MILITARY SERVICE - AND CIVVY STREET!

This week has seen the deaths of two more soldiers in Afghanistan.

This week has seen the Union Flag lowered for the last time over the soon to be Royal Town of Wootton Bassett and handed to Royal Air Force Brize Norton which has once again become fully operational and will receive the repatriation of the Fallen.

This week has also seen yet another tranche of defence cuts with 2,000 RAF and Army personnel losing their jobs and, bluntly, their careers. All of us I think understand that the defence deficit inherited from the last Administration is unsustainable. It has to be dealt with and that means reducing our armed forces to the smallest it has been in living history.

Wars and insurrections will continue, and the UK will be expected to make its full contribution to helping the trouble spots of the world to be returned to peace, good order and, above all, freedom. Some of those trouble spots have not experienced the freedoms we enjoy, in several hundred years. So it will be tough, and the brunt will be taken by the dedicated men and women of all our Armed Forces on Sea, Land and Air.

It is widely presumed that because our forces are so highly trained, then the defence cuts will not really greatly impinge upon them. They will return to civilian life and be immediately welcomed with open arms by employers desperate to take on people with such high levels of dedication, motivation, discipline and expertise.

Sadly that is not the case.

Leaving the Services, especially when it was not even envisaged, comes as a huge shock to the system and it often brings with it the break up of the family unit, broken marriages, broken homes and single parent children who suddenly wonder why it is that the protection they naturally felt when 'dad was in the army' has suddenly stopped, and why 'I can only see dad now every other weekend', and 'I only know that when dad lost his job in the air force, he and mum stopped talking and instead started fighting.'

I do not exaggerate.

I remember too in the legal profession 12 years ago being taken aside by a bumptious partner to be told that my method of management was upsetting the department. He explained in a very pious, priestly way that "here we are all one happy family and we like to work together." This solicitor was well into political correctness - big time! I understood but argued that I am working with my department. We were a team. But I didn't suffer fools gladly, especially secretaries who were taking their employers for a ride.

What made me laugh was that the very principles he told me to not apply, he applied himself.

Civvy Street is naturally suspicious of people who have served in the armed forces. It is now 66 years since the end of the Second World War, and as a Nation we are no longer used to military service. As a civil population we have had 66 years of peace within these islands, excepting of course the Troubles in Northern Ireland and most recently the Riots in England.

I do not like listening to a report, last evening on the main BBC news, that an RAF officer, having learned yesterday that he was being made redundant, had to be taken from his office because he was in a state of shock and could not be left alone, for fear that he might try and harm himself.

In the same week we demand that our armed forces give exemplary duty on the battlefield. Reader, they are!

We must help them to acclimatise to Civvy Street again. And it's tough.

In Civvy Street the camaderie and team spirit of the company, platoon, squadron, deck or ship's company is frankly non-existent.

In Civvy Street it is more like the scrap on the international trading floors of self-seeking investment bankers and traders who think only of number one.

In the armed forces you are taught not to think of number one but of everyone of whom you have now become an inextricable part. You think of everyone else around you. Then and only then do you think of yourself. And if you are an officer then you darned well set the highest example and lead from the front, never asking those within your command to do that which you wouldn’t hesitate to do yourself.

And we see that constantly in the reports and dispatches from the front line; from the reports written by the officers, NCOs, colleagues and friends following the death of a colleague in their Unit.

We are a great Nation and a great people. But let us not forget the demands we make of our armed forces, nor mistreat them when they try to return to civvy street. For in civvy street we are a very poor substitute for how a community should live, work and play together, something that our armed forces know and value only too well.


Ian Bradley Marshall
LIVERPOOL

http://ianbradleymarshall.com/Military.aspx