Grow Up About the Army

Most people have, at some time or another, come across someone whose life story is so colourful and impressive that you can’t help but doubt them. These people are for the most part harmless. It’s a bit irritating if you’re in the wrong mood and you always wonder if they’ll take it too far and hurt someone, but no one really loses sleep over it.

Roger Day appears to be the exception to this. He was sentenced to sixty hours community service last week after attending a Remembrance Day parade wearing seventeen military medals, none of which he’d earned. He said that he’d made up his military past to impress his wife.

It was no doubt offensive and upsetting for those who had earned those medals and their
families to see an imposter marching alongside genuine soldiers, but I can’t help but feeling that sentencing the man to sixty hours community service is pushing it a bit. It is illegal to impersonate a soldier and with good reason. If you’re in the middle of a battle you don’t want the ‘soldier’ watching your back to have had no military training, especially ifthey’ve got a gun.

But after retirement? Yes, he was a twit about it and yes, I can understand the anger felt by soldiers and their families, but come on. The guy’s clearly nothing more deadly than a fantasist. He’s probably more frightened of the effect it’ll have on his wife than anything else. He’s apologised. The sentence in my opinion is far too harsh.

It is also, however, unsurprising. The view we have of our armed forces in this country is rose tinted to say the least. Soldiers are seen as saints regardless of what they have or have not done on the battlefields. In the eyes of some all you need to do is sign up for basic training to be placed on a moral pedestal high above the rest of the population. I understand that it’s a difficult job and a real tragedy when a young soldier is lost while fighting for (what they believe anyway) is the freedom of the UK, but I don’t think these people are saints.

In fact they kill people. Currently they are killing people in wars many of them do not agree with against those who are ill equipped technologically to fight against them. There have also been, and I stress here the rarity of these cases, many soldiers would not dream of acting in such a way, incidences of barbarity committed by our ‘brave boys’-as the Sun likes to call them.

The Sun, being one of the sexist pieces of chip paper in waiting currently conning people out of their money in this country, always refers to them as ‘our boys’. Never ‘our soldiers’ or ‘our army’ or even ‘our people’. They clearly do not see the scores of women who work just as hard in just as dangerous conditions as their male comrades worth mentioning. And it’s rather infantilising to the soldiers themselves. They are ‘boys’, not ‘men’. Perhaps this is because it’s easier to see them as wide eyed and innocent if they’re portrayed as children. But that’s a different rant entirely. Time to get back on topic methinks.

And then there are the moral problems many people have with the conflicts we as a nation are currently engaged in. You can stand up and blast the government for their action in Iraq and Afghanistan but even hint that the military may be at fault for following these orders and you instantly become a social pariah on the same level as Roger Day. And before anyone says anything yes I understand that the individual foot soldiers can’t question orders without severe consequences. That final remark was directed more at the higher echelons of the military.

I think we, as a country, need to grow up a bit about the army. Stop seeing them as a link to the ‘glorious age’ that is gone and is never, ever, ever coming back. Stop putting them on ridiculous moral pedestals because you’ve been brainwashed into believing that the young people who don’t risk their lives in unjust wars are pushing this nation into an obese drink induced promiscuous stupor. Stop giving out hopelessly disproportionate punishments to people who are just sad fantasists who need a slap on this risk rather than actual dangers to society.

Peace and Love. Seriously, can we all be a bit more peace and love? x