Driving an armoured vehicle hit by rocket-propelled grenades

(RPGs), and on the second occasion terribly wounded, he extricated his Warrior and its crew from mortal peril. One RPG exploded less than a foot from his head, crushing part of his skull and inflicting brain injuries, but he kept driving, with his officer in the turret also wounded, until they were out of the battle zone. He was 24 years old, and had been three years in the British Army. Most memoirs of soldiering are pretty awful. Against expectations, this one is remarkably good.

It paints a vivid picture of a young man’s odyssey from a shack life on the little Caribbean island of Grenada, to the fierce heat of Bush and Blair’s war in Iraq. It presents a convincing image of the British Army, not in the least idealised. The soldiers in Beharry’s tale talk as soldiers always do, in expletives and shorthand. The good, the bad and the ugly are all here, some of the latter officers and NCOs.

On Grenada, Beharry dreamt as a child of being a racing driver. His father was a drunk who gambled away whatever money he got, leaving his grandmother as the big influence on the boy’s life. Johnson was never much into schooling, and devoted his teens to scratching a living from casual labouring, and drinking away the proceeds. His gran said: “You a good child — you smart, kind an’ good. Do somet’ing with your life, Johnson. Don’t throw it all away.” In 1999, he scraped together the airfare to Britain, went to live with his aunt Irene in Hounslow, swore off alcohol, and started working on building sites. Unfortunately, he soon got seriously into marijuana.

After two years here, when first he walked into an army recruiting office in his dusty dreadlocks and a haze of pot, the sergeant in charge told him to come back when he had cleaned himself of drugs and got fit. Amazingly he did both, chopped off his hair and became an infantry recruit. His mates called him “Bee”, “Harry” or “Paki”. His NCOs thought he was an awkward number and a skiver, but the army taught him to drive, and he fell in love at first sight with his 25-ton Warrior fighting vehicle. In an unexpected fashion, the Warrior fulfilled his childish dreams of racing a Porsche. He enjoyed an ecstatic moment in Al Amarah, when his column encountered an insurgents’ pick-up truck in the road.

The only way through was by driving over it: “Glass shatters, metal buckles and the pick-up collapses. It’s like treading on a Coke can. I can’t help it. I start to laugh. ‘Something tickling you, Beharry?,’ Mr Deane asks. ‘I wanted to do this me whole life, Boss,’ I tell him. “Mad Grenadian bastard,’ Mr Deane says.” Beharry’s unit’s tour in Iraq, based in a hotbed of insurgency — the outskirts of Al Amarah — proved to be one of the most violent experiences British soldiers have known since the Falklands. Patrolling the streets, again and again the regiment met an enemy bent on mauling them with RPGs, mortars and small arms. The book’s accounts of “contacts” are vivid and full of good detail. “I’m so used to the sound of bullets striking our armour I don’t even bother to duck any more . . .

As we pass an alleyway I glance left and see an RPG in flight, heading right for us. I just manage to scream, ‘Boss! RPG! Nine o’clock!’ before it whooshes past us. ‘Shit! That was close!,’ Mr Deane says.” Battles are full of clichés, because the formula is always the same: successive generations of young men are introduced to the brutal sensations of killing, and of confronting strangers eager to kill them. Once, a 10-year-old exploded a Molotov cocktail on a Warrior.

Nothing shocked the men of the PWRR more than the fact that they kept finding themselves fighting children, and often had no choice but to shoot them down. It does the author no disservice to say that he chose his ghostwriter well.

The book’s abrupt, staccato style and dialogue catch the flavour of this thankless little war, and the sort of men who are fighting it. A soldier remarks that everybody in the army is running away from something, but “Bee” does not analyse his own flight. His Warrior seems the focus of his passions, more than the military as an institution.

This is not a reflective book, but it would be monstrously unfair to expect one from a very young man. It is simply a warm, good-natured narrative of Beharry’s life in peace and war. The Queen told him at his investiture that he is “a very special person”. In one sense, this is obviously true. In another way, however, his story is moving because he is so ordinary.

A dismaying number of VC winners have found their lives blighted by being branded with the medal. Interviews that Beharry has given for his book’s publication highlight his own sorrows: a broken marriage, continuing pain and emotional strains resulting from his wounds; a host of supplicants crowding around the celebrity. I hope he overcomes his troubles. His book presents a portrait of an uncommonly decent young man. I doubt whether Johnson Beharry, any more than any other soldier at war, thought for a moment about his adoptive country as he fought his Warrior through the streets of Al Amarah.

His mates, reflexes ingrained by training, together with the instinct for self-preservation, must have dominated his mind. He deserves to find happiness now. Without a few men like him the British Army could not do the amazing things it does, on behalf of us all. COURAGE UNDER FIRE Beharry showed astonishing composure as well as bravery in winning his VC, the first awarded to a living recipient since 1969. In the first engagement for which he was cited, on May 1, 2004, he pulled his wounded commanding officer and three other soldiers from his stricken Warrior tank after an ambush, despite having taken a direct hit from a bullet on his helmet. Six weeks later, he drove his vehicle to safety after an RPG exploded inches from his head and shattered his skull. He was in a coma for eight days, and had such severe wounds that he had to undergo reconstructive surgery. Available at the Books First price of £16.99 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585