Heartbreaking...

[SueDOnym]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/ho ... 53008.html


Every parent's worst nightmare...anyone who has a child out there must dread something like this happening. I've got a friend who's 18-year-old daughter is out there right out, and my son's adamant that's what he wants to do when he leaves school. So, so sad, and such a waste of a life which had barely even begun. And for what?

[mentalbovine]

that news story got me terruibly chocked up!


i have the utmost respect for them out there doing that job. I dont beleive in war, but no matter what the circumstances...someone has bee sent out there and they are someones son or father or husband or brother or sister, mother or daughter.


no one bleieves in this war - but it saddens me when folk talk ill of the soldiers

i wish them all well and s safe return.

[Anona.Mouse]

So often it's the youngsters who pay the price for what their elders have decided to do.

I feel for his family.

I am, by nature, a pacifist - but I'm also a soldier's daughter, so you might think I have a foot in both camps. There are occasions, however, when I know exactly which side of the line I stand.

[Soup]

I too am off the don't agree with the war but I support the warriors camp.
However what I don't like is the Mothers (usually it is the Mothers but sometimes it is the Fathers : it is usually the parents rather than the people themselves) who say "this isn't what my jimmy/jemima signed up for". I am of the opinion that if someone joins the armed forces in this day and age where nearly everything is contracted out and the armed forces are so small anyone signing on is well aware there is a better than even chance of being in combat (some trades more than others admittedly).

[SueDOnym]

Obviously, that is the risk you take when you sign up - but reading something like that lad's letters just brings it home that every statistic - another one brought home in a box - is someone's son, someone's daughter. I guess it's a bit hard to see the bigger picture when it's your own flesh and blood in that coffin.

[silvers]

...hmm doesn't bear thinking about ....
Fortunately, my two were never that adventurous.

[Soup]

I feel for those who have lost loved ones. What I was meaning was more (example) the Mother of a cook at Kandahar air base (the one with a Pizza Hut and a Burger king) saying those sort of things.

[Anona.Mouse]

My Dad joined up at fifteen. Yes, he was under age - and each time he signed on, his mother would take herself off down to the Recruiting Office and drag him back home again. Finally, when the sergeant pointed out to her that his sixteenth birthday was only weeks away now and he would be straight back as soon as the day dawned - she gave in, and allowed him to stay where he wanted to be. So from that time onwards he had two birthdays: his real one, and the slightly earlier one he had invented for the Army.

It wasn't wartime then. Dad wasn't signing on to go and fight - he wanted to escape from the Bradford woollen mill where his future had been laid out for him. He had been apprenticed to be an electrician in the mill - and he didn't want to be that. His aim was to "see the world", and the Army was his ticket.

He did get to travel, but before long war broke out in earnest. He had to grow up more quickly, and a lot more thoroughly, than that young lad could have imagined. Dunkirk made its mark on him - Burma, where he spent most of the war years, left a deeper one. He saw and experienced things that nobody should have to. Some he wouldn't talk about in any detail, to his last days. But he was one of those who did come home after the war, and married and raised a family.

Many youngsters of today have a rather hopeless view of the future, in particular of their own future. They see a bleak life ahead with no jobs, no homes, no money - and as previous generations have done, they see military life as an escape from all that, a chance to see and do things which would otherwise be impossible for them.

Basic training will no doubt knock some of the idealism out of them, but it also gives them a sense of their own value - the feeling that they are worthwhile individuals who have a part to play in the world. Going to war, I'm sure, seems to many a positive thing, something they can do to help make the world a better place.

Reading that series of letters, I think, shows the young man in the process of growing up, losing a bit of innocent youthfulness but growing towards maturity. The tragedy is that he didn't survive to return to home and family, like so many others.

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