The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars, Patrick Hennessey.
There aren't many books I would rate as almost impossible to put down; keen bookworm though I am, I can usually set one aside to pick up as and when convenient. But Patrick Hennessey's account of three years as a junior officer in the Grenadier Guards (and the prior year training at Sandhurst), during which he saw more sustained and intense action than any generation of soldiers since the 1950s, kept me reading till the early hours three nights in a row.
I'm hardly a neutral reviewer, of course. The midpart of Hennessey's memoir relates to his time at Shaibah Logistics Base in Iraq, in the summer of 2006; only a few months later, I visited SLB several times during my stint at COB Basra, ten miles and a nerve-shredding one-hour drive to the north. The little details brought it all back, but Basra - even during the mortar and rocket-heavy run-up to the withdrawal from Basra City - was a holiday camp compared to his tour in Afghanistan the following year. Hennessey combines a gift for eloquent and descriptive writing with a startlingly blunt ability to convey the culture shock of the XBox generation fighting a savage and bloody war for weeks and months on end.
A few of the reviews for this book have been very negative, accusing Patrick Hennessey of glorifying war and killing. That wasn't my interpretation; rather, he very honestly relates the adrenaline-fuelled joy many soldiers confess to feeling in combat. But he goes on to relate its mutation into crushing stress and his sense of growing alienation from friends and family - an recognition that led him to leave the Army after only three years and, in an echo of my career, study law with the aim of becoming a barrister.
Compelling, sometimes shocking, sometimes incredibly funny (the anecdote about the ceremonial snuff-box is worth the price of the book alone) and very highly recommended.
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