Taking Aim

Here in Swanvale Halt Rectory, whatever regard we may necessarily have for the Supreme Governor, our interest in his family is slightly less than we have in, say, the historic rolling stock of the railways of New South Wales. However, in all the current controversy over the apparent declarations of the S.G.'s younger son - 'apparent' pending the actual emergence of the English text of his book, in which we will take no interest either - we were most surprised by the reaction to his statements about his service in Afghanistan. They were markedly less tasteless than the ones he made about the same matter a decade ago, and his point seems to be that it wasn't so much a case of him deliberately keeping count of the number of Taliban insurgents he despatched, as the Army Air Corps counting for him: something a person in that situation couldn't avoid knowing. 

Far more interesting than this, for someone who has worked with the military and is still linked to them in the form of the Air Cadets, is the vocal rage and apparent shock from senior military figures at the idea that soldiers might have a sense of detachment from the people they kill. 'That's not what we teach personnel' they insist; but, though they might not be taught, personnel are hazarding their mental health if that's not what they learn, because how can you conceivably kill someone while wondering about their family, their hobbies, or what they might have had for breakfast? To argue that such detachment isn't an absolutely necessary part of combat life is fastidious in the extreme, though there is another word for it. The question everyone wants to dare to ask a veteran of active service is 'Did you kill anyone?', and the inevitable followup is 'How do you feel about that?'  Well, here is one answer: uncomfortable, but not more. What do you expect? I doubt the Taliban put many of their servicemen through trauma counselling either.

I've not long since finished reading Angela Beleznay's Incident 48, an account of the worst bombing raid on my home town of Bournemouth during World War Two. In a little over a minute one May afternoon in 1943 - although it's hard even now to tally up a completely reliable figure - something over 200 people died, slightly more than a third of them civilians. The youngest was a toddler of 21 months. The attack on Bournemouth, where the Germans knew many Allied personnel were concentrated in the hotels awaiting deployment, was itself part of a retaliation for Allied bombing of industrial centres in the Ruhr which had killed hundreds of civilians, let alone military personnel. That's what war is like. It's monstrous, terrible, and that's why you don't engage in it unless you absolutely have to.

A few weeks ago we held the ceremony to swear in the new ATC recruits in the church. I told their parents that part of my role was to help the cadets think through their identity as cadets in a more reflective way than they might otherwise get a chance to do. I think we might be having a conversation at some point shaped around the statements of Citizen H Windsor and see where that takes us.