I’ve just been reading a book about the Welsh Guards in Afghanistan in 2009. Unlike all-too-many of the Canadian books about the conflict, not all the men in this book were paragons of courage and professionalism. I liked that. And the book got me thinking about courage and bravery again. The book reminded me of some things I’d forgotten. It’s generally accepted wisdom that courage/bravery is something like a water well or a bank account. If too many withdrawals are made, it will run dry. There is a limit to how many times a person can go out there and face death. Some people’s reserve runs out sooner than is the case with others but no-one can go on for ever. It occurs to me that courage/bravery is also like a piece of elastic. It can stretch so far and then if it snaps, it’s all over. A piece of elastic kept at full tension will snap sooner than one that is allowed to contract once in a while. That’s why getting away from the action for a short while can be beneficial. The water well/bank account will not be completely replenished by the break but increases enough to delay the crisis of courage. With luck once back in harness, the crisis point is not reached before the danger has passed and no-one need know how close a person came to snapping. Gradually, over time, the reserve slowly trickles back to something near its original level. And the past is mis-remembered to create a more comfortable self-narrative. Sometimes the biggest lies we tell are the lies we tell ourselves to help make it through the working day.

Enough of what I think. With all the recent discussion in relation to cuts to the Royal Regiment of Scotland about Golden Threads and Cap Badges, I thought you might be interested in what the Cameron Highlanders had to say about regimental spirit in 1835 :-

The Regiment should be considered as a great family, and every individual connected with it should feel and act accordingly; should ever be anxiously alive to its honour, reputation and welfare; endeavour, by every means in his power, to promote and uphold them; and not only act by the letter of the law, but likewise discharge all his duties, according to the full spirit of every order in existence.
Any one who may exhibit an indifference to that proper Espirit de Corps, which should be felt by every Officer and Soldier in relation to the Regiment in which he serves, cannot be considered as a desirable person to belong to the 79th Highlanders.

The above comes from the regiment’s Standing Orders and dates back to the time when the Camerons were doing garrison duty in Canada.
By the way, I noticed that several media organisations made knowing references to the Royal Regiment of Scotland battalions retaining their cap badges in the latest shake-up. This is not true; the RRoS has one badge for all its battalions, regular and Territorial Army. The various battalions lost their old badges when the regiment was formed in 2006.

What a difference three hundred years or so makes. In the 1690s, about half the British troops fighting in Flanders were Scottish. Sixty years after that the British Government bent over backwards to keep the number of Scottish units to a minimum – while the size of the British army quadrupled, the number of Scots units didn’t even double. One battalion recruited in Scotland, the 85th Royal Volunteers in 1759, was officered almost entirely by Englishmen.
Now, in 2012, the English are complaining that well-recruited English infantry and armoured units are being axed while Scottish units are getting off Scot-free. Well, almost, the 5th Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland is being reduced to just over 100 men and put ceremonial duties. That preserves the name Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders on the Army List. The remaining four regular battalions are being reduced in strength from around 500 men to 400. Some may take comfort from the fact that the Argylls were reduced to company strength in the late 1960s but restored to full strength in 1971. The restoration was not without its problems, some cynics would say the rest of Scottish Division dumped its worst officers on the revived Argylls in 1971 and the once proud regiment took more than a decade to recover, but if a future government sees sense when it comes to British defence policy, the rump of the regiment could be the foundation of a very useful infantry unit.
The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards had seemed likely candidates for disbandment or amalgamation but have somehow escaped the axe. Instead it fell on the Royal Tank Regiment, which will be merging its 1st and 2nd regiments, and the Queens Own Lancers and 9/12th Lancers which will also be amalgamated.
Three English and one Welsh infantry battalions are getting the chop. So it’s goodbye to the 2nd Royal Fusiliers, the 3rd Mercians, the once proud Staffordshire Regiment, and the 3rd Battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment, descendents of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. The 2nd Royal Welsh is also being axed.
English politicians are already screaming that the Royal Regiment of Scotland got special treatment because Westminster doesn’t want to upset Scots in the run-up to the Independence Referendum in 2014. Once again, it depends which figures are to be believed. The reduction of the Argylls to company strength, tokenism some might argue, brings the number of Scottish infantry units axed since 1994 to three. Three out eight comes out at about a 37.5% cut in Scottish infantry units in less than 20 years. In 1947 there were 11 Scottish regular infantry regiments. Now we have 5¼.

Americans can wear bravery and campaign medals they're not entitled to with impunity again. The US Supreme Court recently struck down the Stolen Valor Act which made it illegal to wear such medals in public. The court ruled that it was a freedom of speech issue and the Government should not be in the business of punishing false statements which did not result in material gain. So, an outside observer might conclude that the US version of Freedom of Speech includes the Freedom to Lie. Bogus war veterans are generally sad people. But many would say they do no harm. That's not quite true. It's not so long ago that many western countries hadn't been in a serious war for years. So, when they did send their young people into action in Iraq and Afghanistan, older veterans were asked how the new generation could deal with the stresses of combat. But if the “veteran” was bogus and taking his war stories from cheap paperbacks about the Vietnam War, then the advice given might do more harm than good. I heard of one supposed Vietnam war veteran living outside of the US who bought a box of Purple Hearts in a pawn shop in the States and then made a big deal of presenting them to young injured soldiers fresh from home the wars as if they were his treasured wound medals. How would the families of those soldiers feel if they knew where those medals really came from? I think anything which discourages this sort of dangerous nonsense is to be applauded.
This Thursday (July 5) is supposed to be decision day when it comes to how many battalions the Royal Regiment of Scotland is going to have. Speculation is that the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders (5 SCOTS), as the junior battalion, is the most likely to get the chop. But some commentators are suggesting the Royal Highland Fusiliers (2 SCOTS) may be vulnerable because it has so many non-Brits in its ranks. The Highlanders (4 SCOTS) is said to have the worst recruitment record. But some are saying that for political reasons, all five battalions may be spared and a better-recruited English battalion will be sacrificed. I still say it's a mistake to axe any British battalions at the moment. And like old Humpty Dumpty, once broken up, an infantry battalion can't be put back together again.

I'm betting that it is now beyond that the Royal Regiment of Scotland is about to lose one of its five battalions. I say this because the government's let it slip that two of the battalions, the 4th and 5th, are under threat due to their poor recruiting records. I used to be a government media relations advisor and I know the trick: hint at  some really bad news coming down the pipe and then announce something that isn't quite as bad. With two battalions apparently facing the chop, at the end of the day only one being axed will sound like good news. The 4th Battalion's recruiting record is supposedly worse than the 5th's, so it might be the one that vanishes. The 4th may be handicapped by having Aberdeen, the most prosperous city in Scotland, in its recruiting area: poverty has always been the British Army's best recruiting sergeant. It also recruits from the old Highland Regional Council area, which is sparsely populated. The Army has just announced large scale lay-offs. Many suspect that the criteria for redundancy may include being on the verge of qualifying for an enhanced pension. Some of the soldiers being forced out are within months of becoming entitled to higher pensions. Such shabby treatment, if the accusation is well-founded, hardly encourages anyone to take the Queen's Shilling. By the way, only two of the Royal Regiment of Scotland's battalions have retained their Second World War identities – the 3rd, the Black Watch, and the 5th, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. The 1st Battalion, the Royal Scots Borderers, is the result of 2006 shotgun marriage between the Royal Scots and the King's Own Scottish Borderers; the 2nd, the Royal Highland Fusiliers, came out of the 1959 merger of the Royal Scots Fusiliers and the Highland Light Infantry; and the poor 4th Battalion, the Highlanders, comes to us via the 1961 merger of the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders and Seaforth Highlanders into the Queen's Own Highlanders and then the 1994 addition of the Gordon Highlanders to the mix. Some might argue that the 4th Battalion's supposed recruiting problems are linked to the so-called Golden Thread of regimental tradition being broken and re-knotted twice. Others might say that it has to work with the worst recruiting area. There reports that the modern-day members of the Royal Regiment of Scotland are getting impatient with the Golden Thread arguments and feel they are harming the espirit de corps of new “super-regiment”. And it is true that Scottish recruits have long been channelled to whichever regiment most needed them, rather than on whether they come from the regimental recruiting area. When I was young a lot of guys from the Royal Scots' area ended up in Hong Kong with the Queen's Own Highlanders.