British Army on the Rampage (B.A.O.R.)

Yes there were elements of the BAOR (British Army of the Rhine) in here, but the book was a bit off for me as it started to seem a bit 'walter mitty' and inaccurate over some basic facts and equipment - for myself as ex serving, I didn't finish the whole book.Walter mitty - pushing the General's yappy dog up the breech of a 105mm gun and firing it? Army Air Corps running Pumas now then and not the RAF?Nah, sorry, doesn't ring true, David Niven does tal tales much better.

good comical read -ex squaddie

Sean Connolly's `British Army on the Rampage' bristles with acerbic squaddie-humour and gloriously offensive observations on army-life of the most delightfully inappropriate sort; basically it's bang-on and tells it exactly as it is, warts, runny-poo and all. Sean's book is that rare work which captures British Army culture in a very particular era: the 1980s decade of repeat Northern Ireland tours, a massive Cold War presence on German plains, and the odd, drink-sodden, crotch-rotting tour to a certain hot and sticky place called Belize.Connolly served a dozen years in the Royal Artillery and his latest work is an excellent summation of those wild, youthful times. The first half of his story focusses in microscopic, hilarious detail on just how much fun - and sheer hard work it was - to be a young squaddie, building up to Junior NCO rank, in a busy Artillery Battery in the `80s. There are lots of big oily guns, squashed fingers and severed thumbs, vomit strewn pavements and furious Sgt Major rollockings in epic scale. But above all else there is humour; long, laugh-out-loud and wet-your-pants-humour - for that is the medium through which Connolly has chosen to tell his story, and it works surprisingly well.The second half of the book deals with the author's 1982 operational tour to Belize and all of the sweat, laughter, mishaps and misadventures that came with it; as well as a fair-old dose of gritty professionalism in getting a hard job done, amidst giant spiders, anthills, `mozie-bites', upset tummies and constantly running backsides in a searing heat. I particularly enjoyed Connolly's Belize musings as I feel it's an underreported conflict and it's a great shame that more hasn't been written of it. As important as our `main ops' in Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan are, sometimes it's nice to read about lesser-known conflicts and celebrate what our troops went through and achieved in them. Scores of books have been written on our big campaigns of recent years but not quite so many on the smaller ones; Sean Connolly is righting that balance in `British Army on the Rampage' and I commend him in the highest terms.Steven McLaughlin,Author of Squaddie: A Soldier's StoryMainstream Publishing