Posts Tagged ‘war’
Channel 4 – The Air Hospital
This was magnificent television, enough surely to shock us all out of our complacency. Watch it here.
It was the story of the courageous team that flies our badly injured heroes home from Afghanistan in a C17 aircraft, converted to one large intensive care unit. Every second of this documentary is shot through with pain, heroism, trauma and the utter pointlessness of the war.
I am afraid that I don’t believe we will be any further on in Afghanistan in another year. I don’t believe that having our troops there now is making our country safer. I think it actually makes terrorist attacks more likely.
What this programme reminded me of most effectively is that every time we hear of another soldier who has lost his life, there are four or five others, horribly mutilated and facing a future which may well be worse than death.
It has been said a hundred times but we need to say it a hundred times more, every day. This is an unwinnable war, a pointless war.
Bring our boys home now!
Yet Again the MOD Fails Our Heroes
I hope that I never have to experience the reality of war. but, I think like every man, I am fascinated with how I would behave in combat. We all want to be heroes and, as I have read, courage is often forged from the fear of disgrace. The idea of letting down one’s comrades can be more frightening than bullets or explosions.
Even during the Second World War, I would now be deemed too old to fight. They won’t even have me in the TA, much as I would love to volunteer. Yet every day, right this very minute, there are men and women younger than my own children, who are being called on to put themselves in mortal danger on our behalf.
These people deserve the very, very best that we can do for them. Clearly, the reality of combat means that there will be times when circumstances are less than ideal. Ammunition may run out. It might have been preferable to have larger calibre weapons given the force that the enemy deployed. If air cover had arrived earlier, lives may have been saved. The very nature of combat is that it is unpredictable but when there are lessons to be learned it is imperative that they are studied in depth and acted upon.
Why, oh why, is there episode after episode where the MOD refuses to acknowledge its failings and seems to duck and dive to avoid responsibility? This isn’t about civil service office politics, about covering one’s back or manouvering for promotion. This is about death and pain and blood and grief. It’s about mothers who will never see their sons again, about fit, healthy, beautiful bodies and minds that are broken, twisted and consigned to the scrapheap with – yet another scandal – insultingly inadequate financial support.
Steve Jones was an SAS Lance Corporal on board the Hercules shot down over Baghdad in 2005. When I first came across the memorial bench on Thorney Island (see http://pjroldblog.wordpress.com/2008/06/22/walking-the-dog-2/) I was deeply moved and when I returned there a few months later to find a memorial book full of glowing tributes and commendations, I felt that this story was one I wanted to take further.
So I made contact with the MOD press office and very tentatively enquired what support they might be able to offer me with a further story, perhaps even a documentary. A very charming female Wing Commander seemed interested and said that two of the men on the Hercules had been personal friends. The Army though were different. I received a courteous but frosty reception and was told that there was no question of being put in touch with the victims’ families.
I can understand, of course, that some of the families will just want to move on and that journalistic investigation may prolong their grief. In the end it was made clear to me that while the MOD wouldn’t stand in my way, it believed that the story had already been exhausted and wouldn’t offer me any support.
I have been an MOD spin doctor myself. Some years ago I was the communications advisor to the Assistant Chief of Staff, UK Support Command on the launch of the British Forces in Germany Health Service. The year that I spent working at Joint Headquarters in Rheindahlen gave me an insight into the services that I am very grateful for. One memory is of the extraordinary combination of austerity and luxury that I experienced while staying in the Officers Mess. My room was like a prison cell but in the morning there was silver service at breakfast as I sat at a huge four inch thick mahogany table surrounded by oil paintings, regimental colours and memorabilia. There was no menu. I could just order whatever it was that took my fancy.
My overwhelming memory though is of the incomparable integrity of the people I worked with. It left me with a feeling (entirely undeserved) of connection with the military and an understanding of how one really could trust the man next to you with your life.
In the extraordinary age in which we live, when cocaine-fuelled w**nker bankers abuse their customers and the taxpayer, when venal politicians grub around in the muck on billionaires’ yachts, whilst in Afghanistan our boys lay their lives on the line in medieval conditions, it is time that the MOD displayed a fraction of the courage that men like Steve Jones have and admitted its failings to start the process of putting them right.
For the full story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7683909.stm
Walking The Dog 3
The fields have been ploughed and scattered this week. My memory tells me that the ploughing should take place in the depths of winter so that the frosts can break up the great clumps of soil but that’s not the way it’s done in Emsworth.
Instead the local farmer brings in contractors who arrive in huge leviathan beasts, each worth a brace of Aston Martins, that devour the stubble fields and transform them into finely graded seedbed.
Think of the effort of lifting one spade of compacted soil. The plough carves down three spades deep and four spades wide with each of six blades. The earth surrenders to its mighty force and is exposed rich red and raw. Then a massive grader, its huge weight hauled at speed across the fields smashes the soil into powder. Only then does the farmer drive out his John Deere, looking puny by comparison and sets it to seeding and raking. In the space of three or four days the work is completed.
The new scenery brings out a burst of fresh exuberance from Capone. He gallops across the fields, his energy enough to lift any mood. His sheer joy at being perfectly expresses the purpose of a dog. He and the intimate experience of a walk with my best friend is the most powerful of therapies requiring no theory or structure, just the doing of it. Perhaps more like a meditation or prayer.
With age the individual senses diminish in power but I find that there is a greater discernment between them. I hear birdsong now like I never used to. The pleasure of the birds, the sea, the sky, the light and the breeze is all so much more intense and the unreserved, joyous companionship of my dog makes it all the more so.
The most extraordinary things happen every day to those of us that indulge in this most universal hobby of walking the dog. Last week, and I kid you not, from behind an isolated cottage, flew a second world war US fighter plane at no more than 200 feet. Breaking every civil aviation rule in the book, it sent Capone and me diving for the nearest slit trench convinced that we were its target.
Regularly the Chinooks fly over Chichester harbour, their massive thumping beat pulverising the air. If you happen to be wading through a large area of eight foot tall bullrushes it is so easy to imagine the rattle of M16s and the threat of napalm descending from above.
But the real dangers that lurk here are of a more rural nature. The most marmalade orange, malevolent cat saunters along the church wall, a half dead rat clamped in its teeth. The nasty fat corgi, its belly dragging on the ground and while Capone ambles by it leaps up and bites him on the back of the neck!
Spring is accelerating towards summer now. The grasses and nettles in the hedgerows are lush. The trees are turning a deeper green and filling out their magnificent silhouettes but the earliest crop in Emsworth is the forest of masts that’s sprouting everywhere you look.
Peter Reynolds 14-05-08