit to some of the notes I made about perception, because I think as reluctant as I am to ever hand a good point to British Liberals, I felt like during the period of like quite intense opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was quite like a clever line being taken by those people of a kind of support the troops, not the war, and there was a lot of hay being made about troops dying, troops getting injured, troops being poorly equipped, like you've sent them over there for this thing and you've not even given them the right equipment like this, so there was a lot of kind of Liberals like going out of their way to be like, I'm against this war, but I support

the people who are having to fight it, because it's not their decision. Yeah. As with that, they should have enough helicopters and body armor. Yeah, it's just peak liberalism, isn't it? Yeah, it's, I remember actually at the start of it all, the Lib Dems took this brief, fleeting anti-war position. The Lib Dems are held up as having been an anti-war party at the time, and I don't think it stands up to scrutiny, because they were like, we will oppose the war until it starts. It was actually their position, it's Charles Kennedy. We oppose the war, and then when it started, they were like, now we will support it with some mild criticism, because they're always held up as like, oh, we, and they do it themselves, they're like, oh, we opposed it as

well, and actually it's not true. Yeah. Which I suppose is different to kind of Labour Liberals and centrists who like, you know, all in, all in from the off. God bless Charles Kennedy, a man who, unlike the troops, was fully loaded. It's also interesting to me because I don't know if, if Britain has the same culture where one political party is emphatically seen as the party of the troops and one is not. I just know that in America, you know, the overwhelming majority of people who are now or were recently now retired, you know, conservative Republican luminaries, made it a point to, to dodge the draft as theatrically as possible. But then when Clinton became president, they're like, this fucking draft dodger has become president, like all of a sudden

having, having been drafted, having served in Vietnam became a thing. But every time Democrats try to appropriate that, they fail. And the point I was going to make here is that I think about what you're just describing, threading that needle of being like, I don't support the war, but I support the troops and therefore like we shouldn't be sending them with fucked up stuff and under equipped and unprepared and things along those lines. When Democrats tried to take that same approach, you know, in the first Bush administration, the response that I remember seeing was more or less like, how dare these fuckers publicly expose our vulnerabilities to the enemy? So I mean, like it was unbelievable. You're like, just in case Osama bin Laden is watching CNN

right now and hearing John Kerry and they're now they're discovering that apparently our Humvees have sandbags on the bottom of them. Like, yeah, it was deranged. And so it felt, it felt like, and I think 9 11 had a huge role in this, there just wasn't any way that you could oppose the war without being, you know, more or less pilloried for somehow being like, basically, you might as well take a complete fuck the troops position because that is how you will be presented. Yeah, but that wasn't really the case here, I don't think. And I think it's interesting what you bring up about the, that what is the party of the troops because it's always been politically a bit of a mess, like because you would sort of assume that the

Tories are more naturally the party of the troops as the Republicans are in the States. But the Tories hate the army or the armed forces in general. And they're obsessed with because to like, it's so British that to them and to the British state in general, the armed forces are just a public service. And therefore, inherently a socialist thing, which needs to be cut back. Anything that involves the government spending money, like you would assume that any kind of like right wing kind of like fascist light or kind of nationalist government would be like, yeah, we're going to spend loads of money on the army. No, they're like, absolutely, there's going to be four troops. Two of them are going to be children because they get a lower

minimum wage. I was going to say, Joe, you served during the time when, as I understand it, the timeline that you were in was like, not quite in the austerity era, but getting towards it. But like, if you consider new labor as austerity, under a different name, you were there. So like, what was your, I guess I'm wondering, like based on your experiences versus perception, for me, it's like, for all the, you know, we can't have roads that aren't full of potholes because we have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the wars. But then like when I was in Afghanistan, our helmets got recalled because a bad lot of helmets made by a prison labor manufacturer had been issued to us. And so they had to recall them. That kind of that to me was like highlighting

the contrast there. I was wondering, did you have any experiences of that sort of like, in your own time, just sort of the difference between rhetoric and like what you were actually seeing in real life? Yeah, I mean, our equipment was pretty rubbish. I mean, the American equipment always looked fabulous to us. Like I was in Kandahar, I had an easy tool, you know, lobster twice a week. We were like, what the fuck? And then they built a British scoff house and we had to go and eat British food. We were like crying about it. You guys called it the de facto dining facility. Yeah. So we were in there. But yeah, I mean, it was always very apparent that a lot of our equipment was still like Northern Ireland, they were like snatches

and Saxons and these big lumbering civil order vehicles. We deployed with with snatches and they were being phased out, we were driving them around. The stupid top heavy Land Rover is designed for, you know, roadblocks in dairy or wherever. Yeah. So that was definitely apparent. I suppose it's a weird dynamic here because I think there's a moment you can almost identify when the Tories become the party of defence. And I think that's the Falklands. If I was to pin down a time when Thatcher, I always think of the Falklands as the South Atlantic leg of Margaret Thatcher's re-election campaign. 100%. And she gave the military, I think the previous year, a massive pay rise. And it was almost like she was trying to win it over. And I think that was the last

kind of vestiges of a, I mean, it's a very, it's a wobbly term, but the idea of a people's army and a kind of communitarian thing from a hangover from World War II, where they all came back and voted Labour. I think that was the last kind of embers of that was the Falklands when we were like, no, we're going to be a colonial power. And here's a massive pay rise for the, not massive, but probably massive for the army, if you're average squad. And so I think that that was a period, that was a moment where there was kind of a break, I suppose, with what had been and the lingering ideas of a World War II people's army, such as it still existed in the early 80s, late 70s. If there was a breach, and maybe it's worth trying to identify a breach, I think it was around

then. And that's certainly when the Tories became the party of defence, which is what they like to claim. And of course, like a lot of the Tories in the coming up to 2010 election, which is when I left, well, was kicked out of the army through military jail. That was the the the Tories were weaponising a lot of stuff like Gordon Brown wrote a letter to the mum of a lad who'd been killed in Afghanistan. And it was something like his his signature handwriting was really scruffy. And it became a huge issue. And they used that stuff. I don't know if you remember that. Yeah, they used a lot of that stuff. And then a lot of this, the kind of dolstos, the stab in the back stuff was about equipment. And it was about labour, the bureaucratic beam counters, you know, the lion

that they give of labour, the kind of penny pinching accountants of labour had let the troops down. And so they, they certainly also the Tories certainly also jumped on it then, going into the 2010 election to make sure there aren't any troops left. Yeah, yeah. And that's it. Because they do that. And they continue to do that. But of course, they are they have viciously cut the military. The army was 120,000 when I joined, which is I think it's about the size of the US Marine Corps. But now it obviously it's and the line they keep rolling out, it's not necessarily untrue is that now our army is smaller than the army of the peninsula war of Waterloo. And so yeah, they're definitely happy to weaponise that stuff while cutting, cutting the military.

It's interesting to me because the thought had crossed my mind that the Falklands was kind of like exercising the ghosts of Suez to the British, the sort of Tory conception of the military. Whereas the American equivalent of that would be the Gulf War. And to a lesser extent, Grenada and Panama. British officers in uniform not being allowed into state houses across West London. But Milo, I know you've you've gotten further stuff you were going to you were going to address. I yeah, I was just thinking based on the basis of us bringing up the equipment in Afghanistan, you've got to tell your story about the British officer in the Humvees. Oh my God. Okay, well, so it wasn't it wasn't an officer, rather it was me talking. So I'd been

reading the news and we also had a we had a British journalist who was in embed with our unit for a while. And he had also been in embed with the British British military and in Helmand and Gannar provinces. And he was talking to me about, you know, some of the problems they were facing because, you know, the Taliban had been sort of upping the, the overall payload of the bombs they were planting, you know, in culverts and on the roads and stuff. And those were meant to target uparmored Humvees. And when they were hitting landrovers, that was just obliterating them. We were facing the same problem that when they started bringing in heavier armored vehicles, like MRAPs, the Humvees themselves, even the absolute limit of uparmoring M 1151

uparmored Humvee with like the Frag 7 kit, I think weighs something like 11,000 pounds. And at a certain point, like the the axles cannot handle any more weight, like, especially when you have the uparmor turret and all this stuff, like it's just too heavy. Yeah, it's like those proud boys, you know, with all that gear on, at a certain point, their knees are just going to give out at a certain point, the when you have like 18 different hundred round drum magazines, like you probably won't be able to move tactically or even get down and not be like a huge mound on the on the floor. So we were having the same problem that bombs were being built to target MRAPs. And when they were hitting Humvees, they were what we'd call a

catastrophic kill, they were completely destroying the vehicle and typically killing everyone inside. When a bomb a bomb that big goes off on even on a uparmored Humvee, a flat bottom Humvee, it folds it up like a fucking book and everyone inside is either burned alive or just destroyed, like it's it's horrendous. And so we also had the phenomenon at the time of stop lossing, which has been that term gets thrown around a lot and a lot of people don't understand what it means, but stop lossing basically kind of hair cream for men. Stop lossing basically means that if you were going to your your enlistment contract was up and say you're you're about to hit three years on your enlistment contract in June, but your unit is deploying in March, your unit

not only has the right to but will keep you for that whole deployment until you come back and then you can be let out of the army. So they also had a thing called stop move, which is that if you were on orders to go to a new duty station and a new unit that wasn't going to deploy yet, doesn't matter. They've got you, they can stop your orders and you can come along. So you have soldiers who like they think they're getting out of the army, they've only enlisted for a certain amount of time, but they're being held past their enlistment date so they can be deployed. And that's how you get motivated people. Yeah, so invariably you wind up with guys that's exactly incredibly motivated soldiers who are supposed to be out of the army by now,

but are being taken to a war zone. And especially when this was happening, the peak of this happening was 0405, 0607. I myself while I was in training saw a formation of guys who were even worse than top loss in active ready reserve callbacks. They had enlisted and their contract was like three years of four years active duty and four years on IRR, which is like a, you don't have to report to a unit, but you technically are on IRR status. They had called these guys up from civilian life and like, nope, you're back in the army and you're fucking deploying again. And I saw a formation of guys getting marched around Fort Bending who looked, they all looked incredibly mad and many of them looked like metalheads. And I was just like, fuck guys, your life really

sucks right now. But anyway, there's a long story, sorry, a roundabout storytelling here, but yeah, we had a stop loss soldier from our support company and he was like, fuck you, I'm not fucking getting in a Humvee. You are not taking me out on patrol unless I'm in an MRAP. Fuck you. What are you going to do? Kick me out of, please kick me out of the army. I'm supposed to be out of the army. And me probably not, you know, not yet being radicalized. I just completely lost my mind with this kid because I was like, motherfucker, there are people in the British army down in Helmand right now getting their dicks blown off. And you know what the fuck they're saying? God damn, I wish I had a fucking Humvee right now. A fucking up armored Humvee. That would

be so luxurious versus this piece of shit that I'm driving. You don't understand, you little bitch. There are people eating Wigan Kebabs down in Hellman province. Do you know what that is? I don't fucking know, but I don't want to find out. But that's the thing, right? Is that like, ultimately, I look at it very differently now, I mean, but I don't blame him for doing what he did. I just at the time was a first lieutenant in a fucking bear trooper unit. And I was just like, you piece of shit. But then also it's like, everything we did, every, every other military was sort of in the shadow of us. And like those bombs were meant to blow up the biggest American vehicles. And if you were unlucky, squatty from, you know, the British military, like,

you're toast, like you're fucked. And, and that it did strike me that yeah, like, it seemed like the kit that I saw, because I saw a little bit of it when I was at Bagram, but then I definitely saw the same kit that was I saw in Bagram almost identical in Australia. I was like, yeah, these vehicles look cool to like drive to the beach, but fucking I wouldn't want to be surviving IEDs in a home view. Like this doesn't look like a military vehicle to me. This looks like a bitch in safari vehicle. And yeah, man, it struck me that you guys got, you guys had a lot of stuff that was sort of intended for a different air and a different conflict. And yeah, totally. And it was just not satisfactory for the conditions.

No, I think, I think it's that thing where it gradually started to catch up by which time we pulled out anyway. So probably didn't prove over time. I just had a weird, there was actually, I was just the stop loss. I haven't heard it, but the there was a film about stop loss called stop loss. Wasn't that right? I just remember the material talents of Ryan Felipe playing in this film about stop loss, which is actually quite good for a Ryan Felipe film. It's very funny too, because so many people didn't realize like stop loss got invoked as a term. It became like kind of a catchphrase, but nobody actually knew what it meant. And so it sort of felt like anytime anyone that was in the military was complaining on Facebook about the military

fucking them over like their civilian family members like, Oh no, is that a stop loss? And it's like, no, it's actually like, like you being denied a 48 hour pass because you can't pass a PT test is not a stop. Just go with it. Yes. Yes, that's a stop. Please call my congressman and complain to him that I'm being stopped, lost by the military. I've been weight lost by the military because they're not letting me fucking eat desserts in the defect. The ultimate punishment for the American soldier is being sent to the British dining facility where you get a jug of gravy. Trickle sponge and fish finger sandwiches. Oh, yeah. Just like the grizzled sergeant, but like you didn't want to know what the fuck I've seen.

They have a thing called spotted dick. It's so fucked up. And who have been issued with one smack bomb? And they will, and they will serve it in 50 degrees in half down summer as well as red hot molten, molten custard. And only imagine, man. My sort of, my sort of perception of the British army and I think we can, we can sort of get into I think the sort of like the officer enlisted divide thing that you were touching a bit on earlier. But also it just, just in a sort of general sense is that it has kind of the vibe of, of Britain in general, which is that like, yeah, it's shit. It's supposed to be shit. If you don't

like it, you can fuck off. Talk to the union. It was the regular, the regular thing that NCOs would say if it was shit, like talk to the fucking union lads. And that does, and I think that is kind of goes back almost a bit to the sort of like the perception of the army again, as this kind of like, not like there's, I think there's a sense with the American military that it's expected to be like, well equipped and capable. And like, whereas the British army is expected to be like, odd, like, you're like, it's kind of, there's almost seemed to be like this virtue in it, not really being equipped. And like this kind of just like, yeah, they're just the ledge, they just fucking get it done. Yeah, that's definitely true.

Make do and mend was the idea. Make do and like, and he would always, we'd always talk about ourselves in relationship to the Americans, blah, he got fucking swimming pool down there lads. And you'll be living a whole two miles down the road. And it was always about that comparison with with big brother, as he were. And the idea was that we were good. We're good at what we did because we put up with with more shit and had worse equipment. Obviously, that didn't really work out in the long term looking at 20 years in Afghanistan. No, we were just shit. And that was the end of it. And that was definitely part of the kind of way we thought about ourselves, I think that, you know, best rifleman, shit rifle, but with the best soldiers pound for pound on earth,

et cetera, you know, the usual. And I'm sure every army on earth says that to itself as well. Yeah, I mean, we, we, I'm sure we had better in terms of ballistic protection equipment than, say, the German army or the French army. And we definitely had better close air support in terms of like availability. But everyone was like, Oh, the fucking French, they have wine in their rations, they have good food in their rations, like shit fucking rules in the French mill, you know, stuff like that. Whereas like, yeah, but if you're a French paratrooper, like you basically get issued socks made out of what feels like sandpaper and you're expected to, you know, do a, do a like a battalion size airborne insertion on an exercise and then

rock 40 kilometers. It's like, we weren't really doing that that often, even in a paratroop unit in the US. So like French, like you about these guys in the British army, is there a lot to have young boys readily accessible? Something I was going to point out about the, the officer enlisted divide is that I think the really the kind of culture around it in America comes from the fact that, you know, for a long time, America didn't have an active duty army officer corps that was not graduates of the West Point, the Military Academy at West Point. But the way you get into West Point is by being appointed, you know, by recommended by your elected representatives. So, you know, like every congressperson can send one person,

I think per year, and then each senator can send one and then the governor and that kind of a thing. And so I've been put under the command of the officer sent there by Jess Phillips. Yeah. I mean, so basically, I don't know how it works here, but, but what that creates is you have situations where like, you know, a general like Omar Bradley, for example, from who's, you know, of World War Two fame was just like this plow boy from fucking Kansas or Nebraska, I think, who just was like a pretty good student and wanted to be in the army. And, you know, in like 1909, applied, wrote his congressman, you know, like, you know, who's probably like weird 19th century name like Dear Congressman Fernando Sheridan or something like that.

I want to go to West Point. And so he did. And like he, you know, Bradley famously like never smiled in his photos because he got his teeth knocked out in a car accident when he was in his 20s. Like he was absolutely extremely country. And then he goes on to be, you know, a very senior, you know, four star general in the US Army in World War Two. Not so much the case over here. And it's like, I'm not, this isn't meant to be a wind up to a, you know, bad teeth joke. It's more that I felt like the way one became an officer, particularly back then in the British Army and had a career where you became someone of that significance in the military. Like it wasn't entirely 100% closed off to people who weren't from upper class backgrounds, but it might as

well have been. It was like the impression that I get. And I mean, reading stuff like, was it Robert Hughes? Goodbye to all that and stuff like that. I got the impression that like, yeah, there was some social mobility because after the first year or so of World War One, so many of those guys died, like they needed more officers. Yeah. Well, at this point, I think it behoves us to do a bit of history, doesn't it? Because I think even going back a bit to the kind of like, well, there's not many of them and they haven't got much gear, but there are sort of thing. I think kind of dates back to World War One, where you've got like the British expeditionary force, 100,000 of the

world's flattest nose geysers who are, you know, kneeling down in a field and shooting at the Germans. And then the strategy of they were basically taking kids straight out of Eaton at like 17, 18 and making them like platoon leaders. And of course, like, I think it's basically the highest casualty rate ever was British junior officers in World War One. It's just funny because as a former captain, I'm like, that's a terrible idea. And I imagine for you, Joe, as a former corporal, that's a fucking terrible idea. But you could imagine how to like an 18 year old, they're like, Oh, brilliant. I'm going to be an officer. I'm going to go do glory in battle. It's like, you are going to die. Yeah. So it's funny here, just to go back

briefly to our original point, I think it varies from you from cap badge to cap badge, regiment to regiment. I think there are, there are, there's an element for meritocracy in the British way, where under close inspection, it's not meritocracy at all. But like, I think in the, in the cores, like the engineers or the logistics core, there are a lot of young officers, subalterns, who were like, Mancunian or Scousers. But and it's partly about I suppose about the expansion of university education, isn't it? Like basically, you needed a degree to get into Santos. Not everyone does. I mean, like Johnny Mercer just had A levels. Harry just had A levels, but he was always going to be an officer, obviously.

Yeah. Yeah. But I think, I think like there are like, if you are going to be an officer in the guards, or particular cavalry regiments, then I think you're going to probably have descended from a long line of people who are in the same regiment. And I don't know if it's still a stipulation, but a lot of those units, you need to have a second income, because that's how you can pay off the fines in an excellent port that you get in the mess for turning up later with the wrong hat on or whatever. So I think if there's, there's, you know, in certain units, they're not the very smart regiments, which you see cutting around London. Outside of that, there probably is some scope for to be like working class and an officer

or lower middle class and get a commission and so on and so on. So I think it's, it's a weird mix of things in the British military. In the other surfaces, I'm not so sure. Someone did, to come back to another point, tell me the other day, an ex-RAF guy, he was like, the RAF's got it right, because it's the only service that sends you, the officers do all the fighting, everyone else stays at the back. It's actually quite a good idea. Yeah, it's a mix of things here, I think in terms of the class makeup of the officer core, as it were. Yeah, I'd agree with, I mean, again, my perception of it as being like completely not involved in the military, but I know quite a few people who've ended up being army officers.

I know a couple of people who were quite posh, who went in from Cambridge to like, and they interviewed at guards regiments, and were both like, this is too much for me, like people who went to boarding school and are like, you guys are too posh, like, this is like a level, like one of my mates said he was at the interview for, I think it was the Grenadier guards. And another guy was sat next to him, he was also interviewing, and one of the like captains who's doing the interview, whatever, came out and was like, oh, bloody good show, I know your brother, yes, your ex is here on you, and how is the rugger? And just like that, he was like, no, I just cannot fucking do this, I'm just going to leave.

There is no equivalent to that to my knowledge in the US Army. I mean, the other branches of service, maybe I don't think so. What I will say is that there are certain things where, like, there was a joke for a while that in the Ranger regiment, there was, which is the whole special thing in the US Army, that there was sort of a cult that like, if you went to West Point, and specifically if you played rugby at West Point, like you had an in like, rugby at West Point. Yes, there was rugby is rugby is kind of like, it's not really a posh sport in America, it's more of like a psycho sport, like friends of mine who were super in shape stoners played rugby, like that's that's kind of the vibe, whereas LaCrosse,

obviously super, super posh equivalent in America. But like, yeah, West Point was like a, like the West Point rugby team, the one of the coaches for the team or the assistant coaches was like an active duty Army officer who then went on to be like a senior officer in the Ranger regiment. And so there was that kind of a thing. But that level of like the fanciness, I didn't ever encounter that. The only thing I could say is that in some units, like there's an, as there's a single brigade of airborne units in one brigade combat team, based out of Camp Ederly in Vicenza, Italy. And it's like considered the most high sex assignment you can get, like just because it's a cool place to be stationed, and it's a light infantry airborne

unit and stuff. So you're getting ass assigned. So like, that's like super West Point heavy, like if the lieutenants who go there, the guys who get to be company commanders, they're like, by and large are going to be West Pointers. It does exist. But you just don't have that equivalent of what you just, what you just described, Joe, like the idea of like, you need to have extra income from your family to be able to afford the family. Like, like, if I showed up at a US Army officer's thing with a bottle of pork, people were like, what the fuck are you gay? Like, it's just not going to happen. You know, however, if I show up with like, if I show up with like a novelty keg of like fucking bushlight or something like that, I remember like, hell yeah,

good show, man. Exactly. I mean, if you showed up at a God's Regimental dinner, they'd probably be quite worried if you weren't gay, you know, in the officer's mess, you know, the what happens the last days. I would just say that that, and my impression also during the global war on terror, was that the military recruiting was struggling and ROTC standards obviously dropped a lot because they wanted to grow the army, they wanted to bring people in. And I mean, for better or worse, you can go to college for free and be guaranteed a job. And a lot of guys did that. And so you wound up with a situation where the officer corps in the US Army is, I think would make a lot of British people uncomfortable

because like it is the higher you go, the more like overtly evangelical Christian it is. But like by and large, like my peers were not, they were not fancy. They were, they were by and large, like mostly people from the suburbs, but like a lot of working class people too. And it wasn't that hard to be an officer back then. And so like, yeah, it's just, it's just completely different culture, even though we were fighting alongside each other in the same conflict, like just completely different planet in a way. I think though what Joe was saying about it being very different in different bits of the service is true because again, even from my like incredibly limited experience, like I would say

most of the people I knew from Cambridge who went into the army, they were into like doing, doing like the most like hardcore shit that would look good on their CV and then like leaving and getting a good job. So they mostly wanted to be, either they wanted to be in the guards because they wanted to like network and be with all the poshos, or they wanted to be in like the Gurkhas or whatever, because it's like really hard to get in and it's like prestigious, that sort of thing. And I get the impression that you get kind of, there's that sort of variation. And I think this happens with enlisted as well, where it's like a weird smashing together of people who are like super motivated and people who are kind of like, I guess I'll join the army.

Like you've got like kind of like one of my mates in Cambridge who's like in the Gurkhas and is like super into it. And then you've got the kind of like two, two from Leeds people, both becoming army officers. And then like, I remember one of my friends worked at a law firm with a guide enlisted in the British army, like from a super rough background, but had done well at school and was like the youngest sergeant in the British army and then got a scholarship to go to uni and then ended up being like the youngest like trainee at some like corporate law firm or so, you know, like that. And then you also get guy with like no prospects, goes to the army, ends up being homeless. Like it's a weird like mixture of all of those different people.

I think in some units, another thing when I think about it is like it's very, it's not, I suppose the Royal Marine, the paratrooper are quite different beasts. Like the Royal Marine is the rugby team captain. And the paratrooper is like the football team captain. But I think it's quite often the case, I've heard or I know that guys, it's not about the ranks so much as the unit, like if you're desperate to be a Royal Marine, very often those guys go in front of the commissioning board, fail and join as a, as a private, as a Marine anyway. And it's the same with the Paris guys will try and get in the Paris as an officer and failing that they just want to be in the Paris, they join as a private soldier. So there's also like, obviously some units have a

more profound ideological kind of component, don't they? Which is probably those elite type units probably have that a lot more. Certainly that's my, my understanding here, that they just want to be that thing, you know, could you talk a little bit about the, the ideological side of things? Because my impression is that that's something that's, I mean, don't get me wrong, the US military is pretty right wing, but that's something that I've been surprised is, is my, my cousin was a, I think he is now a major, but was previously enlisted. He got up to being like a, I think the, I think a color sergeant, I'm not sure of the term, but he was a senior NCO in the British Army for a while. And

then he went back in the army and I think he commissioned, he was in Northern Ireland in the late 80s. And he invited me on a Facebook group to like some million veteran march thing that was, struck me as basically like a, like a, don't, don't prosecute soldier F kind of thing. And it struck me that like, it seemed so much more uniformly right wing, even than American veteran things I'd seen. And specifically the Paris struck me as being like, extraordinarily so. And I mean, I think Milo is probably the subject matter expert on the Paris. He's got, he's got the line down perfectly. I think I would say, I would say there's something, it's a generational thing as well. And I've tried to unpick this

right in, I think there's something about Northern Ireland and something about the kind of profound bitterness of that generation of veterans are the worst blazers of the guys with the Northern Ireland general service medal in their, in their profile picture, the protect soldier F the, there was the sniper on the roof on Bloody Sunday, et cetera. There's something about that generation. And it's partly, I think, because I mean, it's partly because a lot of those guys, I think their grandads or whatever dads had served in the wars of decolonization and World War II. And they probably expected to be fighting the Russians in mass set piece battles. Well, they actually ended up doing was kicking in fucking doors and houses that looked like their own. We wanted to die.

Why won't you let us die? It's like, it's just something about something about that group. Falklands veterans can be similar, but it's kind of, and it's also because they're boomers, they're like boomer veterans. I think there's a bunch of different kind of things coming together to make them. So the million men march guys and veterans for veterans and veterans one voice and all these groups, which I'm a member of purely for research reasons, a lot of my Northern Ireland veterans. And yeah, they are particularly reactionary, like deeply, deeply, like they're, they're the like chute, Corbyn guys. Yeah. They're also like Tony Blair, shoot Tony Blair as well, guys. Like everything is ever, everything that's vaguely liberal left wing in their mind is formulated

into, into some neo Marxist postmodernist, however you want to formulate it kind of plots. And other generations of veterans, I think, like, I've never seen anything like that with World War Two veterans, for example. And I don't see it yet with Iraq and Afghan veterans. I hope that our kind of ex military future isn't quite that bitter, though I'm starting to see it, starting to see the kind of stab in the back shit, which is a big component of how Northern Ireland veterans think about their, their military experience. But honestly, there's something about which I guess is like 69 through the 80s, the kind of troubles era guys that's really, really just dark, man. It's fucking dark. I feel like there's a lot of that. The most right wing

reactionary veterans in America that you will meet, in my opinion, are Marines who served in Iraq between 03 and say 11, but specifically the guys who served in Ramadi Fallujah in the really dark time in the war, like in 050607. I mean, my unit went to Iraq. I wasn't there yet, but they went to Iraq in 0607. Whereas our brigade in Afghanistan had a notionally rough deployment in the sense that we had like, I think 12 people die in the brigade, seven in my battalion. It's like 25 or 30 seriously wounded. My brigade in Iraq had 52 people die and like 250 seriously wounded. And those aren't big numbers by like World War Two standards by any means, but that's pretty bad. But then the Marines, you talk to Marines, you'll see stories of a

single battalion losing 26 guys in Iraq and then having an equivalent number of suicides within the first like five years back. It's really, really grim. And you do see kind of piecemeal some situations where it's much, much worse. But for me at least, I have seen that anger. I have seen like what you're describing, Joe, but I haven't seen as much of it from people my age or slightly younger. What I've seen has been the most vitriol that I've ever encountered. And obviously most of this is online, but also like, you know, one of these people I know in real life, it's mostly from, yeah, like boomers, it's from Northern Ireland and to some extent Falkland's vets. On my Twitter thing with the guy saying he wants to fight me at the Santa

Taft, that guy's a Falkland's vet. Like, it's wild, but it does... One last battle for that guy. And it does strike me that like, maybe it's the British military and the veteran culture isn't necessarily more right wing than American. It's just that I'm so inured to like the right wing this of the American side, because like I was in that, I wasn't ever right wing, but I was in that environment. Whereas here, I'm encountering this for like the first time. And there are moments like the, you know, the joke about, I think Alice made this joke on Trash Future about, you know, the guy very happily showing up to get his photo taken with a Tory politician wearing a shirt saying like, you know, soldier F did nothing wrong or like, you know... Northern Ireland, we did war

crimes and it was good. Yeah, yes. Yeah, bloody Sunday. Yes, we did it. And we'll do it again. That kind of a thing. A man who even Douglas Murray thinks is guilty. Even Douglas Murray is like, no, he did it. Like the most reactionary writer in British, in the British commentary is like, no, he's a fucking horrible man. I think that a lot of like, we kind of have this, you have that sort of like World War One thing where the sort of like modern conception of the army is formed. And then you have World War Two, which is obviously just like a much bigger war where like lots more things get dragged in. But then you also get this formation of like the the commandos and the SAS and then this kind of

what latterly then I think shifts to become how like, I think Britain, but both like as as a people and as a government almost like conceives of its armed forces as this kind of like smaller, like more elite kind of thing. And then I think sort of the peak of that is probably the Iranian embassy siege. Yeah, I remember reading a really interesting comment from it was one of the one of the whoever the Scottish trooper who was like the famous shot of him like swinging through the window. And Sandy something I want to say. Yeah. And he said that the Iranian embassy siege ruined the SAS because it made everyone think it was cool. And so then suddenly everyone was trying to join the SAS and they didn't realize that most of the time you're just like

in a forest looking at something through binoculars and shitting into cling film for like four days. Yeah. I mean, I've got to put a chapter on that in the book. It's about the sadness of Ant Middleton, who is the ultimate product of the kind of how the SAS stopped being very special. Because it has this weird status where it's like it's the most secretive unit on the planet, but it's also one of the most well publicized. Everyone has a fucking book out. Everyone has a TV series. And that that process. Yeah, I think I think that was when it started to slip from I mean, the British army lies to think of itself and constantly tells itself is and I quote the best small army in the world. And the idea of something something small and slick and elite

is part of the composition, I suppose, but definitely the slide through the Iranian embassy stuff. And I suppose it was timing because it was on a bank holiday and everyone was at home or something like that. It was it was like live televised over a bank holiday. It was one of the reasons it got so big. They were like, all the Brits are at the pub. Let's do it now. Bang it on, bang it on the TV. But then through that through the kind of Andy McNab and Chris Ryan stuff, gradually these things are now and now the expression of that now is Ant Middleton, like the world's world's most angry man doing his thing. And that's part of that's part of the process, which means that if you walk into Waterstones or foils, there will be an entire floor

dedicated to the kind of military death cults. And some of it will be like memoirs obviously which loads of memoirs like soldier F Apache pilot seven sniper two. But some of it, increasingly it's kind of an Ant Middleton's a good example has become like, it's just influencer shit isn't it? It's just self blaming neoliberal influencer shit like it's all your fault. But I can help you 10x your fucking Bitcoin scam with the secret dark powers of the special boat service. And so I mean, there's obviously a market for that shit. I kind of think of it as an extent, it's also got part of it's an extension of the kind of 2000s like true crime like I was a gangster. I was an East End gangster shit. It's kind of taken over that

as well in terms of like memoirs military Dave Courtney basically. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm sure I mean, there are I know there are equivalents in the States as well, native these guys who were kind of scamming off there. Oh, I mean, I don't blame but if I could if I could pitch Channel 4 and have a series like Royal Logistics Core, are you fucking on the sick enough? Are you organized enough? Can you drive a big enough truck or whatever? I would stack enough blankets. I'd be there or do it but there's no market for it. So I kind of get why I mean, what else are they going to do in a way they're going to come out and do private military shit after doing 20 years? You know, I don't blame them but it's also irritating at the

same time. It's very funny to me because the US equivalent of basically formed specifically to be like the SAS is what we call they called Delta Force but most recently was called CAG. I don't know if they have a new name. They always change their name to be as secret as possible. And those the veterans of Delta don't really do this as much. There's some but not that much. Obviously, we have the Navy SEALs. They love it. They are worse in a way than the SAS about this but it's just very, very funny to me because yeah, that phenomenon exists like you're describing everything from sort of like military stuff to make you better at trading Bitcoin. General Stanley McChrystal now has a consultancy group that like goes around to like corporate offices and is like

make your corporate people pretend like they're company commanders in Afghanistan and they can like do a mission to learn military problem solving skills. And it's so stupid but and I think anyone who's was ever in will look at this and be like, this is a grift. This is the dumbest shit I've ever heard in my life. You know, it's so stupid but there is this on a corporate bonding expedition where we're like practicing being British Army officers. They've taken us out on a boat and we've got to empty our filing cabinets into the sea. I also like when I look at SAS, are you tough enough way of it and Middleton's one with the other guys? I think the other guys I think are all right. I know guys who've met those guys on selection and stuff like apparently

those are like fairly decent blokes and Middleton obviously there's a huge fucking screamer to be honest. But it's also that the idea that format of that show I don't know if you've seen it but the format is nothing like special forces selection. It's like basic training like on special forces selection and I know this second hand from guys who've done it. There's none of this screaming and shouting that's all for recruits. That's not for if you arrive at special forces selection in the UK. You've done at least four or five years. You're normally a junior NCO and they're watching you to see if you fuck up but they're not screaming and shouting and tipping your bed over and that is just that it just doesn't seem to reflect this show doesn't seem to reflect anything

about kind of special forces training in my understanding anyway. That is basically the number one thing when you read about anyone going through British special forces training because they've usually come from the Paras or some sort of like similarly fairly like tough unit. For the SAS it's like 70% Paras. Yeah and then they say the shocking thing getting to SAS selection is that no one's yelling at you because it's entirely about can you get through this on your own like no one's trying to help you do it. If anything like but like daring you to quit. That's the funny thing that when you said that that figure 70% that's almost the exact same for members of Delta Force who are former Ranger regiment and obviously Delta is super NCO driven.

There's very few officers and so the overwhelming majority of guys because quite frankly that's one of the units where you will actually get enough experience to be a good enough marksman to pass not just Delta selection but then the Delta operator course. As the Rangers always say they sure do. Yeah I mean I got the fucking Milo's doing a call back to a to a to a I'll tell you this story Joe because I think you'll appreciate this. So you know you maybe you've encountered this and I don't know if the British Army has a similar thing but in the US Army there's a very common thing that there's a unit motto that you say that soldiers will say to the officers when they're saluting them and there's a thing you say back like I was in a unit that was formed as a test

unit when they first started doing paradrop operations right in the beginning of World War II and so our unit motto was Geronimo and the soldiers would say Geronimo sir and I would have to say airborne back to them and obviously with Rangers it's Rangers lead the way that's their thing Rangers fucking lead the way like they're everywhere Rangers Rangers Rangers whatever. So Fort Benning where I did my initial training is the site of Ranger regiment headquarters and one of their battalions and like their special troops battalion and most importantly the Ranger indoctrination program which is like the junior enlisted join the Rangers thing which is just the most brutal fucking hazing I've ever seen in my life like we were adjacent to them

in our barracks and like their PT sessions had dudes foaming at the mouth one night we came back late from a night fire and we saw them forcing Rangers to carry wall lockers up and down a staircase and then set up a barracks room outside on a parking lot and then bring it all back in like non-stop hazing and so basically Milo's Milo's making this joke because one time Ranger privates are so indoctrinated to like you you you are not a human being and you don't deserve to be alive until you've got your tab and so like if you're a junior enlisted Ranger you're just constantly being abused and they're very very quick on the salute of like Rangers lead the way saluting everyone and my buddy was out one time and he was walking and he was

around talking to this captain he didn't know who was like a military intelligence like soft skill very not elite unit guy and they were walking past and the five or six Ranger privates come in a little gaggle and they see him they see the cap they're like Ranger lead the way sir and this captain who's like doesn't give a fuck is like yep they sure do and uh yeah that that to me was kind of indicative of the difference between them but um but I would say that that's that's that's a similar thing to um that Ranger school is getting streamed at and hazed where Special Forces selection aside from the uh log and rifle PT section they never yell at you it's just like all right get up carry heavy thing go all right

we're timing you my mind again second hand understanding is that like parachute regiment training is very much like that because you do it all on the same basis the other shit regiments the hatch regiments as they're called um the crap out regiments and yeah and Special Forces selection is much more complex it's much more um grown up I suppose yeah it's the way it's been explained to me because the gray mates the idea of the gray man in it like can you work in a small unit and keep your mouth shut I know you can you not be obnoxious I don't know how the fuck ant Middleton made it through that was the same thing with us the silent professional they're always going on about the silent professional yeah I always thought the British army has diminished

by not having a kind of things like Rangers lead the way and who are and all this shit we don't have any of that shit they're like go and do this and you're like all right all right I can't we'll just go and do it we don't really have that kind of executive thing that we shout back if you know what I mean yeah I think we should we should introduce it I don't know what it would be tell it home yeah I think we just know we'd be bad at it it's the aesthetic isn't it I'm like I'm really fascinated by military vernacular because I just I do just find a lot of it it's just like Sami's but particularly British military vernacular but yeah just like people just saying stuff like crap at crap job or whatever just like this kind of yeah so to end

it off I don't know Joe have I ever told you the story about when I was in uh officer basic and that I'll lead you into this all right because this is very funny so I think in many ways like what what the British army in a sense has has to offer that the world culturally is its storied tradition of nutters so yes we we did a whole episode on the Falklands war which I mean absolutely go back and listen to that because when we drew the conclusion that it was the most dudes rock war it was just a bunch of guys who were like right we're getting our hands on a real war it's going to be a pisser uh time to get fancy with it um and so like you had guys like H Jones just like just man just wanted to die like uh and uh you're like guys like fucking like Jack Churchill from

world war two just like carrying a fucking sword and a longbow for like some reason the guy with a bowler hat or was that someone else I can't remember I'm not sure it might have been a bowler hat so what someone on him was like turned up in a bowler hat or something phenomenal Doughty Wiley beating Ottomans to death with a walking stick at Gallipoli when he was holding a revolver um yeah uh but then I think that this is kind of this sort of pervades it's like a running joke on the trash rucha stream with the uh the British army color sergeant uh good morning men it is 4 a.m British time you'll retract your full skin and use it to salute the queen but Nate met this man in real life so um I'm gonna paint the picture for you uh this doesn't exist

anymore but when I was in uh the the sort of post I don't know if you're familiar with the whole story of Jessica Lynch and her unit getting overrun in Iraq and the army decided that it's like a snap reaction to this they were going to have a mandatory course for all officers regardless of branch even if they were like medical corps or you know uh judge advocate general where they would do like a six or seven week base like pre basic basic where you would do nothing but how to uh basically marksmanship essentials how to like actually zero and qualify correctly with the standard issue equipment um and then do land navigation so like orienteering and then also do run a run a convoy and actually do a convoy live fire and it was a pretty easy course because

it was like our first course in the army but like it had to have everyone so like it couldn't be hard like it couldn't be like infantry or something insane because you have to like the the regardless of what they say they don't want the people who are going to be you know ordinance officers or transfer officers or lawyers or doctors to fail out of the course you know what i mean yeah yeah and so we got done with this and we show up at our first formation for infantry school for the infantry officer basic course and a guy walks over to us wearing a very strange camo pattern and a very strange looking green beret and wearing and carrying a swagger stick and we're sort of like what's happening and then this is on this on this at this field somewhere like range i can't

remember it in fort benning and he says all right gather around gents basically so we form a circle and he he introduces himself uh and he's the first sergeant of the infantry school presently or our company presently and he's uh from the british army he's from a regiment in yorkshire um i can't remember his name but uh i just remember this scene very clearly and remember remember my mom's english but like she's mostly americanized i'm familiar somewhat with some british things not a ton of them and i'll do my best impression of his accent i realize it'll falter a little bit but it's basically along the line he starts talking to you like all right gents this is not fucking bolig two you will not be on the range chatting shit with your mates on your mobiles this

is good fucking training it's not private soldier business and i'm telling you my peers were like color sergeant jason donovan what the fuck is this guy saying like and sure enough every formation he was there and uh his name was sergeant major page that was his name rich page was his name and i just i was like we were so confused by this guy and i mean it was very funny we had a bunch of soldiers or officers from uh middle eastern militaries that were guest students and one of them had gone to sandhurst he was like a crown prince of jordan and so when he was the student first sergeant he was doing the full sandhurst style of drill and ceremony and of course sergeant major page saw this was like that's fucking right gents that's bloody fucking right like he loved it but

my story of him is that we were on a we did a live fire where we had like a full on like company sized patrol base what was just like a cop that would never exist in real life of just a perfect triangle so each platoon could be in one big line on a berm on one face and then one on the other and one on the other and then the you know control center or whatever so it was it was just training so we were out and it's like we're on a range where we literally are in like a big big you know fire base and we can shoot outward and it's just training stuff on like rates of fire and signaling and lift and shift fires and things like that and i was a saw gunner a light machine gunner in this exercise so i had a you know m249 and piece of shit training weapon that you know

has been passed down through numerous people and training and is not that well kept and i'm firing this thing when you know they're telling us to shoot and it jams and you know so i i i pull the charging handle back i open the feed tray i try to fucking check it put it back it doesn't work it's still not fucking working because the the charging handle is jammed up so i take a knee trying to figure this fucking thing out and i hear behind me are you bulletproof sir and i'm just like what he's like sir are you bulletproof and i was like no sergeant major he's like well they get the fuck down and now and he grabs my rifle my machine gun he goes now sergeant majors we're fucking bulletproof and he takes his helmet off and he hits the charging handle with his fucking

helmet and it rides forward and he gives it back to me he's like see if that works and i was just like this guy is fucking insane this guy's out of his mind and then the thing is that yeah i had some cultural context that was actually episode one of britannology was that happening it didn't work it didn't work that's the thing it did work and that's the thing is that i had like some cultural context of this but my only context of the british army was watching black adder goes forth i had no idea what i was prepared for and so randomly as a brand new infantry lieutenant i uh got to meet like milo has described this and maybe this is your experience too of the sort of like archetypal sandhurst nco yeah that's who this guy was and i was just like man this guy being in

this guy's unit must either be incredibly fun or completely psychotic but like there's no middle ground yeah yeah so the stick man as we call him after the swagger stick terrifying terrifying human beings don't say the stick man just weird to me to think of i mean i imagine like if you had you know the equivalent of like the you know the the pt monster southern redneck nco who's like an e7 who still runs like a 12 minute 2 mile and never is not having a dip in his lip and it's like it has been deployed everywhere has like 0 body fat looks like he smokes a carton a day like that sort of are equivalent in the u.s. army and it's like imagine if you show up at a british army training school like he's your senior nco that's the level of confusion going on and i suppose that to me was

like illustrating ah okay he's gay to just said we smell like wolf pussy now we got to wrap up i can't tell that story too some other time i'll tell you the story about the ranger instructor saying we all smelled like wolf pussy you have to oh fuck sake joe before we we wrap up i want to say i forgot to mention this in the introduction but i know that you have a book coming out and i wanted to give you an opportunity to plug that yes it's with repeat it's called veteran hood hope and rage in ex military britain i don't know if i got that right but the subtitle but some for fucking like that just look out for it but veteran hood is the title and yeah it's basically i'm just basically trying to kind of reflect on on what

it's like to be a veteran now really and try and unpick so like unpick some of the assumptions not least on the left that all veterans are basically either irredeemable fascists or small sea tauries and look at some of the radical stuff you know the mutinies and the rebellions and the strikes and also talk a lot about why why we are right wing when we are and look at some of the reasoning behind that i also slag off ant middleton i also slag off johnny mercer so those are in there as well was that on the planet herald comment section yeah that quote is in there that quote is a number of his best quotes are in there i'm including the one where he's asked if he'd ever done cocaine and he was like you don't put

diesel in a ferrari lens i don't know if you've heard that one but yeah there's a there's a you know i look at the captain tom phenomenon phenomenon which is very interesting and a bunch a bunch of stuff i'm just trying to kind of bring some kind of humanist and critical approach to talk about veterans in a humanist and critical way rather than just a load of big fucking assumptions which people who are conservative and liberal and on the left all do um you know i'm trying to kind of get past some of those simple narratives so it's out in november um yeah so fucking buy it please no it sounds it sounds like a much needed book because there's something i've talked about a lot recently it's about how people just say insane generalistic shit about

like oh everyone in the army is like this when it's just obviously such a massive organization which people get caught up in for all sorts of reasons i can deal with it from the right mylo but a lot of people on the left to it they're like you're either a fascist or you're all the other one is like soldiers are basically cops and i'm like i don't think that like the relationship of soldiers to capitalism and the state is very different like yeah britain's town centers aren't full of coppers going i'm a homeless fucking copper give me a quiz but they are full of soldiers so clearly there's something fundamentally yeah it's you know so i can deal with it from from you know reactionaries but it really annoys me when it's the left to be on it i makes me laugh too

because i was like yeah soldiers are basically cops like well i think based on my soldiers uh general behavior the anchorage police would probably disagree that soldiers and cops exist and we have our own prison and our own judges and our own legal system so we're not you know we're obviously not angels are we and we're definitely not cops yeah we're on trial in front of the stick man exactly how do you play bulletproof or not bulletproof well joe thank you so much for making time for this thank you for for being flexible it's been great talking to you and uh we'll get this we'll make sure that uh everyone knows about where to buy your book when it's available so thank you again thank you it's great to hear great great to hear from you um great

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