{"product_id":"the-junior-officers-reading-club-isbn-9781594484797","title":"The Junior Officers' Reading Club","description":"Hailed as a classic of war writing in the U.K., \u003ci\u003eThe Junior Officers' Reading Club\u003c\/i\u003e is a revelatory first-hand account of a young enlistee's profound coming of age. Attempting to stave off the tedium and pressures of army life in the Iraqi desert by losing themselves in the dusty paperbacks on the transit-camp bookshelves, Hennessey and a handful of his pals from military academy form the Junior Officers' Reading Club. By the time he reaches Afghanistan and the rest of the club are scattered across the Middle East, they are no longer cheerfully overconfident young recruits, hungering for action and glory. Hennessey captures how boys grow into men amid the frenetic, sometimes exhilarating violence, frequent boredom, and almost overwhelming responsibilities that frame a soldier's experience and the way we fight today.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWatch a Video\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003ePatrick Hennessey \u003c\/b\u003eis a barrister and author who served in the British army from 2005 to 2009. Additionally, Hennessey worked as a special foreign correspondent for \u003ci\u003eThe Times \u003c\/i\u003e(London) as well as the host of the BBC Two documentary \u003ci\u003eKipling’s Indian Adventures. \u003c\/i\u003eHis published works include \u003ci\u003eThe Junior Officers’ Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eKandak: Fighting with Afghans. \u003c\/i\u003eWe had founded the Junior Officers’ Reading Club in the heat of the southern Iraqi desert. Marlow and me, the smart-alec Oxford boys,      with surfer dude Harrison and the attached Coldstream Guards.       Basking in boxers on improvised sun-loungers, we snatched quick        half-hour escapes from the oppressive heat and boredom routine—    caught our breath among the books, wallowing after patrols and         riding the adrenaline come-down. Convened behind the junior        officers’ tent, the ‘Crows’ Nest’, flaunting non-regulation under-          wear in a gesture of defiance to the quartermasters, we might have  thought we were the Army’s Bright Young Things, but we weren’t       the first and we won’t be the last. \u003cp\u003eThe club was a product of a newly busy Army, a post-9\/11 Army    of graduates and wise-arse Thatcherite kids up to their elbows in            the Middle East who would do more and see more in five years than     our fathers and uncles had packed into twenty-two on manoeuvres in Germany and rioting in Ulster. ‘Too Cool for School’ was what we’d been called by the smarmy gunner colonel on a course      down in Warminster, congratulating through gritted teeth the              boys who’d picked up gallantry awards, too old now to win the         spurs he never got the chance to while he was getting drunk on            the Rhine and flying his desk. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut in a way he was right: what did we know just because we’d     had a few scraps in the desert? The bitter, loggy major who sat next        to him had probably been to the Gulf back in ’91, when we were still learning to read; probably been patronized himself when he was a       crow by returning Falklands vets who in turn had been instructed          by grizzly old-timers sporting proud racks of World War Two medals, chests weighed down by Northwest Europe and Northern Desert Stars, which told of something greater than we could comprehend,        the stuff  of history imagined in black and white when no one was any- one without a Military Cross. Our grandfathers were heroes, whatever  that meant, and they had taught the legends who charged up Mount Tumbledown in the Falklands and had returned to teach us. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWe who didn’t believe them. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWe who had scoffed as we crawled up and down Welsh hills           and pretended to scream as we stabbed sandbags on the bayonet      assault course. We tried to resurrect the club at the start of our        Afghan tour, lounging on canvas chairs on the gravel behind the            tin huts of Camp Shorabak. Same sort of base, same sort of desert,       just a few thousand miles the other side of Iran. By the end of the         first month it was obvious that there would be no club. Each of us,  wherever we were and if we could at all, would be reading alone.          We went into battle in bandanas and shades with Penguin Clas-             sics in our webbing, sketch pads in our daysacks and iPods on the       radio, thinking we knew better than what had gone before. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the end we did and, of course, we didn’t.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e________________________________________\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOut in Helmand we were going to prove ourselves. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis was our moment, our \u003ci\u003eX Factor\u003c\/i\u003e—winning, one perfect      fucking moment; we finally had a war. From university through a        year of training at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, from Sandhurst to the Balkans, from the Balkans to Iraq, and now from       Iraq to Afghanistan, it felt as though our whole military lives had         been building up to the challenge that Afghanistan presented. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe only problem was we were bored. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWe landed in Kandahar with high hopes. The whole battalion,        600 men, mustard keen to get stuck into the unfamiliar and exciting task of working alongside the Afghan National Army (ANA) for   seven months. A task which promised as much action and fulfilment as the last few years had failed to deliver. Of course, there            was nothing exciting about arriving in an airfield in the middle of           the night, but the taste of Mountain Dew the next morning was             the taste of expeditionary warfare. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eYet those first March days of 2007, sitting on the boardwalk, acclimatizing outside the Korean takeaway, watching the many multinational uniforms amble towards the ‘shops’ for souvenir        carpets, we had to pinch ourselves to remember this was a war           zone. The indeterminate South African accents of the military    contractors mixed with the subcontinental singsong of the shit-             jobs men jumping in and out of the ancient jingly wagons which        rolled haphazardly past millions and millions of dollars’ worth of   hardware while the Canadians played hockey on the improvised         pitch, and I was bored. As bored as I’d been when I decided to join       the Army, as bored as I’d been on public duties, guarding royal       palaces while friends were guarding convoys in Iraq, as bored as I’d been once we got to Iraq and found ourselves fighting the       Senior Major more than Saddam. Stone-throwing, chain-smoking,   soldier-purging bored. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWaiting for the onward staging to Camp Bastion, it was pretty      easy to forget that Kandahar was already in the middle of nowhere.         A shipping-container city where big swaggering joint headquarters with lots of flags sat side by side with puny National Support   Element tents and the luxury of the semipermanent pods of the          KBR contractors, who were the real power in places like this. All        right, the Taliban weren’t in the wire, but surely Kandahar was at        least dangerous enough not to have a bunch of Canadians playing      roller-hockey in the middle of its airfield. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBored of the coffee shop at one end of the complex, we hopped      on an ancient creaky bus, drove past the local market, where no        doubt the Taliban’s info gathering went on each Saturday as the         RAF Regiment juicers bartered for fake DVDs, and hit another            café 500 metres down the road. A sign by the bin, overflowing with  empty \u003ci\u003eventi\u003c\/i\u003e coffee cups, announced that here six years ago the        Taliban had fought their last stand. A worrying thought occurred:      surely we weren’t late again? \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom Kandahar we decanted into Hercules transport aircraft          for the jerky flight down to Camp Bastion, the tented sprawl in the   middle of the ‘Desert of Death’ that was the main British base in  Helmand. There we conducted our reception staging and onward integration package under an oppressive and drizzling cloud. The mandatory and in equal measures dull and hilarious set of introduc  tory briefs and exercises completed by all British soldiers entering an operational theatre was as vague as ever. All anyone wanted to know   was: were we going to be shooting people? and: would we get in trouble if we did? The answers, to everyone’s relief, were ‘yes’ and ‘no’.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e________________________________________\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAfter days which seemed like weeks we arrived at Camp Shorabak,       the ANA sister camp next door to Bastion. This would be our home    base for the next seven months. The photos ‘the Box’—the broad- shouldered commander of the Inkerman Company—had taken              on his recce had shown a horizon that symbolized everything Op    Herrick (the umbrella name given to ongoing UK operations in Afghanistan) was going to be that previous tours hadn’t been. The      view shuffling at night to the loos down in Iraq had been depress ingly eloquent—the burning fires of the Shaibah refinery and silhouetted pipelines told you all you needed to know about that war.       The Hindu Kush, on the other hand, was the symbol of the great adventure, the danger and hardship that we hadn’t endured last          year. But a bubble of brown and grey cloud blocked out the sky the   week we arrived, and we couldn’t bloody see it. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTo add insult to injury, it rained. At least in Iraq it had never     rained. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Marines we were taking over from didn’t care. They were          going home and had lost too many guys too close to the end of           their gritty, six-month winter tour. Patience sapped by working           with the Afghans we still hadn’t met, they shamelessly crammed          into the gym to work on their going-home bodies, laughing when          we asked them questions about what it was like ‘out there’. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWe were trying to get to grips with the theory of our task. A     normal infantry battalion, the basic building block of any army,         works in threes. The basic fighting unit in the British Army is an        eight-man ‘section’ (sub-divided into two four-man ‘fire teams’).       There are three sections in a platoon—each platoon headed up by\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ea young whippersnapper lieutenant or second-lieutenant and a           wiser, grizzlier platoon sergeant—and three platoons in a company—   each company led by a more experienced major and an even wiser       and grizzlier company sergeant major. These three ‘rifle compa-          nies’ are the basic elements of a battalion, supported by a fourth   company of specialized platoons (support company) and a large headquarters company which provides the logistic and planning      support in the rear echelons. A tried and tested system forming              up a happy family of nearly 700 fighting men, a system which we      knew and trusted and which worked. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA system which, for the purposes of our job in Afghanistan,           had been thrown out of the window. We were to be an Operational Mentoring and Liaison Team (an OMLT), the set-up of which was    simple, but bore no relation to anything we’d ever done before. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGone was the familiar comfort of the formations and tactics       they’d spoon-fed us at Sandhurst. Suddenly we found ourselves in     much smaller companies of about thirty, the platoons reduced to         mere six-man teams loaded with experience: captains and colour   sergeants you would normally expect to find in more senior roles          and the junior men all corporals and lance-sergeants who hadn’t          been the junior men for a few years. In these teams we were to         attach ourselves to an ANA formation and mentor them as we            both trained and fought together. Each six-man platoon would be  responsible for an ANA company of 100, each company of thirty responsible, therefore, for a whole \u003ci\u003ekandak\u003c\/i\u003e—an ANA battalion of          600 men—with our own battalion commander no longer commanding his companies but sitting on the shoulder of the Afghan  brigadier, advising him on how best to deploy his brigade of thou-     sands.  We would  use our  experience  and   expertise   and   superior \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003etraining and resources to form each Afghan battalion into a cred-          ible fighting force. The potential for fun was incredible, the poten-          tial for fuck-up immense. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSo we should have been glad of the enforced lull at the start,      should have been grateful for the time to get our heads around           what everyone soon referred to as \u003ci\u003eomelette\u003c\/i\u003e. But, as weeks passed          and the training continued and the cloud stayed down, what we          were dreaming of was getting out there and having a fight. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e________________________________________\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe invite to my going-away party had promised ‘The Great Game,  Round III—Beards, Bombs and Burkhas’, but we were getting bollocked for not shaving before early-morning PT, and as for bombs,        we fucking wished. It was only a matter of time before the creep      ing bullshit would start; before those with nothing better to do          would start to patrol the huts, complaining that the mosquito               nets weren’t in straight enough lines or that we should be carry-            ing our weapons in the showers. The sergeants, infuriatingly tidy           and unfailingly up at 0530, would crash around the hut and have            us pining for the little eight-man tents we’d resented back in Iraq.         Like clockwork they would order ‘lights-out’ at 2200, and the hut    would become a profound dull tunnel lit by the blueish glow of lap-      tops being watched on camp cots. Padding back from the show-           ers, I’d pick my way past rows of fluorescent faces, featureless and  blurred through the mosi-nets, each man absorbed in the snug             little world of the nylon domes, somehow finding a privacy in the headphones and pretending to sleep through the telltale rhythmic       rustling of the cot next door. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe frustration grew when the Inkerman Company, luckybastards (In Iraq they’d been \u003ci\u003emy\u003c\/i\u003e company), were crashed out in            the middle of the night on a real-deal, this-is-not-a-drill, load-up-the-wagons tasking. As it turned out, they spent the next week          bored and cold and with no sight of the enemy, but what was worrying was how selfishly and childishly jealous we all were. With       nothing remotely gung-ho to boast of, we couldn’t even be bothered to write home, and moodily sat out at nights on the Hesco         fence, watching the thunderstorms. Towering clouds hurling mag        nificent bolts of lightning silhouetting the mountains to the north       drifted over our heads as we sulked and, in the finest tradition of        bored soldiers, sat around throwing stones at each other. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe days ticked by. The heat and dust grew more oppressive,        and the reports from elsewhere in Helmand grew more exciting,           and our own boredom intensified with each passing day we didn’t         get out ‘on the ground’. Occasionally we would catch the whisper          of something, the sniff of an American op going in to the north.            But we were scheduled to spend the next two months training              our \u003ci\u003ekandak\u003c\/i\u003e in camp. The idea of spending months trying to force Sandhurst on the ANA was unthinkable. Other companies started      getting sent on real patrols and getting into real fights. Marlow             was down on the Garmsir front line, and the daily SITREPs—       situation reports sent back from the boys on the ground—were tantalizingly full of heavy engagements. The ANA soldiers, who            had watched with amusement as we played our incomprehensible      rugby sevens on the helipad, started to get bolshy, trying to play      football right through our games. We were already telling our new comrades to piss off in their own country—as someone shouted          from the wing: how the fuck was it ‘their’ helipad when their army       had no helicopters? \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThey barely \u003ci\u003ehad\u003c\/i\u003e an army. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e________________________________________\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e205 Brigade of the 3rd (Hero) Corps of the Afghan National Army,  though they didn’t know it and though certainly not enough of us      knew it, were the solution to Afghanistan. We were trotting out             the right phrases—‘An Afghan solution to an Afghan problem’—         but we didn’t believe them. Back with the Operational Training            and Advisory Group (OPTAG) on pre-deployment exercises in      Norfolk, we had asked one of the instructors what special prepa-        ration we should undertake to be an OMLT, and he had made a           gag about eggs. It wasn’t OPTAG’s fault, not that the training they  delivered wasn’t a waste of time. The problem was all in the name; ‘mentoring’ and ‘liaison’ sounded like holding hands and build-             ing bridges. If we’d wanted to build bridges we’d have joined the Engineers; we were combat soldiers, a ‘teeth’ arm, and our culture demanded more. If they’d called the task OBFET (Operational           Blow the Fuck out of Everything Team), then every battlegroup in        the Army would have been creaming for it, but the Afghans might      have objected. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAfghanistan was only going to work if the ANA could eventually do it for themselves. The Paras (Parachute Regiment), first out      when the war began, had been thrust into a fight they couldn’t win        on their own and forgot about the ANA in the midst of keeping            the Taliban from their throats. The only story anyone heard about         the ANA during the whole of the first British deployment into             what the papers soon exclusively referred to as ‘the lawless Helmand Province’ was the one about how they ran away when Tim  Illingworth of the Light Infantry won his Conspicuous Gallantry         Cross. The Marines had come in six months later with a whole lot       more people and, in theory, a whole lot more sense. They dedicated almost a whole Commando, the OMLT Battlegroup, to the task of bringing on the ANA, but they hadn’t found it sexy enough and           had sulked, taking it out on the ANA, alternately over-working             and ignoring them. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSo of course, if we’re honest, the Grenadiers hadn’t wanted the    task either, but we’d sucked it up when we were told we were going       to be 12 Brigade’s OMLT. After all, we were going in with 1st Battalion The Royal Anglians, who had been the lead infantry battalion in 12 Mechanized Brigade since forever and even had previous  Afghan experience, although we all knew by then that the Kabul peacekeeping tours of pre-2006 had nothing to do with the war in Helmand. The Grenadiers were tired from their tour of Iraq; the    Anglians had trained hard for the task of proving that, if the Paras        and the Marines could do it, so could the line infantry. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWe knew they’d get the \u003ci\u003eimportant\u003c\/i\u003e jobs over us; we’d only just got back from a no-notice deployment out to Iraq so we could finally        wear the yellow medal that everyone else in the Army already had. Bumming around Shaibah Logistics Base, feeding detainees and  cramming down lobster in the American D-Facs in Baghdad was           no adequate preparation for what—even by autumn 2006 and   presumably to the justified annoyance of those Falkland veterans    marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of what was hardly a picnic— everyone was calling ‘the most intense fighting the British Army           has experienced since Korea’. So while the Anglians got the best            kit and training and focussed on the ‘main effort’, we could play          with the Afghans and teach them how to use their rifles for the            time when the real soldiers had blown up all the Talibaddies and         could hand a peaceful if not prosperous province over with smiles         and handshakes and flag ceremonies. Just like the British Army           were supposed to be doing in Southern Iraq. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eProblem was, down in Southern Iraq the Rifles and the Irish     Guards were getting hammered. The Americans were pouring    everything into a surge which nearly bled them dry, but was start-         ing to work, while we were handing over the bases, doing dodgy        deals with the militia and then stepping back as Basrah descended           to anarchy. And this in a region we’d walked around years earlier   wearing berets and smiles and gloating about how good we were            at hearts and minds. But even then, Helmand was something else,         and no one down there really knew it. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eExcept the Afghans. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThey couldn’t shape their berets. They didn’t get up early and      they stopped everything for meals, for prayer, for a snooze. They         had no discipline. They smoked strong hashish and mild opium.          They couldn’t map-read. They had no tanks, no planes, no order             to the chaos of their stores. Their weapons weren’t accounted for.      Their barracks weren’t health and safety compliant. They wore           what they wanted, when they wanted, and walked around holding     hands. They lacked everything that British Army training believed           in and taught—and fuck me if most of them hadn’t killed more     Russians than we had ever seen. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI loved them. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI liked that they had more balls than I ever did to just stand up       and say ‘why’ or ‘no’ or ‘I don’t care if there is a war on and a massive IED threat, I like watermelon so I’m going to steal a car I can’t     drive and run a Taliban checkpoint in order to go to the market.’ \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI couldn’t train them at all. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe video spoof of Marlboro adverts, with all-American cow-        boys covered in scratches herding cats, didn’t do it justice. We          would wander over to the Afghan side of camp mid-morning, the sergeants already gritting their teeth in fury because they’d been                     up since half-five and couldn’t understand anyone who hadn’t            been, hoping for the best. The best would usually be half of the sol-     diers we expected, lounging around on mattresses, sharing \u003ci\u003echai\u003c\/i\u003e.          Well, we reckoned half of the soldiers, but since we had no idea           how many there were supposed to be, how did we know how many   were half? And since there was no commander, or headquarters,            or any sort of structure, how could we find out? I spent my first         week with \u003ci\u003etoolay se, kandaki awal\u003c\/i\u003e—3 Company, 1st Battalion       ANA—trying to find out who commanded it. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e________________________________________\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMiserable March turned to April, and without warning the temper-     ature soared, and the peaks of the Kush were suddenly hidden in        haze, not cloud. The remaining ANA were supposed to have come      back from their leave, though still only half our Afghans were in        camp. The combination of the rising temperature, the continued           lack of action and our utter failure to make any progress in their     training was starting to take its toll. The frustration was starting               to show in shorter tempers, and the old-school lot were itching to        form the whole kandak into three ranks and thrash them round    Shorabak like Sandhurst cadets. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eInstead we took those we could find out on the range and         gulped hard and reassessed our desire to fight alongside them as          they missed target after target with rusty and broken AK-47s. As          the gap between what we were realizing we would need to do in   Helmand and what it was obvious we could never teach the ANA           to do widened, so things descended into farce. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI guess it was inevitable that I would get told off for conducting      the body-bag lesson from inside it. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e*    *    *\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEvery so often something would stop us in our tracks and almost       force a reassessment of our new allies. The blasé way in which the     young and impressive sergeant mentioned that he was hoping to            go back north with us because he had earned his reputation up           there years before, capturing a number of Taliban during the civil         war and, unable to take them all prisoner on his own, throwing           them one by one down a well and tossing a grenade in after them.      Even Mahjid—quiet, considered, intelligent Mahjid, with whom,     standing in for all the other officers in his company, I daily talked         over \u003ci\u003echai\u003c\/i\u003e and too-sugary boiled sweets, liking him more and          more—mentioned how he too hoped we made it to Sangin so that         he could avenge himself on the man who had shot him in the leg           last year, pulling up his trousers to modestly reveal barely half a          thigh distinguishable beneath monstrous scarring. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt forced us to remember that we were the tourists here. We were action-starved soldiers who had flown in for our seven months of       glory. The Afghans were in no rush—they lived it all year after year.    The mandate for OMLT was to be completely integrated with the      ANA: if they went out for a fight, we went with them. Brilliant in  principle, except that at every rotation of Op Herrick a fresh bunch         of British soldiers arrived hungry for some action and started a         frenzy of planning and grand ideas, involving the tired Afghans           who had just accompanied the previous lot. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLieutenant Mahjid was weary, a good officer who looked            twice his thirty years and who’d never go far because, for all his          balls and brains, he had no patronage. He was only supposed to              be second-in-command, but there was no company commander            and no platoon commanders  either;  come  to  think  of  it,  there  was  no company sergeant major, so it was pretty much his show. His     soldiers were from all over the country but mainly, thankfully, far       away from Helmand, where Pashtun tribal loyalties undermined          what little military command structure there was. His best fight-             ers were northerners, battle-hardened Tajiks and Uzbeks with         ruthless eyes and Hazaras with their Mongol fighting blood, guys         who had stood alongside Massoud, the Lion of the Panjshir, who          had fought for the only team ever to defeat the mighty Red Army        and then been the last rearguard against the insanity of the Tali-           ban. Problem was, they all lived many hundreds of miles away in             a country with no roads and they needed to go home once a year.      They needed to keep making children. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWe had forgotten, if we ever knew, that this ‘training’ we were delivering wasn’t important; was, in fact, insignificant compared              to bringing up a family. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd what the hell did we know? It took me three long days of haggling and translating and drawing pictures and taking digital photographs just to get what I thought was a nominal roll of the     hundred or so soldiers I was supposed to be working with. We had        the audacity to be cross because thirty of them were still absent,        trying to maintain their families on the other side of the country.           We had the nerve to be pissed that thirty of those who were in           camp refused to turn up to our training sessions, or that twenty              of those who did left their shirts untucked. Christ, we must have       looked stupid as we trudged back across the sweltering helipad       dejected to lunch after another failed attempt to teach vehicle     checkpoint drills or safe weapon handling. It was the ones we          labelled troublemakers early who turned out to be the best sol-           diers,  lazily pretending  they didn’t  know  how  to  handle  a  weapon when later it turned out they knew better than most and were just      taking the piss because why would they bother to handle their       weapons ‘safely’ when all they used them for was firing at Taliban,         no manning gates in Surrey with empty magazines. We grumbled           in the cookhouse afterwards over Black Forest gateaux about how         the hell we were supposed to go to war with a ragtag bunch like          that, forgetting for one crucial moment that most of the ragtag          bunch had done this before. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Riverhead Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301198057701,"sku":"NP9781594484797","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781594484797.jpg?v=1767740031","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-junior-officers-reading-club-isbn-9781594484797","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}