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.