The Junior Officers' Reading Club

I just finished reading young ex-officer Patrick Hennessey's bestseller The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars, with a view to using it as a set text for our first-year cadets. Unfortunately, I don't think it is well suited to our needs; the language is quite complex, and it presupposes quite extensive knowledge of the British military organisation and culture, so I guess we'll stick with the old memoirs from the Falklands War, One Hundred Days and Four Weeks in May.
(Aside: what we definitely could use is a new little naval war involving at least one of the English-speaking states of the world, and someone writing a whopping great book about it, complete with a lot of mesmerising navy and ship facts. That would both modernise and fancify (is that a word?) our curriculum.)
I don't think this book was quite as impressive as the reviews suggest, although it is interesting that a very young officer writes about his very recent experiences in a conflict that concerns us deeply. The title of the book is rather misleading, the Reading Club plays a very small part, and he writes mostly about training at Sandhurst, boredom in Iraq, and exhausting operations in Helmand.
What I found quite interesting is that his descriptions of his thoughts and feelings about being a soldier, like the yearning to see action, to prove himself, the intense feeling of being alive (the adrenalin-kick) during combat, and the feeling of being out of place when he is back home in London on leave for a few weeks, correspond very closely to observations made by historian Joanna Bourke in a 2001 Guardian article.
Comradeship, the craving for real action, the joy of destroying the enemy - these are ingredients in the life and experiences of soldiers that set them apart from "normal" civilian life, as Patrick Hennessey confirms in this interview: