Geraint Jones’s Brothers in Arms
I'm only on page 62, but I already wanted to write a review of Geraint Jones's 'Brothers in Arms' for two reasons.
First: slang. I'm a language nerd. I studied linguistics and still diagram sentences in my head (that's a verb, that's a countable noun, etc.). Also, I studied 5 languages and have lived and worked in places where I rarely spoke in English.
These two things combined mean that I regularly play with language and words. I think about how words mean one thing and can mean the total opposite (“sick”, “awesome”, “proper”, or “eager”). What really gets me going is when someone is able to simply and clearly explain slang that can take people years to master.
Brothers in Arms is great for people like me who play with words because Geraint introduces the reader to British army slang in a way that is approachable, funny, and irreverent. Rather than just forcing the reader to stumble their way through dense colloquialisms, Geraint immerses the reader into the life he lived.
Geraint gave me a sense of what it feels like not just to say words like “scoff” or “gen”, but to understand what they meant to the men and women with whom he spent some of the most important periods of his life. The nerd in my got excited learning a new language.
There's a deeper impact here, though because language, in my opinion, is at the core of culture and community. If we can speak one another’s formal and informal language then we can find opportunities to build deeper connections. 62 pages in, there's one thing that's clear to me already, Geraint strives to create the kind of community that sustains him and his comrades. He doesn’t pull punches on how community is built in a war zone: there’s a lot of filial competition and name calling that creates a deep bond.
Unfortunately, though, community-building frequently devolves into insider-outsider tensions: “us” vs “them”. In my experience, those tensions tend to revolve around sex and gender. Geraint quickly and forcefully rejects that tension by explicitly stating:
“’It’s alright if you’re gay, Blake,’ he was told. ‘We’ll take the piss out of you a bit, but it’s alright with us, honestly.’ And it was. We had a solider in the company who was known as Gay Sam…”
And:
“We had a female company clerk…I could tell you that she was one of the boys, and that we treated her as we did each other, but that would be a lie. She was special. She was a connection to home…”
This is the second reason I felt compelled to write this: I’m a man whose partner is a man. Also, I’ve experienced nothing but acceptance from my military, firefighter, and rugby brothers and sisters. There can be an unfounded perspective that competitive and intense communities breed discrimination. Geraint managed to debunk that perspective in the matter of a few pages and sets an example that needs to be recognized and imitated. I don’t know what else he says in the book, but if he keeps up this perspective, he gives voice to those who can be marginalized. Those of us who can should stand up to protect those who need it most.
That’s hero work.