Posted 5:24 PM by Paul
Warfare is Not a Lifestyle

I worry that the West is going a little bit soft it when it comes to war. Not that we are becoming pacifists - I am all for exercising extreme caution before playing with fireworks - but in our expectation of what happens when the shooting actually starts.

I was listening to a phone-in programme where people were calling in to share thier experiences of having a loved one away on active service. It's a worrying time for thousands of people sat at home waiting for news. Naturally your heart goes out to them. Then a woman came on the radio complaining about the "appalling way" the Navy had treated her daughter - a 19 year old new recruit straight out of basic training. Tapping away at my laptop, sipping tea and munching on a biscuit I awaited the woman's horror story. It didn't come. Her complaint was that no one was there to meet her daughter at the airline check in desk to Quatar and she had been asked to pay for her daughter's excess baggage. Excess baggage? What was the girl taking? A complete fashion wardrobe and her double decks in case she wanted to join in a hip hop jam with some US home boys? Did she expect a chaperone or a holiday courier?

It occurred to me that this trip to the Gulf may have been her first time abroad away from her mum and dad. Mine was a camping holdiay in Belgium. Really dull, huge ant bites and the weather was awful but altogether more congenial than the Iraqi desert.


I felt sorry for the girl and her mum. No one had mentioned war in any of the slick recrutiment ads for the Armed Forces which promote sport, team work and the chance to use "lots of secret kit" - as though active service were an episode of the Man from UNCLE. Maybe decades of consumer confort has made us less able and willing to put up with even the natural discomforts of war, like not being able to take more than your baggage allowance without paying extra or having to organise your own airline tickets. Clearly nobody mentioned anything to her about killing foreigners.

It wasn't always like that. My uncle Wilf who faught in Burma from 41-45 knew that his job was to kill the Japanese before they killed him. Ditto my old friend Matt who was on Iwo Jima with the US Marine Corps. Their main worry was to get something to eat once every 48 hours and stay alive. Both of them made in back but in Wilf's case his wife heard nothing of him for over three years. Would we put up with that in 2003? I wonder.