I’m not really one for watching lots of television although I love good movies or a high-end box set. To that end, I do sometimes find myself behind the curve in recognising current popular culture personalities, media-led trends, and what’s hot and what’s not.
Recently though, my good lady introduced me to the delights of ‘I’m a celebrity, get me out of here’. Essentially it’s a show devoted to the collection and demeaning of C and D list individuals of ‘celebrity’ status, dumping them in an Australian rainforest and forcing them to endure unpleasant trials to earn food. Roman colosseum entertainment for the 21st Century masses.
Be that as it may, the one thing that I picked up on was how much these personalities missed their homes and loved ones, despite the fact that, currently at least, they are around the 14 day mark. A fortnight. Watching a recent episode where the celebs received emails from people at home, I was struck by how emotional they were. And it got me thinking about those members of the Armed Forces who, throughout their careers, will spend years away from their homes and families.
A friend of mine posted last year about how he was gutted to be missing his daughter’s seventh birthday and went on to say that he had only been home for three birthday’s throughout her life. He didn’t moan or gripe about it as he’s a thoroughly professional soldier and one who accepts full responsibility for his choice of career. It was more a case of surprise at how much he’d missed once he’d taken pause and added it all up.
Our country asks a lot, and is given much, from our men and women in the Armed Forces. A standard military operational tour today pretty much writes off the best part of a year for the deploying personnel. Between the progressive exercises, mission-specific training, and pre-deployment prep, the six-month operational tour generally equates to a good nine month’s plus of absence from routine life.
The improvement in communication helps to offset this a little. Face Time, Skype, WhatsApp, Instagram, email etc all facilitate connectivity between the deployed individual and their families. I was reminiscing with a colleague recently about the old days of stone-age communications and the severe limitations.
On a mountainside in Northern Iraq my fellow commandos and I spent two months living in shell-scrapes under our ponchos. We would receive letters from home maybe once a fortnight if a helicopter was heading our way and if the mail had reached our headquarters element. We would go some weeks with no contact whatsoever with home and then receive a bundle of letters that had accumulated in a post room at a US base in Turkey.
The issue here was that it would take a long time for letters to make it between correspondents and many of us could be seen shaking our heads as we read the familiar line from our loved ones; ‘…why aren’t you replying to my letters?’ Or, my personal favourite was when the chopper would come in, land, be unloaded and the excited shout of ‘Mail!’ sent the troop running to the HLS. Someone would hand out the mail, yelling names and sarcastic remarks as they distributed the small white rectangles of morale. There was general quiet as each of us lost themselves in their missives but then there would be a yell of disgust or disbelief as one of the guys received a Poll Tax demand or a letter from his bank demanding he explain why he was consistently overdrawn. Perfect pick-me-up when you’ve been over a month with no other contact from home…
An attempt to alleviate this was the use of the ship to shore call using our radio equipment to call a Royal Navy ship that would then relay it to our loved one’s landline. Again, it seems surreal in this day and age to imagine sitting in a signaller’s tent talking into the handset of the largest PRC radio and trying to get it through to your loved one that she had to say ‘Over’ when she had finished her sentence, made all the more difficult by the five second delay. Or when you’d made the trek to the sigs location, waited for over an hour in the queue and then get nobody home.
Generally speaking, most Service personnel on operational tours are very busy so the time on the ground goes quickly for them. It is however, usually dangerous, stressful, and intense. Draw these elements out over six to nine months and it is not difficult to see how the UK military has become as exhausted as it has over the past ten years. A study I saw some years back showed that the same 35% of the military carried out 90% of the operational tasks, something I’d always suspected but was not surprised to see confirmed.
Year on year, the accumulation of absence from the routine of home life takes its toll. The missed Christmases, birthdays, anniversaries, concerts, New Year parties.
I’ve seen first hand the pressures that these extended absences from home have on the stability of the family unit. Many Armed Forces’ families often find themselves posted alongside their spouses to unfamiliar towns and cities. New schools for the children, new jobs, new routines and dynamics. When the Service member is deployed at this point, the wife or husband remaining behind is suddenly expected to cope with the responsibility of assimilating the family into their new life and deal with all the associated stresses.
When these deployments extend over Christmas, it provides an added pressure, particularly when there are younger children involved. I’m sure many of us have experienced seeing a friend or colleague looking a bit teary-eyed as they hang up the phone or log-off the computer on Christmas day before heading back to their Ops Room or sangar duty.
And the military does try to alleviate this for their deployed personnel. EFI-sourced entertainers, Charlie-Charlie messages from the CO, and the standard Christmas dinner for the troops are just some of the methods with which the pain of absence was supposedly alleviated. But, as someone else once said, ‘the more they try to make it like home, the worse it feels’, or words to that effect.
I’ve spent a lot of Christmases being away from home and usually in pretty grim places, sharing cramped accommodation or a basic bunk. It was always a little easier for me as I didn’t have children but still a lot for my partner to put up with. And sometimes I’d question it: WTF am I doing spending another Christmas day in a dusty, desert shit hole when I could be at home with a belly full of turkey and a large Laphroaig in my hand? Why does anyone do it?
We do it, or did it, because we serve. Because we chose to invest ourselves in something that required bigger sacrifices than could ever be expected of the standard Joe Public. And I think it’s sad to see that this notion of service is all but disappearing from our national psyche. More and more, people seem to be increasingly driven by the notion of self and individual gain than by the giving of anything back.
Even our government recognises this. David Cameron’s ill-fated initiative of a national service for the civilian sector, an indicator of his feelings on the subject. The fact that this initiative failed as spectacularly as it did shows I think, the level of public apathy for anything that does not provide personal gain or instant gratification. I also think that the further a nation removes itself from embracing the notion of service, the bigger the gulf between the people and the Armed Forces becomes, as the general populace have even less in common with the service men and women who deploy on their behalf.
So, to all those members of the Armed Forces deployed abroad this Christmas, or even stuck on Base Company duties or Unit Security, I say thank you. To the soldier carrying out framework patrols around a FOB, to the sailor safeguarding our maritime interests and to the Airmen and women posted to middle-eastern bases supporting our extended operations, thank you for your service. At a time when it can often seem that the notion of Service is all but consigned to the dustbin of history, you can be assured that many of us still recognise the value and importance of your sacrifices at this time of year.
So again, to those who serve, or have served, thank you. Thank you for your Service.
