I'm a little fellow. Luckily, before I realised that I had the chance to serve my country. I was in some form of self-denial when it came to my, what shall I call it, “shortness”. Or maybe my “height-disadvantaged” status. My father was no help. He's the same height as me and yet he used to play rugby. So, not being one of the world's greatest footballers, when I moved to Inverness I joined Highland Rugby Club. I used to get a game with the 4th Fifteen. To be honest, and I don't think any of my team-mates would deny this; we were a bunch of has-beens and never-will-bees. But we had a lot of fun. I even scored a try once against the Royal Air Force. No-one was more surprised by that than myself and the two RAF guys who failed to stop me charging across the line.
One day I was in the Post Office at Queensgate in Inverness, I spotted one of the star players from the local rugby club back home in the queue. It turned out he was a forestry college in Inverness. It turned out he'd recently been signed up by one of the big Scottish clubs, Boroughmuir I think, by this time. I told the guys at Highland that I'd seen the guy, Alex Moore, but it turned out they knew he was in town. It had already been arranged that he would train with Highland week-nights and play for Boroughmuir, let's say that's who it was, on Saturdays.
And guess what part of his training involved: running over the top of me with all the speed and force of an express train. It was worth it when the Rugby Internationals came around. When Alex carved his way down the wing knocking various opponents side-ways, I had the satisfaction that he'd perfected his technique by trampling me into the ground. They also serve who only get the be-jesus knocked out of them in training.

I'm going to throw out another half-remembered quotation from high school English. “One doesn't go to a battle with one's best trousers on,” I seem to think the doctor in Ibsen's play “An Enemy of the People” said. It may have been “a war” rather than “a battle”. So if it's not advisable to wear a business suit to a war zone, what should a reporter wear? Those of you who have taken a peak at the photo-gallery on this site will realise that I tended to favour autumn/fall colours, greens and browns, and a pair of ruddy big hiking boots. Let's not talk about the protective gear – the ballistic plastic-helmeted Canadian soldiers got a big laugh out of my steel “pot”. Budget constraints meant I didn't have one of neat blue Kevlar protective vests, with ballistic plates fore and aft and matching helmet, emblazoned with the words “Press”.  Or the fancy Australian chukka boots I found were so popular with male television presenters. By the way, why do so many of them insist on putting on their flack jackets only when they're on camera? Anyway, I'm not here to talk about protective gear.
I noticed that some of the US reporters, and a lot of US civilian contractors as well, wore American Army desert camouflage gear. One school of opinion is that this is a bad idea for two reasons – one the real soldiers will think you are taking the piss and second, that it might make you a target for the bad guys. The opposite school of opinion was that being the odd one out in the crowd by not wearing cammo might make you an obvious target for a sniper or some idiot with a suicide vest on who wants to give you a hug that will last for the rest of your life – about 90 seconds. The bad guys may not know you're a newspaper reporter but you're obviously not a soldier – maybe you're a visiting politician, or a spy, or someone else well worth killing. Funny story, at least I think it is: When queuing up for food at Kandahar base I noticed the US soldiers treated me with excessive courtesy. Someone had to tell me that it was my civilian clothing and lack of a firearm that accounted for this. Almost the only other guys, apart from some of my journalist colleagues, who wore civvies and didn't carry a gun in the dinner queue were the folks from the US Special Forces. Here's another observation for you; when Canadian military bigwigs visited, their body guards always wore civilian clothing. They stood out in the crowd like sore thumbs. These are not stupid people. There's obviously more to the civvies versus ammo debate than I realise.

Way back, a long time ago, at high school we had to study a play by Bertold Brecht; Life of Galileo I think it was. There was line along the lines of “Poor is the country without heroes; poorer still the country that needs them.” That's a bit cynical but it one of the few things from English class that I remember. It seems that not only are heroes not a great idea but it doesn't exactly pay to take too close a look at them. I don't have many heroes, but I do have some people I admire. A writer I always had a lot of time for was Laurie Lee. His account of his walk across Spain in the mid-1930s “As I walked Out One Midsummer Morning” was long one of my favourite books. I also got a kick out of his collection of essays “I Can't Stay Long”. So when I saw the biography of him by Valerie Grove for the bargain price of $2.99, I made the mistake of buying it. I was particularly interested in what she had to say about his time with the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. His account of shooting a fascist soldier just never rang true to me. I also wanted to know what Ms Groves had to say about suggestions that Lee hadn't, as he claimed, walked all the way across Spain, north to south in the 1930s. One of the favourite Lee essays is called First Born. It's about his hopes for his new born daughter.  It always struck me as eminently sensible. The problem, as Grove reveals, is that the baby in question was not his first born. He'd had a daughter by a married woman about 20 years before and had little, if any contact, with her. In fact, his real first born had to track him down to a bar where it sounds as though he tried to chat her up when she first approached him. So, “First Born” is a lie. I can never read, or enjoy, that beautiful essay in the same way again. It's not that I condemn, or indeed pass any moral judgement on, the fact that he already had a teenage daughter; it's the lie that bothers me.  I was also appalled to learn that he forced his young wife, and the mother of his supposed “first born” to change the spelling of her Christian name. Can a man who bullies his wife like that really mean everything he says he wants for his newborn baby daughter? She changed the spelling back to the original after he died. The light of truth can be unforgiving when it shines into the dark crevices of our lives. I sometimes think of The Truth as a light so bright and harsh that, like the sun, we should never look never look directly at it. But like the Sun, we cannot live without Truth. It's a strange old world, ain't it?

Well, mystery solved. A few blogs back I was bitching about the terrible job the Canadian media had done when it came to reporting a claim from Wikileaks that four Canadian soldiers had been killed by US friendly fire in Afghanistan. The media fought to outdo each other in demanding to know why the Canadian government lied about how the men died. Very little was done to find out details of the friendly fire incident. That would have been somewhat challenging because the men were not killed by a US bomb – they were killed in fire-fight with the Taliban; just as the Department of National Defence said.
It was wasn't so much the Canadian Government that got a raw deal from media – it was the implied criticism of the families of the dead soldiers that bothered me. The media was pretty much accusing them of not caring enough to find out exactly how their loved ones died. They were, if the media was to be believed, dupes.
In fact, it was no fault of the US Air Force that the deaths weren't due to friendly fire. They did indeed drop a bomb, a one ton one, near the Canadians but it failed to go off. Someone with the US military put two and two together and got five. A one-ton bomb and four dead Canadian soldiers doesn't always equal friendly fire. Common-sense should have resulted in some caution be used when it came to the US report. The chances of the US Air Force killing four Canadians and none of their friends and comrades saying a word about it are less than zero. I gather there were around 50 Canadians in the area when the men died.
This highly discreditable media episode links into another problem highlighted in a previous blog – the preference for women commentators in reporting fields normally dominated by men. I was talking about female football and men's ice hockey commentators. A lot of the Canadian media thought it would be smart to get women “experts” on defence matters to comment on the supposed friendly fire deaths. The decision to choose experts purely on the grounds of their sex back-fired on this one. There are some very knowledgeable female commentators on defence/military issues but the reporters in the main failed to find them. There are also a number of very knowledgeable men, but they were excluded by the bright spark reporters who thought it would be a great idea to get a woman. There was one male “expert” I heard. He's not a guy I ever used when I was a reporter and after hearing what he had to say about this incident I remembered why I red-flagged him as a hysteric and never used him in my stories. One of the women I heard interviewed about the never-happened friendly fire deaths was former US Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski. I'd always thought she was scape-goated over the Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal in Iraq. Now I'm glad she was never my boss.

I spent the time I should have spent working on the blog trying to work out how to put a Photo Gallery onto the site. I think I've managed it. Access to it can be found on Page 2 for the moment. Trying to put it on Page 1 created all sorts of problems with the layout. But I'm going to speak to my computer guy at Davsus and see if we can put it on Page 1. I have some more photos from Afghanistan which I hope to put into the Gallery but they need to be reformatted first.  So, there's no blog this week - unless you count this announcement. Feel free to let me know whether you think the Photo Gallery works.