Will Yates, War Trials (Pen & Sword, 2021)
War Trials examines the corrosive effect the war in Iraq has had on the people and institutions that became involved in the debacle. At its heart is the story of a young Irish Guardsman, Joe McCleary, who is accused of a war crime in British occupied Basra and breaks into pieces under the intolerable mental weight of the event and the investigation that follows. But he is not the only one on trial in Yates’ superb investigation into the decision makers at all levels whose actions put this man into an impossible situation and to all intents and purposes left him there to rot.
BUY NOW
Part I opens in blitz-shattered Bootle that McCleary’s grandparents struggled to survive. Post-war dreams faded more slowly for the town, and it was into this damaged environment that Joe McCleary joined the world in 1981. Yates switches to Basra in May 2003 and the search for an Iraqi boy drowned in the canal. A complaint is made to the British army by the boy’s father and an investigation begun that homes in on Joe McCleary of the Irish Guards. Yates continues to alternate stories in this fashion, narrating the investigation while allowing the background biography of McCleary to catch up with events. That happens with dramatic intensity when McCleary cracks under the pressure of the investigation and his experiences as a soldier. He is in very deep trouble.
Yates’s focus shifts in Part II to the war in Iraq. He spirals in from the causes of the war to the preparations by the British Army and McCleary’s role in it. Meanwhile, the investigation continues, and Joe’s mental decline accelerates. He has PTSD, but who wouldn’t based on the case Yates builds through these chapters, recounting atrocities on both sides in a war that should never have been fought? Yates flips around between the horrors of Basra and the dislocation of Bootle, the two melting together in McCleary’s shattering mind. The intertwining narratives are harrowing but necessary if we are to enter into McCleary’s world.
McCleary’s impending court martial set against a backdrop of terrorist attacks opens Part III. McCleary adds paranoia to his assembly of symptoms as his trial approaches. That took place in April 2006, but Joe McCleary’s personal trials had already taken place in Iraq, and his trial and subsequent naming in wider inquiries continued his ordeal well past the time when it should have been settled. Yates keeps that story bubbling while revealing what happened in Basra on the day that changed McCleary’s life.
War Trials is a searing indictment of the war in Iraq, the British Army, and a succession of British governments who did next to nothing to help soldiers like Joe McCleary caught up in their machinery. Yates’ writing is brilliant, exposing layer after layer of a modern horror story while keeping a sharp focus on the tragic destiny of the young soldier. His descriptive passages of the war claw at the emotions – I was reminded of Michael Herr’s unforgettable book on Vietnam, Dispatches. There are excuses for why all this happened, but Yates eviscerates any attempt at providing reasons. If War Trials does not leave you feeling angry that all this happened and could easily happen again, go back and start again. This is easily the best book I have read this year and perhaps the best written about the senseless war in Iraq.
