Thirty years ago a very dear friend was dying of cancer at 18 years of age, I had a beard and my own hair, and there was a nasty but thankfully short war in the South Atlantic. I wrote something I was going to say I was very pleased with that involved that war, but 'pleased' is the wrong word. Satisfied, perhaps.
There was an interview in the Sunday Telegraph today with a man who was there as a boy of seventeen. I found it enlightening to compare my descriptions of the fighting (in 'Uniforms') with his, and I feel gratified that I seem to have got close to the truth. His description of his first kill made my flesh crawl. Seventeen years old, and exposed to that, and all because some politicians like to show how large their external genitalia are. The veteran's description of being sent straight off on leave rather than helped was painful.
I had five friends killed down there. Others I know never recovered fully. I know we have at least one Falklands veteran here. I will raise a glass to the dead tonight, and pray for the impossible: that politicos start to grow up.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/falkl...
Comments
I remember
a television programme about killing, and how most people have a reluctance to do it to each other. However, the military have ways of teaching recruits to overcome this reluctance. What they don't consider is the affect on those who have killed and the PTSD which frequently follows it. I'm led to believe that more British soldiers killed themselves after the Falklands war than were killed in action.
There is no such thing as a good war, just horror and suffering. Sometimes I despair at humanity, we don't learn from our mistakes. In co-operation we can reach the stars, in conflict we end up in the ground.
Angharad
Angharad
PTSD
I have tried to cover that, along with survivor guilt, in much of my writing, here and elsewhere. I was giving advice to somebody with endogenous depression the other day, and that is similar in that there is no visible wound. There is no scar or cast or wheelchair to seize attention and deliver sympathy. There is just pain for reasons that are invisible to others, and it doesn't go away.
Feelings like that are the main reason I write here.
My OddPOV
I agree totally, but a common mistake some people make is if you disarm you are safe, when nothing could be further from the truth. When a hostile country thinks you will do nothing that is when they try for gotchas.
My Dad, who was not in WWII, but was in Korea and Nam, mentioned the decompression WWII vets had, it seemed to help some. They weren't flown home as today, but had long ship cruises to learn to deal with the the horrors they had experienced. Today's solder is dumped on the streets in two days with little or no preparation. This is wrong in my point of view, they had basic training to prepare for war, they need similar training (and treatment) to unlearn the horror and learn how to be civilians again.
You turn good men into killers, then wonder why they kill in inappropriate circumstances.
I respect anyone who has offered up their all for me, and mourn those who have been forced to give it. I despise those who belittle it, such as the church that likes to picket and celibate solders deaths. Heinlein once wrote of a society where to be a voting citizen you had to contribute to the society, usually by being a solder. The book was excellent (Starship Troopers), even if the movie was not so much.
I just wish governments held our troops in as high esteem as they claim to.
Decompression
That is exactly the point the young lad (as he was) makes in the Telegraph interview. I remember a lad nearly getting glassed in a Tidworth pub (squaddy town) when in the middle of an anecdote he mimed cocking an automatic weapon. That scene I wrote, where the machine gunner surrenders right at the last minute, that happened several times. The Argentines, of course, call it a war crime, but that is rubbish. No human being can switch from one state to another so quickly, and the same applies to going back into civvy street after combat.
They rely on their mates, and if they end up isolated, among people who cannot and often WILL not understand, nor make allowances, they fall apart.