There are young lads from across the Services who are in harm`s way right this minute. For them, it isn`t a video game. They get seriously hurt and they get killed. That`s not "Game Over" it`s dead.
This was a piece from a geezer who`s son had joined the Corps and went off to the Iraqi war in 539 ASRM but with a few changes could apply to every parent. Just remember that parents like this are looking at this site for news of their loved ones.
Quote
How does a father feel when his son goes to war? This man says he is opposed to military action in Iraq, but to protest would be to betray his 21-year-old-son, who has sailed to the Gulf with the Royal Marines
“IT WOULD BE wrong of me to pretend that there is not the possibility of a war against Iraq in which we will be involved during this deployment.” So begins a newsletter like no other I have received before. The very word “newsletter” has a warming air of British amateurishness about it, but it is in name alone that this example bears any resemblance to something that might be put out by the vicar to boost attendance at the harvest festival.
The writer is, however, responsible for a flock — in this case, the men of 539 Assault Squadron Royal Marines, among them my 21-year-old son, Adam. Lieutenant Colonel Nick Anthony gives us a welfare number — along with a firm request that it be used only in emergencies, and not to pass on news of the loss of the family cat — and signs off with a jolly “Best wishes and good luck”.
I am no longer Jonathan, nor even Dad. To the Royal Marines, at least, I am a NOK — next of kin. The person to whom the letter will be sent, or the phone call made, or the visit paid.
Now, with war in Iraq seemingly inevitable, NOKs all over Britain are saying prayers or crossing fingers or doing whatever they do to strike the deal: “Don’t let it be him.”
How did it come to this? How did the chuckling blond baby come to be heading for the Gulf in a grey ship as one small part of Operation Telic? Gap-year anxieties have nothing on this.
Adam grew up in a small Spanish village in the Canaries with his English mother. The local school was quaint, and it did wonders for his Spanish, but by the time we came to our senses English was virtually his second language. Reluctant to leave his comfort zone, by the age of 16 he nevertheless realised that he had to broaden his horizons and came to live with me in rural Suffolk.
We were an odd couple. Most days I had to travel to London to work, sometimes for two or three days at a time. Never a cooker kind of guy, I packed the freezer with microwaveable food and pretty much left him to it. To his credit, although he never quite seemed to master the knack of filling the I'M A SCAMMER SPAMMER!!! sink with hot water and washing-up liquid, he never burnt the place down and only twice had to smash a window to get in.
After a couple of false starts he found a place in a Suffolk college and proceeded to battle with his poor written English, study horticulture and make new friends.
He had always been passionate about flora and fauna (although his concern for the latter proved to be selective when, aged 12, he took to feeding live white mice to his snakes) and he can still name virtually any tree or bush.
But quite suddenly he decided to become a Royal Marine and now he sees the landscape entirely differently. Flora represents food, shelter, camouflage and a place of concealment.
There is a Forces recruitment office in Ipswich and one day after college he jumped off the bus and walked straight in. They advised him to finish his course. So did I, and he took the advice. I relaxed, thinking he’d grow out of it and lose interest, but six months later he enrolled for the week-long assessment and came back exhausted and happy.
I could see how it had happened. Within 18 months of arriving in Britain, the allure of the shops, the cinemas and the nightclubs had worn thin. His village in Tenerife may have been small, boasting one pizzeria, but Ipswich was no metropolis. One day, while shopping together for shoes as he prepared for his second-stage interview with the Marines, we eavesdropped a job interview. A lad of Adam’s age was obviously desperate for a full-time job at Topman, and Adam kept glancing at him with a mixture of pity and horrified incredulity.
No wonder the recruitment office, bang opposite the bus station that Adam used every day, grew to appear as a kind of magic gateway — a wardrobe through which to enter some other strange and wonderful land.
I was in a dilemma. I didn’t want him to do it, but he seemed so determined. Partly, I suppose, I feared he would fail. The 30-week course is one of the toughest in the world. I should have had more faith. He sailed through without a single dreaded “back-trooping” — when injured recruits, or those who fail one or other component, are put back into the next course. Very few of Adam’s original squad made it through together, but he was one of them.
Even then, the prospect of real action seemed remote. Perhaps the odd humanitarian exercise, in the style of Sierra Leone, nothing nakedly aggressive. I couldn’t help thinking that our family had already done its bit for King/Queen and country. My father, who served in Suez, was a soldier. He survived. But from the age of 15 my grandfather was in the Royal Field Artillery during the First World War, and the combined effect of the cold, the wet and the gas fatally undermined his constitution. As if his death wasn’t enough, my mother had to endure the loss in the Second World War of her much-worshipped older brother.
I didn’t want to go for a soldier, and I certainly didn’t want my son to. And yet, once he had made his choice, how could I belittle his ambition, dismiss his undoubted achievement?
Politics, personal beliefs, indignation at the prospect of my country allowing itself to be dragged into a questionable war, must all be set aside. A father can only stand by his children. This is not a time to undermine Adam by arguing the pros and cons of the political game. This is a time to let him know that I am thinking of him daily and that I am proud of him and the other sons with whom he may, any day, be going to war.
Conflict is not an inevitability for the modern soldier; many of the old hands embarked with Adam have seen no more action than he has. But world politics and Adam’s short career have been on a collision course. Last year, with the world’s attention still focused on the hunt for Osama bin Laden, Adam won a place on a boat course at Poole, home of the Special Boat Service, the Marines’ equivalent of the SAS.
After weeks spent mucking around in fast inflatable boats he came home for a weekend thinner, harder and tougher. We went for our traditional run and he easily outpaced me over an hour. It was the same story in the canoes.
Adam was thrilled to pass the course and win a rare place with 539 Assault Squadron in Plymouth. As he did so, world events escalated and the Marines rapidly formed a small group of Amphibious Beach Units, to which Adam was attached. In the past month or so he has become more thoughtful. I guess that a briefing from the CO on the details of battlefield burials will have that effect, and 21 is no age to be making a will.
Soon he was sailing with his unit on board the Fleet Auxiliary ship Sir Percivale. He has been able to make the occasional phone call from the ship and has access, in what will be this most modern of wars, to e-mail.
They sailed past Gibraltar, where mobile phones had to be handed in, and via Cyprus to the Suez Canal. He e-mailed me after passing, unknowingly, a family landmark — the place where his father was conceived, precipitating my single mother’s own personal Suez Crisis — to describe the heavily armed Egyptian soldiers silently lining the banks. The Marines, with little else to do, glared back.
Further e-mails revealed nothing of his whereabouts but described life on board. Lots of the traditional boredom, increasingly broken up by hard training and endless packing and cleaning of kit and personal weapons. One lad snapped his Achilles tendon during the tough circuits of the flight deck. He was, no doubt to his parents’ barely suppressed delight, on the next flight home.
We knew that communications would not, could not, last. The post has been getting through to the ship, slowly, but he has been thriving on the e-mails. “Keep them coming,” he wrote. “They’re good for morale.”
Now, quite suddenly, the thin thread has been cut. In a hastily written e-mail that popped up on my screen at work on Friday, he said I shouldn’t expect to hear from him for some time but to keep writing because it would be something to look forward to “when we get back”.
For three weeks I have carried my mobile phone everywhere, fearful of missing his call and what could be my last chance to give him a final injection of love and courage. Except yesterday. I went for a swim at 8.30am, and by 9.10 I had missed four calls. Adam had left one message and I barely recognised his voice — tougher, coarsened by weeks of proximity to other young men bracing themselves and talking up one another’s courage.
“I can’t tell you where I am,” he said, “but as you can probably tell from the racket in the background I am off the ship.” The “racket” was the distinctive sound of a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer.
It seems a long time since I was struggling to help Adam with his English and — even more hopelessly —- his maths. It even seems a long time since I watched, with a lump in my throat, as he marched behind the Royal Marines band to the tune of Sarie Marais at his passing out parade at Lympstone. In fact, it was June 8, 2001. I know the date because it is engraved on the fiendishly sharp Commando knife Adam gave me as a souvenir of the day he won his Green Beret.
It even seems a long time since I saw him last, in Plymouth before he sailed. When I knew he was going, my first reaction was to do something practical, to think of some small amulet that he could carry and which would ward off all dangers. I could buy a metal disk, and have it engraved ... but with what? His blood group? My telephone number? Perhaps the Arabic for “My name is Adam. I am 21 and somebody’s son ...” Ridiculous, of course. But the urge to do something boiled up out of the stark realisation that my son was suddenly and irrevocably as beyond the help of his family as if he had been on the Moon.
I don’t support this looming war, but I support my son and the men in whose hands his life now rests. I could not have marched for peace at the weekend without betraying him; my allegiance is not to Queen or country, but to him.
I find it hard to stomach hawkish sentiments in the press. Each such piece contrives to push Adam closer to danger and I feel bitterness towards the easy-living authors of such work.
Now, and for all our technology, Adam might as well be in France during the First World War. Who knows where he is or how long it will be before we hear from him.
And I can’t shake from my head the spectre of Rudyard Kipling’s grief at the disappearance of his son in 1916. After the war, he searched ceaselessly and fruitlessly for the body of John, 18, a lieutenant in the Irish Guards, who died at Loos.
As Adam faces his uncertain future, Kipling’s anguished howl resonates across the decades. I wish it could be heard in Washington and Downing Street:
“Have you news of my boy Jack?”
Not this tide.
“When d’you think that he’ll come back?”
Not with this wind blowing and this tide.
My son can now outrun me, and out-canoe me. Now all he has to do is outlive me.
unquote
That is about a young Booty serving with 539.
Mne Chris Maddison, RMR Poole was killed in a blue/blue with a Milan round on the Shat al Arab with the same Unit. His parents would agree with the sentiments expressed by Jonathon, Adam`s Dad, I`m certain.
Their worst fears were realised.
As it has been for the parents and loved ones of all the young Bootnecks we have lost in Iraq and Afghanistan.
For them it isn`t a game. They don`t look at the news on the telly without scouring the images for a trace of their son. They dread the phone ringing, the "you`ve got mail" message, the news that "A British Soldier"
was killed today.
But most of all, they dread the knock on the door.
Just remember them please
