Training | 2010.01.17
The life of a soldier
Rifleman Phil Allen, 20, was killed by a bomb last November, six weeks after arriving in Afghanistan. He was talented, funny – and a far more complex character than press reports of his death revealed
Phil Allen lives on, for now, in the digital world. His friends post their thoughts on his Facebook page to keep it open. People who don\'t know him at all write on another Facebook memorial site . Closer friends ring his mobile, to listen to his answerphone message, or turn to his MySpace page , which bleakly records the last time he logged in. And in the living room of his home in Dorset, his mother, Karen Charman-Allen, sits and plays More Time, one of the songs he wrote and recorded before he left home for Afghanistan.
Phil\'s voice wafts out of the speakers. "I used to think that I had the answers/Now I know, I took too many chances." It\'s an accomplished ballad, but the knowledge that Phil Allen is dead and that he died not long after writing this song makes it hard to listen to. His grandma, Jacky, quietly gets up and leaves the room while the song plays. His mother holds back her tears and puts on another track.
Rifleman Phillip Allen joined the army last February. He completed his training in September and went straight to Afghanistan. Six weeks later, on 7 November, aged 20, he was killed by an IED while on foot patrol in northern Sangin . He was the 231st British soldier to be killed in Afghanistan since the start of the current conflict. On 16 November more than 1,000 people lined the streets of Wootton Bassett as his body was brought home to Britain.
The tributes released by the Ministry of Defence were unusually personal, and came from all ranks. Phil "was a dynamic, full-on, tough rifleman who made an immediate impact", said Lieutenant Colonel Rob Thomson. "He seemed unfazed by being attached to my senior platoon, the Fire Support Group; it might have been the exuberance of youth. He was not short of exuberance," said Major Richard Streatfeild. "Rifleman Allen was a dream new rifleman. He was straight on the money, fit, superbly keen and always going the extra mile for others," said Corporal Gareth Williams. "Phil will be remembered as being a bit of a poser whenever he came face-to-face with a camera. Phil was also one for impressions, taking the mickey out of anyone, regardless of rank," said Rifleman Andrew Mallett.
"Hundreds say farewell to hero," reported the papers. Phil was pictured straight-backed and inscrutable – soldiers are not supposed to smile – beneath his green beret, and his name was added to the lists of casualties. And then he became a statistic, the 94th of 2009\'s 108 dead British soldiers.
For all the public mourning of our dead in Afghanistan, it\'s not often we see beyond the statistics, tributes and official pictures. Dead soldiers very quickly become almost as remote and anonymous as the "Allen PJ" Phil found inscribed in stone on a first world war memorial on a trip to Normandy during his training.
But the memories of Phil\'s mother, and other members of his family, help show that, like all the victims of the conflict in Afghanistan, Phil was a more complex, interesting and funny person than the stereotypical brave British soldier we get to read about. And he was someone who lived a life, before he walked to his death, that was far from straightforward or easy.
Born in Poole on 6 February 1989, Phil Allen was Karen Charman-Allen\'s first child. When he was very small, people said he looked like Winston Churchill, she says. "He was little, round and chubby-faced and I\'ve got a photo of him doing a V for victory sign. It\'s quite a comical one." Phil\'s father was not involved in his upbringing. Karen, 42, a petite, determined single mother, managed to get a degree in history and English literature while bringing up her three children. Mother and son were close; they looked the same and shared a similar sense of humour. When Karen speaks about Phil now, his voice is still so vivid to her that she often quotes directly what he would say; he lives on here, too.
Everyone from 10-year-olds to pensioners knew Phil in the sprawling village of Verwood, close to Bournemouth, where Phil, his mother and two younger sisters, Leah, who is 17, and Natasha, 10, lived in a semi-detached council house. "From a very young age, he was always very loving, very giving," his mother says. "Everybody else came first before himself. As long as people were happy and had what they needed, that was important to him. He had the time of day for everybody. If a little old lady bumped into him in the street, he would stand there for a good hour just chatting away."
He was "no perfect child", she says, but there was never a dull moment. "The antics he used to get up to. The laughs I\'ve had with him. One night I\'m lying in bed. \'Mum! I need help.\' What have you done? \'Just come and have a look.\' I get up. Top of the stairs, he\'d pushed his head through the banisters and he was stuck. I couldn\'t help him for laughing. He saw the funny side. I said what have you done? He said, \'I just wanted to see if my head would get through.\'" Karen creases up at the memory. "That\'s just the sort of thing he would do. He was just, ahh, always so comical."
Karen still lives with her daughters in the house where the whole family grew up. Gathered around her are memories of Phil: the dresser now houses one of his union flags, his military belt and precious green beret, which were recovered from Afghanistan, while a friend of Phil\'s has created a memorial pinboard with a collage of photos and given it to her. By the computer are Phil\'s teenage sketches of AC/DC and the fictional soldiers of Sharpe\'s Rifles. The family home is filled with the awful bustle of bereavement: emails are printed out, letters of condolence pile up on the table, Karen\'s parents Jacky and Tim Senter make cups of tea and make themselves useful, while the handyman father of Phil\'s girlfriend is doing some work outside.
By middle school, when Phil reached 10, he was finding life in the classroom increasingly difficult. "He was the class clown; the usual thing, always making sure everyone is happy, joking around," says Karen. He did not care if people laughed at him; just as long as they were laughing. Behind the laughs, though, Phil lacked confidence and, increasingly, was bullied. When someone did something wrong, his mother says, classmates blamed Phil. He got a reputation as "naughty". And when he was blamed for something he had not done, he would get angry. "He was bullied quite badly at school and that knocked him." His mother and grandma Jacky, 68, a retired nurse, both say the bullies were not brought to justice; Phil "lost a lot of faith in adults", says Karen.
In the end, Phil\'s behavioural difficulties became such that he was placed in Penwithen, a school in Dorchester for pupils with special needs, and in fact he never again attended a mainstream school. He left without any GCSEs, but Karen is positive about Penwithen. Phil decided to board there during the week, and the school transformed his life, she says. "It turned him around. It built up his confidence and his self-esteem because that had always been knocked. This school made him realise, \'I\'m not stupid, I\'m not dumb, I can do something.\'" The school\'s steady routine, its emphasis on children making their own decisions and working through problems in a more informal way – pupils could even get a hug from their key workers – suited Phil. "If pupils were angry," says Jacky, "and Phil used to get very angry, they were encouraged to go out and walk around in the grounds."
Without that school (which closed down not long after he left), Phil told his mother he would have ended up in prison. Instead, he discovered acting and adults he could trust. He joined a theatre company while at school and took the role of a henpecked husband, impeccably straight-faced when the audience was in stitches. His school travelled to a drama festival in Latvia where he won a prize for best actor.
His grand creative passion, however, was music. Aged eight, he played the cornet and sang with the Salvation Army, later teaching himself to play keyboards and the guitar. He could pick up a song just by listening to it. He loved all kinds of music, from Led Zeppelin to Busted and especially the Beatles. A handsome teenager with a stylishly messy indie haircut, he played guitar and sang at friends\' birthdays. In his bedroom, he wrote lyrics, composed songs and laid down all the parts on a 20-track recorder. Upstairs at home his guitars still hang on the wall: an acoustic, two electric and a replica of Paul McCartney\'s bass guitar; like McCartney, Phil was left-handed. When he left home for Afghanistan, Karen had his childhood bedroom redecorated for him so he would have a grownup room when he came home on leave; she now rather wishes she had left it as it was.
When he was 16, Phil left Penwithen. His former headmaster remembers him working though "a lot of difficulties" and leaving Penwithen on "a very positive note". His former PE teacher, Steve Campbell, recalls Phil\'s talent for sport. Campbell was also in the Royal Dragoon Guards and Phil would often ask him about being in the army. But when he left school, Phil told his mother he was "not mentally mature enough yet" to join the army; instead he went to college in Poole to study art and get some GCSEs. Before getting any qualifications, though, he had to learn about fine art, which he had no interest in. He dropped out after seven months.
Phil got a job valeting motorbikes and, at a party 18 months ago, he met Karina Pharoah, who became his steady girlfriend. Despite this, he was still "missing something", says Karen. "Then, in August [2008], he said, \'Mum, I\'ve decided to join the army, could you take me to the careers office?\'" He decided to leave home for the first time and join the Rifles, the largest infantry regiment in the British army.
His decision may have come out of the blue in the end, but for Phil the army was always a serious option. For all his creativity, he was realistic enough to know it was unlikely he would ever get a record deal. And for all his artistic pursuits, he was always a physical boy: the last to come in from outside, playing football in the snow wearing shorts or spending hours out on his skateboard. His mother remembers him hanging off a climbing frame aged three. "He thrived on anything dangerous. He\'d get on a mountain bike, never having done mountain biking before, and go flying down hills. Same with the skateboard. Some of the jumps he\'d do were just, oooh," Karen gasps. "You would see the skateboard flying back and Phil sliding down groaning and you\'d think he was in agony, and he\'d just lie there and go \'Ow. I\'m all right,\' and then get up. His pain threshold was absolutely amazing."
And the biggest male figure in his life, Karen\'s brother Mark, was a soldier. "They look alike, they have so many mannerisms that are alike and their history is very similar," says Jacky, "because Mark couldn\'t stand being indoors and he tried civvy street and he hated it as well." As a soldier, Mark had undertaken two tours of Northern Ireland and also served in the Gulf war. And when he was a teenager, Phil had been in the local army cadets. "The first time he went away on a weekend it was winter and when I picked him up he absolutely stank, caked in mud, but with the biggest Cheshire-Cat grin on him. I had to stand him outside and hose him down," says Karen. "I knew when he was knee-high to a grasshopper that he would end up in the military."
For the first six weeks of Phil\'s army training he was in Catterick Garrison in North Yorkshire. "I used to get the phone calls: \'It\'s damn hard Mum, it\'s breaking me, I just want to curl up in a ball and sit in a corner and cry.\' And I said, \'It\'s entirely up to you, son\' and he said, \'Oh I\'m doing it, I am not going to give up, this is what I want.\'"
Phil quickly gained a reputation for his impressions. Donkey from Shrek and Kermit the Frog were old favourites but he was fearless enough to impersonate senior officers as well. He did not moan bitterly, Karen says, but he would humorously question authority and "never let that person forget about it either, if there was something amiss". He picked up a new nickname: Victor Meldrew. "We thought he was 60 years old, not 20, as he used to moan and groan!" said his friend Rifleman Liam McNulty in a tribute released by the Ministry of Defence. Without a guitar – Phil planned to take his acoustic to Northern Ireland when he settled at the base there – he acquired a new habit: reading, and he devoured Chris Ryan and Andy McNab\'s soldiering stories.
When he first got leave and came home one weekend, his mother was stunned by the muscular soldier who had replaced her slim teenager. "When he came home that weekend it was, wow, big change. Talk about pride. Unbelievable. Confidence oozing. Standing tall, so proud. He went as a little boy, because he did look baby-faced, and after six weeks, he was a man." After 26 weeks, Phil finished his training and Karen travelled to Catterick to watch his passing-out parade. "When they pass out, they are fully trained riflemen. They are ready. I could see that in Phil. \'There is nothing more I can do, I am trained to do my job.\' He was just so proud, really, really proud."
His biggest dream was still to get a record contract but he was realistic. "He used to joke, \'If James Blunt can do it, so can I\' [Blunt was an army officer before becoming a pop star]. He could always see the humorous side in anything." Instead, with his new salary of £17,000 a year, Phil proposed to Karina, who is 19 and works in human resources in Verwood, days before he was whisked off to join his regiment in Afghanistan. "They were a fantastic couple, they just gelled. We used to joke that she was the female version of Phil," says Karen. "She is part of my family now, regardless."
Karen drove him to Southampton airport, from where he flew to the Rifles\' base in Northern Ireland before leaving Europe for the first time ever, on a flight to Afghanistan. It was the last time she saw her son. When he arrived in Camp Bastion, the British army headquarters, he phoned home. "\'Wow, this place is huge. It\'s a holiday camp! There\'s a Pizza Hut here. There\'s a Burger King.\' He was in his element," says Karen. Every Monday, Phil got 30 minutes to call his family; he spent 15 minutes talking to his mother and 15 with Karina. The heat made him tired and lethargic but "what got him more was how bleak it was. He said you could think you were on another planet. He actually said, \'When I get home I never want to see a beach again\', because he was sick of sand." Karen laughs. "We used to have a giggle."
His mother says she could hear the happiness in Phil\'s voice when they spoke on the phone. "He was loving it. When he used to talk about firefights, oh!" says Karen. "I used to think, Phil, really, should you be telling your mum this on the phone? \'But you\'ve got to understand it\'s absolutely wicked!\'" She does an impression of her son\'s adrenaline-fuelled excitement, and then speaks softly again. "He talked about dying. He wasn\'t silly. He was so focused. He said, \'I\'m scared, Mum, I\'m terrified of going where I am going, but if I wasn\'t terrified then you should be worried because there would be something wrong.\' He\'d say, \'If I do go, if I don\'t make it back, it\'s got to be quick and instant. I might cope with losing a leg or two. But if I lost my arm, put a bullet through my head.\'" If he lost an arm he could no longer play guitar. "Exactly. His life was over. So he knew. He was a soldier. He understood. His attitude was, \'If it\'s our time to go, it\'s our time to go.\'"
Afghanistan must have been quite a shock for a young lad from Dorset. "The way the locals lived affected him," says Karen. "He would question why we were there in the sense that, \'Is it damaging their way of life?\'" She says he struggled to understand the gulf between our society, with all its money and technology and unhappiness, and the contentment he saw in rural Afghanistan. The injuries he witnessed also hit home. "Not just mates, locals. He saw two kids [getting injured] and it affected him."
One Friday 6 November, Karen got a surprise phone call from Phil. "He rang me in the morning saying, \'Just a quick call – because I\'ve got no minutes left – to let you know you won\'t hear from me for a couple of weeks because we\'re going out in the field.\' I went, \'OK, can you . . ?\' He said, \'No I can\'t tell you what we\'re doing but I\'m out in the field for two weeks and then I\'m back to Bastion because I\'m coming home.\'" He was going to be home for Christmas. Instead, he walked out of the Forward Operating Base on his latest mission on the Saturday, and was struck by an IED.
The knock on Karen\'s door came at 12.30am on Sunday morning, Remembrance Day. "At first I thought, who the hell is coming round at this time of night?" The penny dropped before she got to the door. "I didn\'t want to open it because I knew. I took one look at them and said \'Don\'t even bother,\' and shut the door. I knew what they were here for."
A month after the body of Rifleman Allen was flown back to Britain, in torrential rain, hundreds of people lined the streets of Wimborne for his funeral. Among many more messages from people whose lives Phil had touched, Karen received a letter from Gordon Brown. "He does bother to hand-write them himself, regardless of what the writing is like. I could read it. I don\'t think anybody should be made aware of what is in that letter, it is personal to me. They are words of comfort and when you read the words, he does genuinely care."
Karen is now keeping busy raising funds to help wounded soldiers and bereaved families and worrying about her daughters. Leah is pouring her grief into poetry about her brother; Natasha writes Phil messages ("we\'re not going to have those playfights any more") on the computer. Phil\'s former cadet force has asked Karen to present a new award called the Phil Allen Cup to the best recruit. There is a plaque going up on a bench in Verwood. The village football team is organising an annual tournament in memory of Phil. Ultimately, Karen is working with Phil\'s best friend and former bandmate, Karl Howard, to see if her son\'s songs could be released as an album to raise money for the Rifles\' Benevolent Fund, which helps injured soldiers as well as widows and bereaved families; she hopes that James Blunt might be persuaded to help out.
Amid all these comings and goings, Karen is convinced that her loss, everyone\'s loss, was not in vain. She believes the armed forces are successfully preventing terror plots being fomented in Afghanistan and only wishes the politicians would stop bickering and the public would get behind the troops on their dangerous mission. Her son, she says, is a hero, but that does not mean he was only a macho soldier. "We shouldn\'t think the military are all brave and robust men because they are not. They are like you and me. They are like Joe Bloggs in the street. They are only human. They are doing a job for our country, to protect and serve. So people just need to get off their backs and stop stereotyping them. My son was one of thousands who are still out there. What about those lads? We don\'t hear about them, still going on, still moving forward. I\'ve lost my son, yes, but I\'m not going to forget those that are still serving for us and I will support them all the way."
When his music stops, we look through some photographs of Phil on Facebook. "Oh wow," says Karen. "I haven\'t seen that one. It must\'ve been when he first got to Camp Bastion because he isn\'t sunburned." She smiles. "I know he is my son but he was my best friend because we would have a laugh and he used to give me advice too, which I found comical, but a lot of the time he was actually right."
Before Phil left, he told her not to be sad, "because he\'d hate anyone to be sad because of him". Karen did not cry when she saw him off, for what turned out to be last time, and she is not crying now, as she hears his voice, singing. "He said, \'I\'m happy Mum, I now know who I am.\' He\'d found that thing that was missing in civvy street. He\'d found himself. I know I\'ve lost him. The grieving, the hurt, it will always be there, but it\'s those words I keep hearing in my head. I know my son was happy and that\'s the most important thing."
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jan/18/soldier-phil-allen-afghanistan
