Danny Boy

At 11 am 3rd September 1939, a Sunday, my mother and grandmother decamped briefly to shelter under the massive scullery table when they heard on the wireless that war had been declared. When nothing happened after 10 minutes, they somewhat sheepishly emerged and continued to prepare Sunday lunch for the men of the house. Meanwhile, somewhere in the Med, my father was making sure 'his' MTB, and its crew of 10, were ship-shape and Bristol fashion. He was a month short of his 22nd birthday. Just 10 weeks later, that Little Ship sank in a storm 20km W of the Northern tip of Sardinia [map]; as he was attempting to repatriate the Effectives to Blighty via French inland waterways. When I turned 22, I was studenting in Dublin and would no more have signed up to serve than I would have been training to be a ballet-dancer, surgeon or vicar - all of which had been stated career aspirations of younger-me. It was the 70s, long hair, loons and Bob Dylan for me; rather than drills, discipline and spit-and-polish.

A full [N=13] coven of my family gathered in Dorset in the middle of August, to scatter me mother's ashes in the sea near where she'd agreed to marry Sir the Old Man. As usual before travelling, I scoured Borrowbox for something, anything, to read on the road. I was ambivalent about an army memoir, but it was more up my street than James Acaster or Barbara Kingsolver. That's how I got to read Double Crossed: A Code of Honour, A Complete Betrayal by Brian Wood MC. 

Living in a parliamentary democracy, we get to vote every few years and hand over the command of the ship of state to a bunch of Effectives Operatives - people who can fund-raise and glad-hand and make deals without being necessarily competent to make difficult decisions. The data on which those decisions are made are gathered by professionals, paid for by the state. Whatever you think about the US-British invasion of Iraq, the uniformed employees of the state were obliged [and trained] to carry out the task on the ground. On 14 May 2004, Brian Wood was ordered out of his armored personnel carrier APC [as L] to engage the Iraqi militia who had just ambushed the Brits. Against 10:1 odds, 23 y.o. Wood and his squaddies won The Battle of Danny Boy and he was awarded the Military Cross. 7m YT exec summary.

But those events occurred 65 years after 1939 and the relationship between The Public and The Armed Services had changed significantly. Since Nuremberg, it was no longer possible to play that "only obeying orders" card: every soldier was expected to be squeaky clean ethically and morally when their mates had just been killed and maimed and incoming is still flying. Politicians, who had committed the British army to the sorry, shabby, ruinously expensive [£8,000,000,000 there or thereabouts] Iraq venture, chose to take the high moral ground by establishing a commission of inquiry into the ethical behaviour of the PBI (poor bloody infantry) hazarding their very lives on the ground at Danny Boy. Brian Wood was required to attend the Al-Sweady Public Inquiry and remember in detail who had done what to whom ten years earlier. The thing that most concerned him was that The Man would take away his medal. The Inquiry was also ruinously expensive [but only £25,000,000 not billions] almost all of it funnelled to lawyers, who had never handled an AK-47 let alone been shot at by one.

Fun facts; small world dept.  Jason Beer the principal lawyer for the Inquiry was the same as the Jason Beer [quips] who was i/c the legal team for the Horizon Post Office Inquiry 7 years later [whc bloboprev]. On the telly, beloved-by-Brits, actor Toby Jones played Phil Shiner - the venal lawyer for the innocent Iraqi farmers killed, captured and brutalized at Danny Boy . . . AND . . .  Mr Bates, the Sub-postmaster who wouldn't be bullied.