Last week I sat in the office with my ‘colleagues’ (comrades having fallen out of fashion of late), eating our reheated packed lunches and talking about whether it was preferable, assuming the medical benefit to be equal, to take a fecal microbiome transfer via the mouth or suppository. The group split 50:50 and both sides dug in.

The whole argument reached the heights that it did exactly because it was held in hushed voices: we were sitting in the ‘break-out’ space of an open plan office, and would shortly exchange resigned glances, wash our tupperware, and go back to our oh-so-serious zoom discussions. Because we were ‘colleagues’ of the work-from-home era, bonded only through the commonality of our email server. To talk about suppositories was to think about bodies! Bums! Parts of the body that ought to be shrouded in darkness! We giggled (rather than laughed) precisely because of the bureaucratic norms of the space. By which I mean, a place in which we occupied a rank and position but very much did not bring our ‘selves’ into.

Body-less but also in some sense mindless, for it isn’t the simple lack of embodied feelings (desire, restlessness) but to some extent a prohibition on personality that the bureaucratic office enforces. In the office, one isn’t expected to call up a sense of one’s own ideas of right, past a certain level of seniority, but rather one’s ideas of how the organisation would do it. The more encultured we are (and progression is absolutely a sieve for cultural fit), the more likely it is that even disagreements are framed around whether it ‘should be done that way here’. In our daily work, we hold responsibilities rather than perform any active duty. To even describe the kind of absence I mean, I’m forced to use terminology of warfare, because where else do we combine ideas of work, duty and commitment with movement and edge-of-life action? I guess one could feel called to be a P.E teacher?

Fine. So bureaucratic process in war, precisely because the body is on the line for more than just repetitive strain injuries, must pragmatically recognise a certain ‘fog’ that the ordinary corporate office need only gently nod toward, like your manager seeing you leave for the pub an hour shy of knock-off time on a Friday. In this sense, the SAS (as depicted in the world of SAS:RH) isn’t actually different from the rest of the army in the ways that it thinks it is. Notice SAS: Rogue Heroes doesn’t actually know how to show ‘normal war’, I think because to show it in a realistic way would involve too much of the very freedom that in its narrative belongs to the SAS alone. All it does show pre-SAS formation is one night raid, already in the style of SAS to come, and the truck convoy you described so well.

In a sense, there’s a (forgive me) Trojan Horse in the other direction as well: if all this anarchy and violence is concentrated in the SAS, it’s implied there’s another war around the corner, where things really might run to order and troops line up neatly to ‘exchange’ fire. Bureaucracy of war isn’t about what you’re allowed to do gun in hand. At that point, it’s you and the other guy, inevitably human, with wives skilled in needlework and all. It’s also not the absence of drinking or drug abuse (rife throughout armies from antiquity onwards) or the bar violence. Those are just the inappropriate jokes of the office kitchen - a little steam blown off, a little pretence of self-assertion, though we all know it’s soon to be relinquished. It’s for this reason that Zoom has brought on the perfect worker in a way that the office never quite could, because finally there is no shared enviroment, but the bureaucracy was getting on just fine (in fact better) without it.

No, bureaucracy is the mail getting through, regardless of where you are in the desert. And the SAS rely on that just as much as anyone.