Such a sad waste...

I don't know why but this news item struck me hard between eyes this morning.

Its specifically made the news of course because the latest British Army death in Iraq happens to be that of a young woman, Second Lieutenant Joanna Dyer, and if that weren't enough to promote it to the front pages then the youg lady in question was on the same officers training course as Prince William at Sandhurst and passed out at the same ceremony in December.

As if all of that wasn't sad enough and as if all of that wasn't enough to focus Prince Williams attentions on what the fuck he is going to be doing in Iraq when he is shortly to be deployed out there with the Blues and Royals, then the saddest part of the news is reading of 2nd Lieutenant Jo Dyers background.

Born in Berlin (I'm making a huge assumption that she is from a military family hence the presence in Germany) she studied at Oxford and gained a degree in philosophy, politics and economics before taking up a commission and a 44 week officer training course at Sandhurst.

Its all such a waste.

Its a common misconception that the foot soldiers who get killed on a daily basis in Iraq and Afghanistan are all "cannon fodder", young lads for whom the infantry was the only chance of a decent job, poorly educated, under achievers for whom the call "make something of yourselves" was the only call that came when they left school.

Well its not always like that, the army attracts graduates too and whatever their educational qualifications they are people with families who are often left alone to sit and stare at pictures on the wall and wonder what would have been if their children had picked a different line of work to the one which requires them to sacrifice themselves for the good of a politicians career.

A modern war...

It feels strange to think that this country is at war because here at home everything is still the same, the country's economy is booming so much that the Bank of England is trying to put the brakes on it, house prices rise by the day and consumer spending and consumer confidence has never been higher.

It shouldn't be like this in a country at war, we should feel threatened, we should be digging air raid shelters in our gardens and being reminded on every street corner to always carry our gas masks with us, we should be hacking down our iron railings to build ships with and handing in pots and pans for aircraft builders to use.

We should be despondant, we should know someone in our street who has lost someone in action, at least one of our nearest and dearest should be "fighting abroad somewhere" and we shouldn't have had a letter from them "for ages".

Our newspapers should be severely censored and only carry news of advances and victories and predictions that "it will all be over by christmas".

Our shops should be empty and we should have coupons for clothing and meat and we should be digging up our gardens to plant vegetables and raising chickens and rabbits for food, life should be austere and we should all be suffering in the name of patriotism and "for the war effort".


But we are doing none of these things.

We have a professional army who don't want volunteers, who don't need tens of thousands of men to make futile gestures on controlled battlefields in some foreign land - this is a professional war, a modern war, fought in the main, although not always, by technology without the need for trenches and constant conflict.

We see and hear everything that goes on in the modern theatre of war now, our news media are not censored in the way that they used to be and yet in the recent case of the Oxfordshire coroners court we ralise that cencorship still exists, and yet again we realise that in todays modern warfare the media can pressurise governments at the very top level into relaxing their grip on the little bit of censorship that they still posses.

More than anything we understand that modern warfare is driven by politics and not a need for land or riches and if the politicians thought for one minute that a war would affect their chances of winning votes then the war would not exist.

Three war news stories are in the headlines today...

The Oxfordhshire Coroners inquest is to hear a transcript of the American pilots who attacked a British vehicle convoy in Iraq, killing one soldier in a mistaken "friendly fire" incident and still the US military stand in the way of an official release of the cockpit video that we have all now seen on our TV News several times over - the coroner has finally accepted that this is as good as he is going to get and to wrap the thing up quickly he has no other choice but to accept the transcript - he also knows that every single person in the country knows the truth of the matter now and to be honest I doubt there is one person who does not accept that this was a tragic accident of war that happens far more often than we understand.

It happened here again where Cpl Bryan Budd was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, the nations highest and most prestigious military medal and one which is awarded very sparingly to only the bravest of individuals on the battlefield. It is revealed that it is now very possible that Cpl Budd was shot and killed by his own collegues in the confusion of close fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan - another tragic accident of war that happens far more often than we understand.

Should we send Prince Harry to Iraq asks most of the nations press today as his regiment The Blues and Royals prepare to go there on a tour of duty. The Prince (son of Saint Diana, Princess of Hearts of course) is an officer in the guards regiment and will be expected to lead a small group of soldiers in whatever scenario they are placed into, although you can't help but think that if you were a foot soldier under the Prince's command then you'd be very happy to be a foot soldier under the Prince's command as the Prince's command are probably not going to be placed in too much danger by the Generals further up the tree - what sort of General dare come home to face HM The Queen and admit that he was the one who commanded her grandson to lead the attack that lead to his death ?


Shit happens in war, but at least we get to know about it as it happens now, not forty years later.

Iraq reporting and our attitudes towards the armed forces

I read on another American blog site last week that the rumours there were that here in the UK we are blaming our armed forces for the situation in Iraq and that servicemen who return to this country are being treated badly by the general population and worse, when they leave the forces they are denied public housing.

There may be some truth in that last bit as anyone who applies for local authority housing has to join a waiting list and is assesed on a "needs" basis - an unattached male in his late twenties wouldn't be at the front of the queue regardless of what his previous occupation was - and a quite shocking statistic that I read in the authors preface to a novel recently is that up to a third of all homeless people on the streets of London are understood to be ex-servicemen.

Be that as it may, the rest of the rumour is incorrect and some way off the mark, I haven't seen any evidence in any of the written or televised press of anti-armed services reporting, on the contrary all of the reporting that I have seen has been full of praise for our armed services and acknowledgement that they are carrying out an impossible task in the face of very hostile opposition, without complaint or argument, simply because they were told to be there and thats what they do - they follow orders.

Its the ones making the orders that are under fire in the press, the politicians who took the decision to follow George Bush into Iraq and Afghanistan and the political wrangling within the Ministry of Defence that allows front line soldiers to go into combat situations without the correct equipment, getting themselves killed on our behalf in the process - the politicians take the flak in this country, and rightly so, they have yet to face the consequences of their decisions at the ballot box.

To make the point this weekend this quite remarkable news report came out of Afghanistan and is typical of the sort of reporting that we see on our TV's and in our newspapers, I recommend that everyone watches it and prays that they never find themselves in the position of the parents of L/Cpl Mathew Ford or indeed the father of one of the marines involved in the rescue who must surely be wishing that his son wasn't quite so much a hero.


EDIT : The video link above is on the BBC web site and as such might be moved around in its location at the whim of the BBC - this is a link to a text news report of the incident.

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.