War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it...

War Scene 1810-12 Brush and Sepia sketch
Francisco Goya

"You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will.
War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out."

Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman
Letter to Mayor Calhoun of Atlanta and others
September 12, 1864

Yesterday the official inquest into the death of British ITN news reporter Terry Lloyd on one of the first days of combat in Iraq in March 2003, concluded that he, his cameraman and their translator were "unlawfully killed" by American soldiers, and the Coroner is now to write to the Director of Public Prosecutions to ask whether or not it would be possible to bring war crime charges against those responsible. Full story here.

I have a problem with that news story.

Its a problem of reconciling General Sherman's quotation (above) with the attempt of a government legal representative trying to break down the chaotic multitude of individual actions that exists on any battlefield, from the Trojan wars to Iraq 2003, and turn it into some sort of courtroom game of chess.

If it were possible to legally define what is right and what is wrong in military campaigns, why it is correct to kill one person but not another, why it is correct to kill one of your enemies but a war crime to kill a whole group of them together, then we will have finally cracked the age old problem of conflict - don't blow each other to pieces - fight it out in a courtroom.

Whilst it is a tragedy for the Lloyd family that their son, husband and father will not be returning home from Iraq, it has to be said that he placed himself, voluntarily, into a situation of severe conflict with an immense possibility that he and his party of travellers would come under fire from one side or another.

Unlike other news media groups involved in the Iraqi conflict, Lloyd and several of his ITN collegues had made the decision not to be attached to the British or US army but to report the conflicts independantly - it was their concious decision to do that and in doing so they shunned the protection available to them from the greatest and most advanced battlefield collection of armourments known to mankind, in favour of a bullet-proof vest each and a couple of minibuses with PRESS written on the roof and sides - and off they set in advance of the allied forces to find and report on conflict wherever they found it.

And they found it very quickly.

In the confusion of a typical battlefield it seems that the Lloyd entourage had been approached by an Iraqi pickup truck with a gun mounted on the back, and while a conversation ensued the ligitimate Iraqi target was picked out for attention by American tanks - Lloyd was wounded in this initial exchange and then hit by another round to the head as he was being loaded back into one of the minibuses.

Its a fairly straighforward act of war, the tank crew were under orders to take out an Iraqi threat and from a distance did so, forgetting of course to first of all pop down the road to ask if all of the persons on the scene were in fact Iraqi.

The bottom line being that if you, as a television news reporter with immense combat experience (probably far more than the US tank crews) made a concious decision to place yourself independantly on the battlefield, then you yourself become a target.

Its not a game of chess and it is not a place of legal niceities, battles can now be fought from a distance and modern weapons mean that you don't need to stand face to face with your enemy before you can kill him with a sharp blade, stand next to the perceived enemy and you become part of the target, questions will be asked later when the turmoil of conflict becomes the black and white two sides of a coin in a quiet remote courtroom.


And in a sort-of-related and sort-of-ironic counterpoint to the Lloyd story, the British Government is now considering whether or not to pardon 300 British soldiers who were executed by the British Army for cowardice during the 1914-18 World War One conflicts.

Its now recognised that most if not all of these soldiers, who had in some cases spent many months, even years, living in filthy conditions on the front line of battlefields, under constant bombardment and threat of physical attack, were in fact suffering from mental problems caused by the very conditions in which they were forced to exist by their own Government representatives.

In other words they weren't cowards when they refused to fight or refused to return to the front line, but were victims of the very government forces that then tried them and quickly executed them as a brutal lesson to other soldiers not to do the same - it was better to face the enemy guns than to face your own governments guns, it was better for your family to learn that you died a hero than die a coward at the hands of your fellow soldiers and bring lasting shame on your family - a shame that some of those soldiers descendants still feel today, together with their rage and determination not to let this current government off the hook and earn a pardon for their grand and great-grandfathers.

War is hell, always has been, and as a soldier you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.