At the launch of Patrick Bishop’s 3 Para at the Cavalry and Guards Club last week, I met some of the boys who’ve been doing their bit in Helmand.
At the launch of Patrick Bishop’s 3 Para at the Cavalry and Guards Club last week, I met some of the boys who’ve been doing their bit in Helmand. God, they looked tough, with a keen, frankly rather unnerving, glint in their eye which set them dramatically apart from all us milksop civvies.
One senior NCO told me what a thrill it had been when for the first time in 26 years’ service he’d finally been able to give the command ‘Fix bayonets’ — then lead an actual charge. ‘They don’t like it up ’em,’ he said, as of course he would.
I really should stop hanging out with these people, though, because every time I do they invite me on their next trip to Afghanistan. My wife says that if I do it will be divorce. But if I don’t go, I sometimes think, then I shall be doomed to spend the rest of my life half loathing myself for being such a girlie, pathetic wuss. Then my thoughts turn to all the terrible things that can happen to a chap out there: the Iranian-made IEDs, the random Russian mines, being captured and skinned alive and dipped in salt….
Our armed forces are engaged in the most serious fighting since the Korean war and what I find extraordinary is how few civilians seem bothered. I don’t mean bothered as in ‘blustering at dinner parties about the radicalising effects these wars are having on Muslim youth’ or — like simian rock star Ian Brown — ‘making Ecstasy-drenched pop records about how, like, our army should get out of wherever they’re fighting now, man’.
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