Justice

This rant is a little late because of a rather hectic weekend which involved a lot of work, paid and unpaid... and a couple of social gatherings, mainly to raise a toast of remembrance to those shippers who remain on an everlasting patrol in the South Atlantic

Friday was a sad day for British Justice... On Friday just gone, the Do-gooders ran amok over the British justice system and found a 'victim', a Royal Marine sergeant only known to the public as 'Marine A' ...... his despicable crime was to to do what he was paid to do, to do what the public expected our Marines to do, he did what it says on the tin, he shot an insurgent, an enemy in far off lands. "FOUL" cried the Do-gooders like it was some kind of Sunday League football match where everyone can go to the pub at the end of each bloody and deadly firefight. They rushed into court blowing their whistles and holding up a 'Red Card', quoting the constantly changing 'Rules of Engagement'..... Sub-Chapter 5, Appendix 8A, Paragraph Blah Blah... When an insurgent drops his rifle, said insurgent ceases to fall into the category of 'The Enemy' and is reclassified as an 'Unarmed Civilian'......... Yeah and if said insurgent lies still and counts to ten, he's alive again.... he's back in the game.

I'd love to round up the do-gooders, give them a rifle each and send them out on patrol and see if quoting the rulebook through a loud hailer will stop the Afghans from shooting them as they tend to their friends and comrades who just exploded into a crimson shower  of flesh and bone before their eyes as they stood on a hidden IED.

Okay, so Marine A said he fired a round into what he thought was a dead body of an enemy fighter. Very ungentlemanly, very un-British, we have rules Sir! ...... But if that wounded Afghan had been in possession of a sidearm, do you think he would have checked the Rulebook before opening fire on Marine A? We hear of the Taliban soldiers playing possum to lure British soldiers into a trap, we hear of them enlisting in the local Police force or Militia so that once they are a trusted member of the team they can shoot young British soldiers in the back..... What does the Rulebook say about that? I know that many years ago it used to say something like... If you refuse to shoot the Enemy then you will face a firing squad for Cowardice.. Perhaps this is what Marine A was thinking at the moment his finger squeezed the trigger..... Did anyone even ask what marine A had had to witness... what was feeding his future nightmares prior to that fatal moment. I suppose only he knows for sure and he now has a lifetime of incarceration to become acquainted with those nightmares.... a harsh punishment indeed.

I find it hard to believe that you can punish someone

so severely for not adamantly adhering to the Rulebook when the opposing side doesn't follow any rules at all.... What an FA Cup Final that would make.. If our 'Treatment of Prisoners' section of the rulebook said, Torture the prisoner for at least one week, then place him in front of a camera and behead him, would there be such a public outcry when images showing this treatment of our captive troops are beamed around the world.... NO, there is such a public outcry because WE give prisoners use of the comfy chair, a cup of tea and the best biscuits we can find, subject to current location..... we are just so evil.

Unless both sides are resolutely following it,  then the rulebook should be burnt in protest and dog eat dog should apply, survival of the fittest and quickest. Our troop's lives are seriously being put at risk now because in every future enemy contact there will be a moment of hesitation before

pulling the trigger, not because they may kill or injure a 'Civilian' who has thrown his weapon to the ground but because of what the Do-gooders will do if they find out.

To paint a picture of what our guys go through I've borrowed the following words from a slightly certifiable lunatic who was once a soldier......


WORDS ON WAR
  I walked down Basra Road in 1991, and my head broke. Tattered scraps of teenage flesh smeared black across burnt steel, as fire cooked white bone. I spent half an hour looking for a dead boy’s head – no joy, so his corpse stretched bloated fingers skyward and his death mask was lost to history.

A Tank sat lonely in the sand. Barrel down in defeat as flames cooked the men in its belly. A rictus grin painted across a roasted man’s face stared down at me, mocking his fate or mine? I still don’t know, so I clipped a grin onto my face and said ‘Hello!’ because the world had gone insane.

A pair of legs spread impossible splits onto blast scorched tarmac, their body gone now – trashed by high explosive launched from an air-conditioned cockpit, jostling for a place in the dead zone next to some severed off arms and a brain splashed helmet. And still the earth gave up her dead.

I met a face with no head, and I stared hard at the straggly hairs of a dead teenager’s moustache. There was no ‘Hello!’ this time. Just a blank nothing from me, no words made sense, so I smoked a cigarette and walked further into madness.

I posed next to a dead man. Swollen and still, silent in death. Click went a camera and we gave him some smokes. More clicks captured the lunacy I embraced, war crimes and worry etched into my life. We called the road ‘Murder Mile’ and we were right. I think often of the boy whose name I’ll never know in the place where sanity fled.

War is murder – all of it. To judge one among many is wrong, but then so is war. I suspect neither will end soon. So I think of the road and remember the boys who fell in the sand.

 FREE MARINE A, HE'S A HERO NOT A CRIMINAL