There's a scene in Brian de Palma’s movie Carlito’s Way which I think of often.
Al Pacino, fresh out of prison and determined to go clean on release, says of his incarceration: “A lot of wasted time…a lot of push-ups.”
Now, I’ve never been to prison, but I have been deployed overseas, and quite a bit over Christmas. It’s probably the closest thing to doing a stretch you’re ever going to get. There is—as Carlito pointed out—a lot of wasted time and a lot of push-ups.
There is also incredible humour and camaraderie and an often-overwhelming sense of duty. The time may sometimes feel wasted, but you know it’s not. Your reasons for being wherever you are—from the Golan Heights in Syria to Bamako in Mali—undeniably noble, even if the monotony can sometimes grate.
Christmas heightens every single one of these elements. The boredom. The frustration. The disconnect from family. It’s an incredibly sensitive time. Boredom, of course, does not mean that there’s nothing happening.
The almost 350 personnel stationed in South Lebanon at the moment will feel anything but bored as they run between bedroom and bunker, seeking safety from the sporadic shelling of the region from across the Israeli border.
Those troops would only love the privilege of being idle above ground. The support staff, too. The cooks, the fitters, and the engineers. All of them tasked with jobs that don’t stop for Santa. As the weather changes, so will the difficulty of their detail.
Depending on the threat level over the Christmas period, commanding officers will try to keep things as low tempo as possible, but much of that is out of their hands, dictated to them by higher headquarters.
I spent four Christmases deployed abroad. In Kosovo, in sub-zero conditions, we all ate Christmas lunch together in the canteen before heading out on a routine patrol after. Phone calls home were limited to a few minutes on a call card via an old Nokia. At least we had the snow to placate our seasonal senses.
In Liberia, a few years later, we did something similar, queuing up for the phone box after mass to call home, battling sweltering temperatures and a seven-second time delay in the process. As a younger man, I wanted the day to pass quickly.
Operational duties were a blessing. Less time to think of home and family and everything you were missing. If you were lucky, a parcel would’ve arrived from Ireland on time. Tayto crisps and bars of chocolate.
If you were lucky, a Monday sports supplement, four weeks out of date, not that that mattered in the slightest. It sounds a tad hard to believe, but the little things mattered greatly.
In Afghanistan, some years later, the fan mail took an even more surreal turn. About four weeks before Christmas, individual care packages started to arrive with my name on them.
Although I knew my family cared for me in a way bespoke to the West of Ireland, I immediately understood that there was little or no chance they would be either organised enough or so bothered to send me a curated shoebox full of personalised gifts. Love is one thing, daftness something else entirely.
Instead, the packages I received were addressed to me from school kids across America.
“Dear Major Sheridan” they would write, a little creepily, “I just wanted to let you know what a hero you are to me and my family. I feel so much safer knowing you are over there protecting us. We hope you don’t miss your family too much. Thank you for you service!”.
The first one was cute. The twelfth one, unsettling. The boxes would be filled with American candys and Hershey bars and hand drawn pictures of American soldiers doing heroic things under the stars and stripes.
How I longed for some mundane normality, an envelope from home with a two-liner from my mother about how much golf my dad was playing and what the weather was like.
The love bombing incoming from elementary schools in Arrow Rock, Missouri, only added to the absurdity of being there in the first instance, and highlighted the industrial complex of veneration that the military in the United States enjoy, unchallenged.
There are many things I could criticise Ireland about, but our rather appropriate levels of appreciation for the work our Defence Forces do is certainly not one of them. If we started a campaign of random school kids in Fermoy sending care packages to Barney from Buncrana stationed in Syria, I’d personally think we’d lost the plot.
Christmas day in Kabul was a bizarre experience. An otherwise normal working day, we began the morning with a 10k run around the compound.
Immediately after breakfast, there was an option to attend a special screening of a not-yet-released Star Wars movie in the American embassy, the multi-billion-dollar unicorn the world watched the Taliban take over unopposed five years later.
The movie was due to finish just before lunch. We then exchanged gifts in the office as a team. By 12.30, it was back to work. By the time I reached my prison cell-sized room later that evening, I felt like Al Pacino in Carlito's Way.
Bludgeoned by the contrived nature of the well-intentioned forced fun earlier in the day, I delighted in my solitude that came with an uninterrupted night of watching The Wire.
There will be many Irish personnel scattered around smaller UN missions who will face a similar Christmas Day next week. In Lebanon and on the Golan, there will at least be a little emotional security blanket of safety in numbers.
Lads will know each other. Know what to watch out for. Spot the fella who is especially down, or vulnerable. But, for the men and women on observer team sites in Syria and Western Sahara, they will be amongst strangers.
Russian Naval officers. Fijian infantrymen. Bhutanese doctors. While the company will be unfamiliar, it at least presents an opportunity to experience the season through the eyes of others.
Each one will have volunteered knowing being away over Christmas was a probability but knowing it in advance doesn’t make it any easier.
The Irish Defence Forces have certainly become more aware of the welfare of their troops overseas at Christmas.
Co-ordinated messages broadcast through their social media channels have undoubtedly helped remove a little bit of the mystery for the families back in Ireland and bridged the emotional gap between the men and women abroad and their kids at home.
It’s not quite care packages sent from anonymous school kids, but it's a necessary step to ensure those in uniform realise that—as the rest of the country downs tools and celebrates together—our men and women overseas are far from forgotten.