Of course they fight... they're soldiers

 

12:14pm 19th February 2006 Reader comments (0) Will no one speak up for the ordinary British soldier? I have heard enough snivelling piety about how "inexcusable" it was for British troops to beat up Iraqi youths in hot blood. I have heard enough fake disapproval from people who, subjected to a day in Iraq, would lose their tempers if they were served a warm Pepsi.

Heaven knows what they would do if they were subjected to what these boys endure, in nervous, sleepless sweaty heat, for months on end. Oh, sure, it isn't nice to watch the men we trained and the men we pay - and the men our Prime Minister wrongly sent to Iraq - lashing out in rage.

But what do all these people think soldiers are for, exactly? This is not the cold-blooded cruelty of Abu Ghraib, but a human response to danger and provocation. An Arab army would simply have machine-gunned the demonstrators. The Americans would have called down an airstrike. Quite a lot of "European" armies would never have gone outside in the first place.

If you are happy to see our men persecuted and reviled so that our Army is emasculated, we won't endure as a country for very much longer. We have one of the last proper armies in the world. It fights. We take very young men from the hardest parts of the country because we know they will stand their ground where others would run away.

From the archers of Agincourt to the thin red line at Balaclava it has been the same. You might not want these people in the pub with you on Saturday night but, by heaven, you will be glad of them at your side when the enemy are charging straight at you.

We make it clear to them that they are being paid to risk their lives, their health and their chances of a happy future. We lie that they are liberators when in truth they are occupiers. Their coffins come home all the time - not enough to make anyone really angry, but far too many all the same. And not just coffins. More quietly, they also arrive unseen on stretchers, burned, maimed, disfigured, limbless. And then what do they come home to?

A country which - having willingly allowed itself to be bamboozled by worthless demagogues, and cheered its troops off to a damfool war - now curls its lip in disdain at the soldiers, but continues to vote for the politicians. While our troops fight for a cause they didn't and couldn't choose, because they are a disciplined service, they are ceaselessly betrayed at home by a Government which sells, dismantles or demolishes the very freedoms it claims it is fighting for abroad.

It asks the Army to make the world safer, but cannot even keep our streets safe. Look at the fate of Trooper Narel Sharpe, a veteran of Kosovo and Iraq, who hoped to become the British Army's first black colonel but was murdered on a Birmingham street for a gold chain round his neck and for daring to fight back against his assailant.

In one of those moronic statements lawyers are given to, the prosecutor of his killer said that Trooper Sharpe was "in the wrong place at the wrong time". In that case, so are we all.