The BBC, as well as other news outlets, is carrying this story about the father of a dead soldier. The father is complaining about the lack of helicopters and other important equipment. It also turns out that a letter that was due to be sent from Downing Street to the man’s father was sent very late. This is a sad and anger-inducing story: the father was interviewed, clearly distressed, on BBC television this morning, and was also making very angry, and to my mind, some pretty shrewd, points about the management, or mismanagement, of the war in Afghanistan.
And yet there is something about these interviews with grieving parents of dead military personnel that bothers me. And it clearly also has bothered the writer and one-time prison doctor, Theodore Dalrymple. Mr Dalrymple was writing about a related recent story of how a letter of condolence, sent by Gordon Brown to the mother of a dead serviceman, contained spelling errors. Mr Dalrymple writes in the Social Affairs Unit blog:
“No one, I think, would take me for an admirer of Gordon Brown, much less an apologist for him; but in the matter of the letter that he wrote to Mrs Janes, mother of the soldier killed in Afghanistan, I feel sorry for him. He has become a victim of the ideological sentimentality so assiduously promoted by his odious predecessor, and now so fully a part of our national character.”
“The letter he wrote to Mrs Janes seemed to me a perfectly decent one. It was legible (perhaps, as a doctor, my standards of legibility are low); the sentiments expressed are decent, conventional ones, without the kind of extravagance that might lead you to suspect insincerity.”
“The offence of the mistake in the name – Mrs James instead of Mrs Janes – does not seem to me a hanging one. Mr Brown is a very busy man (would that he were less busy!) and the mistake is one that we could surely all envisage ourselves making, given the relative frequency of the two names.”
“The grief of Mrs Janes was perfectly understandable, of course; the loss of a child is like the loss of a world. But grief is not necessarily the midwife of truth, and some of the things that Mrs Janes said are simply not true. Surely only someone determined in advance to find the letter disrespectful would have found it so; one might even think that a hand-written letter from the Prime Minister was a sign of respect, when he could so easily have written nothing or have ordered someone else to do it on his behalf.”
I agree. I think it is terribly harsh to say to a person like the father interviewed this morning that he should bear in mind that serving in the army is a risky profession and that anyone who joins up should recognise this, but it does need to be said, by someone. The “victim culture” is spreading its slimy tentacles across the land; when I see any parent lash out and demand that X or Y be blamed or shamed for a train of events happening in a warzone, I can sympathise, even agree with some of the comments. But what I cannot abide is the failure to recognise that the risks are high, and many brave people pay the supreme price.
related:
http://www.navytimes.com/news/2009/11/navy_gear_113009w/
Theodore Dalrymple said:
It does show Brown’s lack of judgment. If he cannot write neatly get someone else to do it. If he hasn’t got the time to write it correctly do not do it. If he cannot be sincere (as he cannot stop being a politician) do not do it. As his predecessor (and Major and Thatcher) did these letters Brown must have felt beholden by the past to do likewise. Brown is a pygmy of a man who thinks he is a colossus.
There are serious failings in the military. Parliament gave up directing the MoD long ago, ceeding ground to the technocrats in uniform and the defence industry, and since then they have plodded along a Cold War path. Money is being mishandled. Procurement is out of control as it cannot get value for money items on time that do the job they were meant to. Basic kit is not suitable and the mend and make do culture is being exploited.
Grieving parents seem to be the only ones able to air these issues without people shouting them down over protecting British jobs and British technological sovereignty.(Not that we’ve had that for a long time – the big defence firms source their bits from where it is cheapest as you would expect) It shouldn’t be this way.
and many brave people pay the supreme price
They do, and it is tragic because they are defending me.
What is most reprehensible is that hair-trigger sensibilities should cheapen these brave people’s sacrifice for me.
Gareth – Brown’s inability to write neatly is a serious failing of the military
Gareth, if any lost British life came back and declared that it was worse because of Brown’s handwriting, I would be surprised.
ADE
Supply deficiencies in the military are not a new problem…they’re a very old one. You can trace texts back to Alexander the Great where there are stories of soldiers buying their own needed materials. Hell, during my 6 years in the US Submarine Force, I probably spent a thousand bucks a year for equipment I needed because I couldn’t get it quick enough through the supply system.
A veterans group that I co-chair donates equipment to allied ground forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Everything from body armor to baby wipes, we fund what they request (if our budget allows). Is it wrong? Hell yes. But that doesn’t make it abnormal. I’m not excusing it, just pointing out that this is not a new development.
As for Mr. Brown’s spelling mistakes…I wouldn’t hang the guy for that. Whether he is just going through the motions or he’s sincere in his condolences, he did take the time to write the letter(s), after all. He could have had an aid write them, or sent a form letter.
why is no one asking the most obvious question the letter affair, viz.: what on earth is the prime minister doing writing these blasted things at all?
isn’t it a job for the dead soldier’s CO?
With full respect to LibertarianSoul’s observation that many military cultures develop and value many alternative supply chains, I submit that the UK (and especially the Army) is in a different league in this regard.
Gareth refers to the ‘make do and mend culture’ and I submit that it has gone way beyond that – it’s now a ‘do without’ culture.
It’s not merely that their equipment is old or outdated – you can sometimes do suprisingly-good work with old kit. One man I know tramped the length of the Falklands carrying a Lanchester SMG, an all-steel-and-brass relic of WW2. It worked just fine. But a systemic and continuous starvation of kit (both establishment and expendable) eventually fosters a culture where risk to equipment is avoided, scarce supplies are husbanded instead of being used, and doctrine eventually becomes more concerned with counting bullets than with killing bad guys.
The Brits have long made a sport of whingeing about how the Yanks always have plenty of everything, and they are absolutely careless in the expenditure of supplies and equipment. This is seen as a Bad Thing. You have to ask yourself what kind of doctrine calls the profligate use of mere Things as automatically Bad. If you’re concerned about Not Wasting Stuff, what do you have left to Waste . . . . .?
llater,
llamas
I imagine that the dead soldier’s CO did write such a letter. But a handwritten condolence letter from the leader of your nation is a very nice gesture, and should be appreciated for what it is. And it’s not like writing these things takes up much of his time; the British contingent in Afghanistan suffers very few casualties.
Calculating politician though he is, I don’t doubt that somewhere inside Brown has a human soul which feels for the mother’s loss, and he tried to do a good thing. It seems to me that this is another illustration of the old saw that “no good deed goes unpunished”. Find something else to criticize; he certainly has enough real flaws.
What Laird said.
the first hour of the somme would have kept lloyd george busy writing letters for the next decade.
Asquith rather than Lloyd George was PM during the battle of the Somme, but I agree with Stephen Willmer’s wider point.
(Asquith, had he written those letters, would also have written one to himself as his son was killed in that battle.)
I recall that one of the Northern Irish police chiefs during the Troubles had to stop going to the funerals of RUC officers killed by the IRA. He went to so many that it was stopping him doing his job, both in terms of time and perhaps more importantly, psychologically.
As other commenters have said, there are a thousand real issues to criticise Gordon Brown over, but a mistake in writing the name of a man he never met made by a man with bad eyesight is not one of them. I feel sorry for him in this.
Laird:
James Gordon Brown might be the completely ineffective and incompetent leader of the government, but the leader of the nation is someone else entirely.
Apologies; I stand corrected. (I presume you’re referring to the powerless, ineffectual and irrelevant monarch? Or is there someone else you consider the “leader”?)
Actually, the wider point is simpler even than that. If the nation can afford to have its prime minister write letters of condolence, then the casualty rate is more akin to a series of skirmishes than actual war, compared to almost any other war in British history (e.g. the Somme, Balaclava, Ypres, Arnhem, Spion Kop and so many others).
Johnathan’s main point, that the West is becoming a nation-set of whingers, is absolutely spot on. One wonders how today’s Britain (or today’s America, come to that) would react to ONE day’s published casualty lists from 1917.
But the cowardice lies not with the peaceniks, nor the media, and certainly not with our soldiers or their parents.
The real cowards are the politicians who shrink from using all the weapons at our disposal to end this conflict.
One tactical nuke landing on an Al-Qa’eda stronghold in northern Afghanistan, to use but a single example, would have ended this thing already; but our politicians shrink from the bad PR that such an action would bring, because it’s easier to deal with the occasional anguished parent of a dead soldier than it is to face the indignation of the United Nations and the various handwringers.
Sorry, but I’m pretty cold-blooded about this. If there are going to be deaths, I’d rather the deaths were not ours, but of the bad guys (and collaterals, of whom some are surely enablers and/or sympathizers).
But that’s not how the snivelling cowards in Whitehall and Washington see it.
As a regular Fox News viewer I often see the parents of American soldiers and marines who have been killed in Afghanistan (and Iraq – Fox News has, for years, had many of such parents making contributions, the “mainstream” media was just interested in a handful of death-to-America freak parents).
Most of these people despise Barack Obama – but they keep their comments respectful (radically unlike me) and do not whine.
They would like either a commitment to victory (no silly timetables and sending half of the extra people the commander asked for, or crazy “rules of engagement”), but they are proud of their dead children and hold that their children who are still living should fight on (regardless of the shortcommings of the person who is President at the moment), for they fight for the United States – not for any particular person.
As for many people in Britain. I try and avoid comming upon the “attitudes” and “values” of many of my fellow countrymen.