What constitutes a combat death? The Canadian media talked about the “the first combat deaths since Korea” when Canadian troops started getting killed in Afghanistan. I tend to think that getting your head taken off by an anti-tank rocket counts as a death in combat. That’s what happened to Daniel Gunther of the Van Doos back in 1993 while he was serving as a peacekeeper in Bosnia. Of course, combat suggests having the chance to fight back and that’s not something Gunther had the chance to do. But then the bulk of Canadians killed in Afghanistan have died as a result of roadside bombs and they didn’t have a chance to shoot back either.
It’s quite possible that the bulk of Canadian journalists don’t even know about Gunther. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the Canadian government lied about how Gunther died in order to avoid going off-script when it came to peacekeeping missions. The deliberate murder of a Canadian soldier would upset the plot line – instead it was claimed he was killed accidentally by some stray shrapnel. Secondly, until Afghanistan, most Canadian outlets didn’t care about the country’s soldiers. Stories I wrote for the Edmonton Sun would appear a year later in the Toronto based media as if they were new. News is like fish, it doesn’t keep well. We used to joke when Sun Media’s own Ottawa Bureau used to send military stories which began “Sun Media has learned…..” that “Yeah, from reading a year-old Edmonton Sun”.
And are combat deaths somehow more important that training deaths? Years ago, in an effort to do something different for Remembrance Day, I did an article about training deaths. Few people realise how dangerous training can be. The old “train hard, fight easy” doctrine comes with a price.  The number of training deaths suffered in the UK during the Second World War was long a state secret.

I’m not going to bore you by adding my voice to those wondering what the heck the Canadians and British hope to gain by joining the U.S./French air assault on Libya. The air campaign defies all political logic. The Libyans have to sort this out for themselves – we can’t save everyone. No-one wants another Rwanda but in revolution nearly always brings the monsters to the fore. There appears to be a leadership vacuum when it comes to the rebels and I’m worried about who is going to fill it. And let's not go into how attacking tanks and artillery positions counts as enforcing a No-Fly Zone
No, I want to talk about the Aussies in Afghanistan. Thanks to the wonders of Facebook it turns out that some of the Aussies don’t have a lot of time for the Afghans they are supposed to be protecting. “Ragheads” was one of the more polite names used to describe the local population. I can sympathise with foreign troops in Afghanistan because if there’s one thing that all the ethnic groupings there share, it’s an almost universal dislike and distrust of foreigners. The Afghans regard themselves as poor but pure and all they want is to be left alone. Sadly, over the past 200 years, the British, Russians, Americans, Pakistanis, and Iranians have all reckoned the Afghans can't be left alone. When I was in Kandahar province back in 2002, it was obvious that any continued trouble-free Canadian presence was heavily dependent on providing tangible and almost immediate economic benefits to the local population. But the Aussies who posted the derogatory material on Facebook were not behaving professionally. I bet the Taliban and their allies are have a field day posting the Aussies’ Facebook comments on thousands of Islamic websites. Not helpful, Digger. In fact, I’ve got to wonder is the morons involved should even be allowed near fire arms.
I’m a little disappointed because the Aussies I met in Afghanistan were all very professional – mind you they were members of the Australian SAS or on attachment to it. Great neighbours.  One day I might tell you about the day some members of the  Canadian special forces unit JTF2 locked themselves out of their office at Kandahar Airport.

The recent Coroner's inquest on a British soldier, Cpl. John Harrison, killed during the 2009 rescue of  New York Times journalist Stephen Farrell in Afghanistan got me wondering what I would have done if I'd been captured by the Taliban. I guess hope for a quick and painless death – or, very much less likely, a negotiated release. The Canadian troops I was with at Kandahar used to joke with me when we went to local villages that if I didn't stick close to them I end up in a “Taliban snuff movie”. What I wouldn't have done was hope to rescued – particularly if I'd ignored numberous warnings not to go somewhere and got myself capured through my own stupidity. Hostage rescues in Afghanistan are kind of dicey anyway, Farrell's Afghan assistant, Sultan Munadi, was killed during the rescue and Linda Norgrove was killed last year by a US grenade during an attempt to rescue her. By the way, I think the US military should get some credit for admitting it was responsible for the death of aid worker Norgrove.
Perhaps I'm being a bit  flippant here, but perhaps the New York Times could have arranged and paid for Farrell's rescue – I'm pretty sure the paper has budget not far short of what the British Army gets these days. There are plenty of so-called security contractors (when did “mercenary” go out of fashion?) with the technical know-how to conduct a rescue operation. Actions should have consequences and those consequences should not involve the death of another person.

A lot of the websites which seem to be aimed at squaddies and former squaddies refer disparingly to “Walts”. I don't think I've seen a dictionary definition of Walt yet but it seems to me to be a term for some kind of military fantasist. Could Walt be short for Walter Mitty? The fantasist hero of a short story by American humourist James Thurber.

Years ago I came across an Australian-based website which specialised in exposing military frauds. I think it was called Australian and New Zealand Military Imposters. Australia seemed to have a lot of Australians claiming falsely to have served in Vietnam and Brit immigrants claiming to be former SAS. That got me thinking about a fellah who regularly appeared in the local media claiming to be a hardened combat veteran who served with a non-Canadian unit. Like the imposters in Australia this fellah claimed to have served in a special forces role. I'd heard he'd been a cook on a submarine. I questioned a fellow journalist who'd done a story about this guy about what evidence there was to back up the claim of special forces service. It seemed to come down to a military discharge certificate – the kind both an elite combat infantryman or a cook would be entitled to. There were also some photos of this character holding a rifle with what looked like some exotic flora in the background. Once again, it could have been taken before this guy went out on another highly dangerous mission or it could have been a cook taking a break from the pots and pans to be photographed with his personal weapon.
Some people would, and did, say “Where's the harm?” in this kind of charade. Well, here's the harm. This guy was  spouting a lot of bullshit, both to the Canadian public and the young Canadian soldiers heading off to Kandahar, about War. He was  filling folks' heads with nonsense, gleaned from cheap paperbacks and Commando Comics at time when Canada was making  a very serious military commitment which has so far cost the lives of more than 150 Canadians in Afghanistan. That shouldn't ought to be encouraged.

A couple of weeks ago I was walking across the carpark at the local shopping centre when I heard a vehicle being revved high again and again. Knowing what awful drivers people here in Alberta are, I made sure I knew which vehicle the racket was coming from and kept a close eye on it. I had a feeling that it was going to reverse out of its parking space at high speed and I didn't want to be in its path when that happened. Right enough, the driver suddenly slammed it into gear and shot out backwards from the space. He shot right into a car in the next section of the carpark. I reckoned he might try to drive off without leaving his details for the driver of the car he'd just hit, so like a good citizen I took down his number. The guy saw me and got out. He wanted to know what I was doing. I told him. He accused me of being a racist. Did I mention he was from Africa? It hadn't seemed important to me but it obviously was to him. By the way, suprisingly, there didn't seem to be any visible damage to the vehicle he hit.

For my last couple of years at the Edmonton Sun I was one of the crime reporters. To me, there was no such thing as a “daring robbery”. The word “daring” suggests something admirable. There's nothing admirable about stealing. Most criminals are sad and pathetic people. A lot of them seem to see themselves as Robin Hood characters. Fortunately for the cops, most of them aren't that bright.
On the other hand, “battling grannies” never fought off “cowardly thugs” in my stories either. What did the reporters who accuse muggers of being cowards when their victims fight back actually want the criminals to do? Knock the old lady to the ground and stamp on her head? Aborting the robbery maybe the only decent thing the crook does that day. I didn't want to write anything that might discourage some inadequate scumbag from doing the right thing at the last minute. Don't get me wrong, anyone who attacks and steals from someone weaker from themselves is a coward, but not half-killing a weaker someone who fights back is not cowardly.
And while I'm on the subject of crime reporting: another thing I could never bring myself to do was to describe a criminal as a “suspect” when cops had no idea of their identity. For example - “The suspect is described as a white male, 5'6”, and wearing a dark jacket”. If that's all the cops have, they don't have a suspect. They have description of a thug, knifeman, raider, robber, mugger or attacker. That person only becomes a “suspect” when they have a name to go with the crook.
Isn't it odd how little things become more annoying as a person gets older.

Some Canadian civil servants who have worked in Afghanistan were up in arms recently because they're no longer entitled to a medal. When the Canadian military was running things the civil servants were considered to be on attachment to it and were therefore entitled to the General Service Medal if they were in the area for thirty days or more. The folks working in the Canadian-owned coffee and doughnut shop at the Kandahar military base are entitled to the medal. But recently it was decided that the civil servants were no longer on attachment to the military.
I have a bit of problem with medals. Either you get them just for showing up – I sometimes feel judging by the slab of ribbons on a U.S. general's chest that they get a medal for every day they turn up for work – or they frequently go to the wrong people for the wrong reasons. A lot seems to depend on being seen doing the right thing by the right person at a time when the medal award quota still has to be filled. Bradford and Dillon's book on SAS hero Paddy Mayne (see Book Briefing) reveals a very deliberate attempt to push all the right buttons to win him a Victoria Cross, even if it meant changing the facts of what happened.
As a former journalist, I always had reservations about the Young Journalist of the Year competition. There was a lot a prestige attached to the paper that employed the winner. Some papers were unable to resist the temptation: the story came from a senior editor, the newsdesk led the young reporter through the fact-gathering process by the hand, and the eventual story owed more to the skills of the paper's best sub-editor than the writing ability of the award nominee. About the only contribution to the winner made was the use of his/her name as a by-line.
On the other hand, when the Canadian soldiers of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry stationed at Kandahar in 2002 decided they'd like a Combat Infantry badge similar to the one sported by the members of the US 101st Airborne they were serving alongside, I gave them sympathetic coverage. They wanted some extra acknowledgement that unlike the bulk of the Canadian troops stationed at Kandahar they left the comparative safety of the base on a regular basis and therefore were putting their lives on the line more often. If that's what they really wanted, who was I to discourage them? But I wasn't going to campaign for a Combat Reporter badge for journalists who “went outside the wire” on a regular basis.

National Myths are important. Nation building is hard. There are many countries today, especially in Africa, which are not nation states at all, but warring tribes locked together within artificial boundaries. They are in fact mini-versions of the European colonial powers which once held sway across the continent. One tribal group seizes power and ruthlessly oppresses and politically marginalises the other tribes.
This is often where national myths come into play. People with very wide ranging interests are convinced there is such a thing as a common or national interest. It's not easy and often involves outrageous historical distortions. British history is a case in point. The Magna Carta was not about protecting ordinary people from arbitrary rule and enforcement of one law for all, but a power grab from a weak king by a powerful clique of very rich and powerful men. Was the Stuart Restoration after the death of Oliver Cromwell really such a good thing? And who were the real beneficiaries of the Glorious Revolution 30 years later which replaced James II with a puppet Dutchman and eventually a German king who spoke no English?
I was reading recently about the British and American generals in North Africa. Many of the Americans seemed to have been raised reading a little history primer called the Red Book, or something like that. In this book the heroes are brave revolutionaries who battle the evil oppressive British for independence and the rights of man in 1776. A lot of supposedly intelligent men took this guff seriously and distrusted their British colleagues intensely as a result of it. The American War of Independence was far more complicated than that – in fact many refer to it as the First American Civil War. Up until the First World War, economic development in the United States was heavily dependent on money from the supposedly despicable British. Of course, building a nation from almost scratch from waves of immigrants is going to involve a very simplistic approach to history and a lot of myth making. But when those myths cost lives, as they did during the Allied campaign in North Africa, it is perhaps time to reconsider them. Americans to this day believe that they live in the finest democracy in the world.  In comparison with most countries in the world, it is indeed a democracy. But it's not a perfect democracy.  The United States is no longer a young country and maybe it's time to ditch some of the national myths and take a mature look at its true history. Trying to impose “democracy” on countries when one's own version may be a little suspect could prove an expensive proposition – both in terms of lives and national treasure.

When I was at high school, the school library was a constant source of wonder. I suspect the local council library service dumped all the books that no-one borrowed from the public libraries on us. Despite that, the school library had some gems. One was basically a handbook for running a guerrilla war. It was called, I think I've got this right, “The Memoirs of General Grivas”. Grivas, for those of you under the age of seventy, ran a late-1950s guerrilla campaign on Cyprus aimed at getting the British out and the Greek Government in. Now, looking back, I'm a little surprised that a school library would put a book detailing how to establish and run a terrorist organisation into the hands of impressionable children. It didn't quite spell out how to make a bomb from stuff found in the average Scottish kitchen, but it wasn't far off from that degree of detail.
Sadly, few of us needed instruction on how to terrorise a community. We already had a gang of kids in town who did pretty much as they liked. If they didn't get invited to a party, they showed up any way. If they weren't admitted to the party they had two choices. One was quick; one required a little patience. The quick option involved smashing all the windows in the house where the party was being held. The second choice meant waiting until someone left the party and then beating them savagely. No-one would want to involve the cops because appearance on a court witness list meant, at best, a life-threatening kicking. Law and Order tends to break down when no-one will testify in court. It was a small town that I grew up in and if the bad guys didn't know where you lived, their lawyers did. Sadly, I think there are lawyers out there who only care about winning. I don't know how much allowing witnesses to give their address as “Care of The Police Station” improved matters. I also don't know if the gang's reign of terror took a hit when they killed a cop. I do know that when a friend and I were attacked outside the police station by some of the junior members of the gang (none its convicted killers were present), the cops only came out after the fighting was over. Actually, I do recall a court case involving one of the gang leaders which ended in a couple of convictions. It involved some plea bargaining. An attempted murder charge was dropped in exchange for a guilty plea to assault and an armed robbery involving an axe became a guilty to breach of the peace. The Chinese have a saying, a curse actually, “May you live in interesting times”. I wonder if the Scottish version should be “May you live in an interesting town”.
 

One unexpected, at least I didn't expect it, hazard of reporting from a conflict zone is ridicule. And it hurts even more when the ridicule is misdirected. What happens when some clown at Head Office messes up a story which you may have risked serious injury to file? When I was involved in training young reporters I used to tell them that one misspelled name or other slip meant their work had just been poured down the drain. Readers would feel that if the reporter had got something easy like name wrong, what else had they got wrong. The whole story had been stripped of all credibility by what would prove to be the only error in it.
Move forward several years to a scabby, dead dog-littered, town dump in Kosovo. It is nearly midnight. I've been trying for hours to file an account of Canadian troops crossing into Kosovo. Finally, I get through to head office and start dictating the story to a colleague. Let's not go into why in 1999 a reporter is still phoning in his copy. I have torch gripped between my inclined head and hunched shoulder so I can read my notes. It may well be the only light showing for fifty square miles. Not a good idea. When I get home and see the paper I find out that some idiot has added in a paragraph which states that Serbs in Kosovo had to leave the province as a condition of the Serb army's retreat. It's nonsense. Certainly, many Serbs had decided to load as many of their possessions into their cars and flee north. But that was because the local Muslims had made it very clear that they were no longer welcome. It was certainly not because of any stipulation in a peace agreement. The credibility of the whole story had been destroyed by an idiot. I suspect the same idiot had also screwed up the best quote in the article. A Canadian soldier had told me he had been uncertain as to what kind of reception he would get in Kosovo. “We were expecting bricks, instead we got roses,” was the quote. In the Edmonton Sun it appeared as “We were expecting bread, instead we got roses”.  There are days, and this was one of them, when I wonder why I bother.

What is a historian? Is it someone who writes about the past? Or is it someone with three PhDs to their name? There are some interesting things happening in the world of books about military history.  There are now some excellent and highly accessible histories coming out from the world of academia. While full-time writers have to knock out a constant stream of books to support themselves, academics have more time to produce their books and often enjoy better access to research material – and the help of bright young research assistants.
But does that mean than anything not written by an academic has no worth whatsoever? I think not. Universities are too often dens of orthodoxy. As the costs of a university education skyrockets they are filled with people from much the same increasingly narrow background, range of experience and outlook on life. It always was a myth that any bright Scottish kid could go to university and make full use of the brains that they were given. Things are only getting worse. The world will be a sadder and less informed place if history can only be written by people from a very narrow section of society.
I know of one writer whose contributions to an on-line encyclopaedia were expunged by some self-appointed moderator because he was not a “historian”. Who says? Was it the lack of a PhD? I have a feeling that Winston Churchill won a Nobel Prize for one of his histories. And yet I don't recall which university he went to. Perhaps if one is a minor member of the aristocracy, one does not need a degree to be considered a historian. I'm going to suggest that there is a lot a good history out there that's not written by a professor. The late John Prebble's histories are not above criticism but his contribution to many Scots' understanding of their country's past was and still is immense. I think he was a historian. I would hope that his books got a lot of people interested enough to find out more and maybe even form their own opinions on past events. My experience as a reporter convinced me that going to university made no difference either way, for better or worse, to someone's ability and skill as a journalist. I suspect the same is true of historians.

It seems that the latest piece of “must-have kit” for Afghanistan is a pair of bomb-proof underpants. The shorts, woven from the latest light-weight ballistic fibre, protect a soldier's wedding tackle from being shredded by a Taliban landmine. I don't know how well they work.
I seem to recall hearing that some British bomb-aimers in the Second World War stuffed car hub-caps down the front of their trousers to protect their manhood from stray Ack-Ack shrapnel as they lay in the nose of their aircraft. I also remember sitting on a spare flack jacket for much the same reason during one of my own visits to Afghanistan.
What didn't occur to me was that I might be putting the lives of the soldiers of who took me out on their patrols there at risk. Just over a year ago a Canadian woman journalist “embedded” with Canadian troops in Afghanistan called Michelle Lang was killed by a massive landmine which blew up the armoured car she was travelling in. Four army reservists from Alberta died in the same explosion. The vehicle was also carrying a female Canadian government civil servant, Bushra Saeed, and it now seems that it was targeted by the Taliban because of the presence on board of the two women. The women in civilian clothing had been chatting and taking notes in a village near the stretch of booby-trapped road and may well have struck Taliban supporters among the villagers as quite possibly “high value” targets of some kind. The landmine was triggered by a command wire after another armoured car had passed over it. It takes quite lot of buried explosive to destroy a heavily armoured LAV III vehicle and I'd be surprised if the local people the women were chatting with earlier didn't know about the landmine. The journalist had been taken there because it was supposed to be a showcase community for what was possible in Afghanistan if only the Taliban could be expelled. I won't go into the fact that more people can name the journalist killed than can remember the name of even one of soldiers who died with her- Garrett Chidley, George Miok, Zachery McCormack, and Kirk Taylor. I just hope lessons have been learned from this tragedy. I know it's made me think.

This one's been bugging me a while: as far back at the Beijing Olympics. There was a suggestion that there should be a boycott. A member of Team Canada was interviewed and declared there was no-way the Canadian Government could tell her not to go to Beijing. Fair enough: as long as she had never received a penny in taxpayer money to support herself. And these days most Olympic level sports people do receive taxpayer support. I felt like shouting into the radio speaker, which is crazy, that she could go to Beijing once she'd paid back very penny she'd taken from the taxpayer.
Note I said “sports people” and not “athletes”. A lot of the events in the Olympics do not require any athleticism. On the other hand, there are events that do require athleticism but are not sports. To my mind, anything that has to be judged is not a sport. There is a clear winner in a real sport – first across the line, greatest height jumped, etc, etc.
And why am I forced to financially support these folks' sports ambitions? Olympic success often brings them millions in endorsements or, at worst, a coaching job for life. But what do I get out of it? A warm fuzzy feeling when they win a Gold? Well, I don't. To me sporting achievement is personal. If I'm playing or someone I know is playing, I take an interest. Beyond that I don't care if the fastest woman in the world is Canadian, Russian or Malaysian. Having the fastest woman in the world setting a new record in a Canadian vest doesn't make Canada a better country. In fact, the woman was probably born in Trinidad and spends all year training in the United States. Someone running around a track several times does not, in my book, make the world a better place to live in. A society should be judged on how it treats its young, old and sick. I'd rather see my tax dollars spent on protecting the vulnerable than making some self-obsessed muscle-bound fool a millionaire. And let's forget that in modern sport, that person may well be a drug-taking cheat who just hasn't been caught yet. Hardly a role model or an inspiration.

Regular readers of this blog may recall I mentioned a play-ground game popular when I was a kid – Best Man Falls, in which I and my little school friends simulated dying for The Queen in various violent ways – victims of grenades, bazookas, machine guns, etc.
Someone was asking me about other playground games and whether we played Cowboys and Indians or anything like that. We did; Japs and Commandos. But usually by the time enough kids had been recruited, the school bell was ringing and we had to go back to class. I hadn't wondered until recently why the antagonists were Japs and Commandos. Most of our fathers and grandfathers would have fought against the Germans or Italians (and maybe a very few against the Vichy French), not the Japanese. The Chindits were more famous British Empire troops when it came to fighting the Japanese. And yet we chose to be Commandos. When I was given two boxes of toy soldiers (Airfix 1/32nd scale), they were Japanese and Commandos.
There's probably a PhD in why we were fixated in the sixties on the Japanese as enemies. Perhaps, despite the Holocaust, the Germans were being rehabilitated and it wasn't the done thing to kill them, even in play. But since when have primary school kids been politically correct? I don't think any of us had ever seen a Japanese person and yet they were the bogeymen of our childhood game. I seem to recall that though we had not encountered any Japanese people we were aware of men in our area whose homes we were not supposed to play near. Some were nightshift workers but some others, we were told, had been prisoners of the Japanese and could not stand loud noise. We were told many of them had been tortured. And these were the lucky ones, the Japanese usually killed prisoners, the wounded and the sick. I was reading a book recently which tells how British Empire troops were not slow to retaliate in kind and came to regard the Japanese as a kind of vermin, albeit a brave and dangerous kind of vermin. I wonder how many of you have seen that picture from a Second World War vintage Time Magazine of a pretty American girl admiring a Japanese skull that her boyfriend had sent her from the fighting in the Pacific. I don't recall Time publishing any photos of young women with German skulls. It would appear that there were some things that were acceptable when it came to the Japanese that were not when it came to the Germans or Italians. Twenty years after the end of the war, it was the Japanese who would die in our playground games.

This book reviewing is an interesting game. I'm not sure I would ever take a book review seriously again. A book came out recently on a subject I reckoned I knew more about that most.  I put my name forward to a well known publication as a possible reviewer. I didn't hear back. I suggested another potential reviewer who also knew the subject matter well. Again nothing. The book was reviewed. The reviewer's ignorance of the subject matter was a surprise. Then it occurred to me that the journal in question didn't want someone who knew the subject to review the book. It's all very cosy. Most book reviewers and many books page editors are writers themselves. If they give someone a bad review, they may get a bad review as payback, either from the writer of the book or one of the author's friends.
What's the point of reading a review by someone who is unable to say what in the book is true and what's not? I'm not talking about matters of factual interpretation, but about basic geography. The book in question was reviewed in several places; I'd say it got saturation coverage and overall enjoyed very good reviews. In all but one review I came across the reviewers' ignorance of the subject matter was staggering, though not entirely surprising in view of the way I'd been treated when I suggested myself as a reviewer. Certainly the book was not as ground-breaking as many of the reviewers seemed to think. The one reviewer who gave the book the thumbs-down was, not surprisingly, someone who knew something about the subject and was not a member of the literary mafia.
Another little thing about book reviews is a print journalist's desire to write something that won't end up within a few days wrapping up fish and chips or lining the bottom of the budgie's cage. What better than being included in those little mini-reviews which appear on the back of the paperback edition - “A splendid tale splendidly told” or “A masterful grasp of complicated events.” Now, you don't end up on the back of the book if you write something negative.
I've been lucky so far with Book Briefing on this site because I've liked most of the books reviewed. But I'm finding one book I'm reading at the moment a real hard slog. It's just possible that one day the author may be asked to review a book of mine. Should I review the book? Watch this space. OK. No need to wait. I will review the book. It's a question of credibility. Come to think about it, this book review thing is a lot like the Hans Christian Andersen story about the Emperor's New Clothes. It took a child with no fear of the consequences or hidden agenda to tell the truth; that the royal personage's new gossamer-light suit was a big con and he was in fact stark naked.

Well, I've decided to post the weblinks I've long been promising – all three of them. I thought there would be more. I certainly asked a lot more people and organisations for permission to link to their sites. It's a shame, I think you would have got a kick out of some of the sites and might even have found out some interesting things.
But the rules are that I have to get permission to link to other sites. One Scottish regimental museum gave me a definite “no”. For some reason it was felt that only victories should be discussed. Maybe the guys who died in military disasters are somehow second-class dead soldiers, whose stories should never be told. However, the majority of people I contacted simply didn't reply. Indifference is a terrible thing. Not so much in the case of the weblinks: no-one's life is going to be ruined because a site wasn't linked to. But indifference can be an awfully destructive force. Like some boss that can't be bothered to check his facts before giving some poor sod an undeserved lousy reference. Repeat that kind of behaviour a couple of times and someone's career is ruined. Years ago I read a book about a guy who wrote a book about his life being chased around New Guinea by hostile head-hunting types. His “escaping head-hunters” book was a great success and he moved to London to pursue a career as a full time writer. He found big city anonymity and big city indifference far more challenging to deal with than being hunted through the jungle – at least the tribesmen cared enough to want to kill him. I'm not kidding, that's what he said. I think far more people die in this world because no-one gives a toss whether they live or die than are killed through maliciousness.

You just never know who you're talking to. Years ago I was running a message across to the Lerwick offices of BBC Radio Shetland. There was a woman I didn't know there. She asked me when I was going back to Bolton. I was being mixed up with my room-mate and fellow reporter on the Shetland Times, Denis “The Bolton Wanderer” Mann. I said I was Paul Cowan. The stranger said she knew a Paul Cowan. I was aware of the guy; he'd been the editor of the Stornoway Gazette. His boss was famously eccentric, to say the least, having reputedly once fired his whole reporting staff on one paper, and having once offered me a job without interview. Anyway, I reeled off a bunch of stories about this fellah's supposed crazy behaviour. It was only then that I asked the stranger how she knew the man in question. “I'm his wife”, she said. She left that hanging in the air for a few long long seconds and then added “But you're right about him, I'm getting a divorce”.
Then there was the time that Lindsay Herron was explaining to me how he'd got his job on the Highland News in Inverness through his dad's freemasonry contacts. “The interview was even held in the Masonic Hall,” he explained. I liked Lindsay. I'm not sure if I bothered to tell him that the job he'd got had been promised to me. I was just waiting for a start date which never came through. At the time I was mystified. As I say, you just never know who you're talking to.

As the veterans of the Second World War get older, time is running out if they are to be interviewed for books about the conflict. These histories are very popular but perhaps a little controversial. The Duke of Wellington once remarked that it is no more possible to tell the whole story of a battle than it is to recount all the details of a court ball. Wise words indeed.
Of course, the move away from history as seen only from the point of view of the great and the good, with little or no input about the experiences of the lumped proletariat, must be a good thing. But just how accurate are the veterans' memories? Sometimes seeing them interviewed on the TV I get the feeling that their repeating things they read in books. It's easier to give a young researcher or interviewer what they expect to hear than to tell the truth. Sometimes that truth is too hard to explain to someone who wasn't there. If you have to ask; you’ll never understand. A check of service records can show that the veteran being interviewed wasn't there during the events he is recounting. But that doesn't mean there is a deliberate deception. Memory is a strange thing; particularly memory of traumatic events in which some kind of coping mechanism has kicked in. The sequence of events can be re-arranged to create a coherent narrative. But that can distort the story of what was at the time a very confused and fast moving action. Sometimes the mind just blanks-out unpleasant and traumatic events. Then a young interviewer shows up and asks for your memories. You try to fill in the void with stuff you don't really remember. I've been in some unpleasant situations and to be honest all I remember is the amusing and funny stuff that happened. Let's not forget that for many years no-one was interested in what the veterans had to say, and a lot of them didn't want to talk about it. Everyone just wanted to put the war behind them and get on with life. Rusted memories being taken out of the brainbox after so many years of being locked up and then polished up for an interviewer may not be entirely reliable. Real history is messy, confused, and often unpleasant. Personal memory is, and has to be, far more forgiving.

I thought it might be a good idea to put some links on this site to other sites which could be of interest to you. It's a time consuming process because I have to get permission from the other site operators to link to them. This often involves someone seeking an OK from a high-up in a veterans' or regimental association. So far, I've only had one definite “No”. That was from a regimental association which didn't want to be associated with the words “military disasters”. That made me a little sad. I would have thought that a soldier is just as dead regardless of whether the battle they fought in was a victory or a defeat. The defeats are all too often swept under the carpet. What I found was that the basic Scottish soldier didn't change much over the centuries. Poor generalship, lack of training, and sheer bad luck were often the factors that made the difference between triumph and disaster. I feel sorry that the soldiers who fought and died in lost battles are somehow regarded as less worthy of having their stories told than those who were on the winning side.
Speaking of whitewashes: I see demands for an inquiry into the 1948 Batang Kali Massacre in what was then Malaya refuse to die down. Good. I don't think the people who deny the need for an inquiry realise just what a great weapon the lack of information about the massacre is for anti-British propagandists. Some of the claims these people make are outrageous but as long as the British Government insists on hiding the truth, they have a clear run. What amazes me is that so many people still don't believe that a patrol from the Scots Guards did murder 24 ethnic Chinese at a rubber plantation. I saw a former senior soldier quoted as saying he thought there has already been a satisfactory inquiry. I presume this means he accepts the male plantation workers were indeed all killed while trying the escape. If that's what he did mean, I wonder if he's ever troubled himself to wonder why there were no workers wounded while trying to escape.

B’ e smachd nan Albannach air malairt bian a bhrùth Canèidianaich Eòrpach siar gu na Rockies agus a chur air chois cogadh fearainn a bheir ort samhlachadh iomadh de bhuidheann dhrugaichean an là an-diugh ri clann Sgoil Shàbaid.
I got a big kick out of this. For those who don't read Gaelic, it's translation into that language of a paragraph from my book How the Scots Created Canada. It appeared recently on a Scottish Government sponsored website.
I only speak a smattering of Gaelic, though I understand more. In fact, that may have got me in trouble in the past. I remember waiting outside a phone box on Harris when the woman using the phone popped her head out and asked if I had a pen on me. I told her I didn't. I'd swear she asked in English. She insisted she'd asked in Gaelic and became very suspicious of me due to my denial that I spoke the language. Actually, it's just possible she did ask in Gaelic. That was the language of many of my little playmates when I was a toddler in Lanarkshire. A knitwear factory had opened nearby and many of the workers there were from the Gaelic-speaking islands of Lewis and Harris. I also had an uncle, by marriage, who tried to teach me. I think I can ask for a drink of water/milk/whisky and ask “How are you doing?” I also know a couple of obscenities and some pidgin Gaelic I picked up when I worked on a sail boat in the waters off Knoydart. But back when I was kid, there was a little encouragement to speak Gaelic. English was the language you needed to master if you were going to get on in life. When a bunch of us asked when we were at high school about learning the language, we were told “no chance”. Mind you this was the same school which made it impossible to study Ordinary Grade History and Geography in Third and Fourth Year.
Anyway, it turned out there was a point to learning Gaelic. About the time I was finishing my journalism course, millions of pounds were pumped into Gaelic broadcasting. Almost anyone who spoke Gaelic and could do joined-up writing was being signed-up as a television or radio reporter. A couple of folk who were able to take advantage of this development did very well, I'm sure I heard one of them reporting from China for the BBC a couple of years back. Oh, I can also “Get out of here” in Gaelic. I wonder why my uncle taught me that one. Anyway, Gaelic reminds me of being a little kid playing on the street outside the block of flats which was home in those days and that's why I got such a kick out of seeing even a couple of sentences I wrote translated into the “Language of Eden”. My world then didn't stretch much further than the length of that street and indeed it was a kind of Eden for a little kid.