Read Out in the Army: My Life as a Gay Soldier for Free Online

everyone else in the platoon would all be thinking exactly the same thing. I hurried myself to the office door and stood there like a rabbit in the headlights.
    ‘Get in here, Wharton. And close the door!’
    I was alone in the office with the platoon sergeant. The other platoon staff were elsewhere, probably making sure Ryan wasn’t doing anything silly. I was invited to pull up a chair, something that had never happened before to anyone. Platoon offices were no place for recruits. I eyed up the personal effects and pictures the sergeant had on his desk: pictures of a wife, two young children . It was the first time I’d considered this man, who we each feared and admired in equal breath, as someone other than the army action man he’d portrayed himself to be.
    ‘What’s going on with Junior Soldier Ryan?’
    ‘I don’t know, Corporal O’Horse. It wasn’t me!’ I was terrified I was about to be booted out of the army for bullying somebody I’d rarely spoken with.
    ‘I know it wasn’t you, you idiot. Ryan says you’re his only friend. He says you’re the only person who doesn’t bully him.’
    I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Ryan had told the platoon staff that everyone hated him and that I was his only friend. Ryan had made me out to be a godsend that stuck up forhim daily and took an active interest in his welfare. The truth was, however, I’d barely spoken with him; I didn’t particularly like him very much and I certainly didn’t consider him a friend. Why would he say those things to the platoon sergeant?
    ‘Is he gay?’ the sergeant asked. The memory of his first address to us all flashed across my mind. He’d made it very clear that he didn’t like gay people. But how on earth would I know the answer to his question?
    ‘I have no idea, Corporal O’Horse. He’s never spoken about anything like that to me.’
    As self-centred as it now sounds, I realised at that very moment that for the previous ten or so months none of us had held a grown-up conversation with the man I was in the middle of talking with. I felt good that I’d managed to break down some institutional barrier that prevented platoon sergeants and recruits from having grown-up discussions. I was helping with the enquiry as to what had occurred earlier in the evening. For a few minutes, I was a little more important than I’d possibly ever been.
    He asked me again if I wanted to tell him who’d been bullying Ryan, but away from saying that pretty much everyone picked on him for one reason or another, I told him I wasn’t of any further use to him.
    Junior Soldier Ryan was officially the smallest, weakest and youngest-looking recruit in the whole platoon. He would always finish last. If anybody was late in the morning it was likely to be him and if something went wrong, which it often did, he’d resort to crying straight away. Knowing what I know now, I’d say the army wasn’t suitable for him, but back then I guess I just thought he was a bit of a wuss, constantly letting the side down and causing us trouble.
    The army, rightly or wrongly, puts its recruits in situations where ‘it pays to be a winner’. The number of times I’ve heardthat line shouted at soldiers over the past ten years is unreal. If somebody in a team, in this example 6 Platoon, is failing or letting the side down, the entire team is punished in the hope that it will make the individual responsible realise his actions have affected everybody. This usually makes that individual unpopular and often results in some other consequence later on, a beating or some other form of bullying from the boys in his section.
    After I was unable to provide the platoon sergeant with answers, he decided that we would all be punished until someone owned up to writing on Ryan’s wall. What followed was hours of misery, beginning with a run down the six flights of stairs and outside into the rain. Once there, and the sergeant could see us out of his office window, we