It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday night and the Pentlands stretch off into the distance. Four girls in fancy dress stumble off a bus faced to end up surrounded by nothing but a country road, barbed wire fence, hedgerows, and a sign for “Dreghorn Barracks,” “3rd Battalion Army Base.”
I’m still not sure why I found myself at an Officers party. It had something to do with conversation in the Pear Tree Garden and an invitation. “A Romp in the Swamp,” one officer called it; or the barracks’ annual Shrek themed summer party. While this wasn’t the typical Cowgate club crawl, I was intrigued.
Two officers met us at the gates when we arrived, adorned in ogre-like-attire, their faces painted green. We were led in our heels on what felt like a 15-minute walk through the barracks, past clusters of housing compounds and clocktowers. I was struck by the scale of it, a self-sufficient town of its own. When we arrived at the Officers’ mess the ceilings were draped with green tinsel, the walls camouflaged with netting and plastic ivy. Cardboard swamp signs stood next to character cut outs of Donkey and Fiona. In the gardens stood a pen of poorly dyed goats next to an inflatable slide and castle on which multiple gingerbread men tumbled down. As the party wore on, I found myself beside a liquor cabinet where a commander dressed as Lord Farquaad poured tonic and Bombay Sapphire.
There was something strange about it all. A staleness in the patterned carpets, the gilded royal family portraits on the walls. Glass cabinets in the corridors were filled with silver plaques, cups and engraved shields to mark decades of service. It felt like I walked into an abandoned boarding school, with its mahogany banisters and fluorescent lighting and asbestos ceilings. I thought I might turn one corner and run straight into an old headmaster. And yet there was no one in command. No one to clean up the beer spills or to yell at the Canadian exchange officer running naked down the corridors.
Growing up, I always held the idea of a military man in high regard, breast blazoned with medals and ribbons. I saw him as a dignified individual, an epitome of organisation, responsibility and maturity. These officers held authority, and yet their faces still carried the remnants of teenage acne. At what point on the way out of the lecture theatre are these boys handed a gun and the power to say “shoot.”
“Why did you join the military?” I asked several officers over a table of Kopparberg cider. I expected to hear stories of how they grew up gluing wings on Airfix planes, waiting eagerly for their Grandfather’s tales of D-Day or the beaches of Normandy. Instead, I was faced with an ambivalence, a “why not,” a “what else.” I talked to many officers who held degrees in philosophy, politics, and engineering, and who attended Russell Group universities, Edinburgh included. It was not intelligence these officers were lacking, or fortitude. If anything, the gap lay in something far more subtle: their own sense of conviction.
The men that I met that night showed no grand sense of patriotism, no eagerness to salute the Union Jack. Rather to me they appeared afflicted by something far more recognisable; post graduation paralysis. They stood at the same crossroads we all will stand at, watching in fear as their friends flocked to the Waterloo and City line. In this sense, enlistment provides not a plan but an escape from the world of finance and Battersea rent. A tunnel to the golden haze of their public school past. But at what sacrifice?
In Girl Interrupted Susanna Kaysen called Mclean “A refuge as much as a prison.” I question if the Dreghorn world of hand painted cardboard castles can only provide the same cause. These Officers surrender themselves to the country and in exchange are provided with a rifle, and the answers to the questions they never asked. A regimented sanctuary, where they perform their duties and are rewarded with tea and toast on the table at 4:30 PM every day. That is until their call comes.
I left the party at three on a Sunday morning. An officer escorted me across the dewy grass, past the barracks and out the chicken wire gates. As I called for a taxi I remember noticing the green paint had melted off his face and stained the collar of his t-shirt. “I need to go to bed,” he said, and left me there alone.
Image by Sam Badmaeva on Unsplash.
