There’s a glimmer of hope that the British Government may still be persuaded to hold a proper inquiry into the Batang Kali Massacre in 1948. That’s when a patrol of Scots Guards executed around two dozen ethnic Chinese rubber plantation workers in Malaya. Official claims that the men were shot while trying to escape from questioning have long been discredited.  According to media reports from Malaysia, the families of the workers have succeeded in getting Legal Aid to help meet the costs of seeking a judicial review of a recent British government decision not to hold a public inquiry into the killings. The families had been warned by British government lawyers that they could be on the hook for hundreds of thousands of pounds in legal costs.
British Government has been determined for more than 60 years that the truth about the massacre should remain hidden. A Scotland Yard inquiry in the 1970s ordered by Labour after a Sunday paper published admissions from some of the soldiers involved that there had been a premeditated massacre was shut down when the Tories took power. In 1993 another Tory administration succeeded in persuading the Malaysian authorities to drop a police investigation into the killings.
The use of army lorries to take the women and children away from the plantation before the mass murder began points to this being more than the work of a rogue patrol. For me the big question is who is the government protecting? It doesn’t have a particularly strong record when it comes to protecting squaddies. So, what is Whitehall so afraid will come out?

Several years ago, while packing my bag to go back to Afghanistan, I got to wondering about war. It seemed to me that war was a lottery which you won if you came out alive or without being turned into a living vegetable. By staying at home, I could win without having to buy a ticket. What I was getting at was the lack of tangible material benefit resulting from putting your life and health on the line for sake of Queen and Country.
In ancient times, the risk to life and limb of going to war could be set against the chance of plunder. There were tangible pay-offs. Now we fight for the advancement of abstracts such as “democracy” and the interests of the nation/society in general. This would be easier to stomach if the whole country was pulling together and no-one was making a profit. But it’s a sad fact that the end of the Second World War was greeted by a big fall in the value of stocks in New York.
Imagine my surprise when I learned from old regimental history that soldiers in Queen Victoria’s time often earned a healthy gratuity or pension if they won an award for bravery. I think the Victoria Cross still comes with a financial award but it’s token. Plundering defeated enemies, or in real life civilians who happen to be on the wrong side, is wrong. But so is expecting our men and women to perform feats of courage with no real reward. It could be said that “a good war” enhances promotion prospects and that should be enough in the way of tangible benefit. But promotion in any organisation is seldom linked to merit or a job well done.  And let’s not forget that some of the bravest men in the front line, who may have changed the course of battle by storming a machine-gun post singled handed, were drunks in peacetime who couldn’t be trusted to remember what day it was. Promoting them would not be doing them any favours.

I’ve searched in vain on the internet for information about the fate of the young Scots Guardsman who was taken off ceremonial duties at the Royal Wedding after making some disparaging remarks on a social media site about the bride.
Eighteen year-old Cameron Reilly also made some very unpleasant anti-semitic and anti-immigrant comments on the social media site. I’m kind of concerned that this idiot has been given a gun at public expense and taught how to kill people. He seems, at his present level of maturity and brain function, to be one of the last people who should be given a firearm.
But, he is only 18-years-old. And a lot of money has already been spent on training him. The part of me that says just boot him out of the Army is wrestling with the part that says he should be given a chance to straighten-up and fly right. I suspect that young Guardsman Reilly didn’t confine his rants to social media sites and it concerns me that no-one appears to have made a serious attempt to persuade him to put his brain in gear. Or maybe someone did. If they did and he ignored the chance to mend his ways, then he probably should get the boot right now. If not, then he should get a second chance – but only one.

So, it now turns out that as recently as 1993 the British government helped torpedo an investigation into a massacre of around two dozen rubber ethnic-Chinese plantation workers in 1948 by a Scots Guards patrol in Malaya. Malaysian detectives had wanted to come to Britain in 1993 to interview former soldiers who have admitted that the workers were killed in cold blood and that there was no  mass escape attempt; as the British Government claimed in 1948. But the Foreign Office managed to pressure the Malaysian authorities into dropping their inquiry into the massacre.
A Scotland Yard inquiry, launched after members of the patrol came forward to admit there had been a massacre in the early 1970s, was also closed down when Labour was voted out and replaced by a Tory government. It’s not clear if the 1993 inquiry shutdown was due to another Tory government being in power.
What happened at Batang Kali is pretty well known by now. The two big questions remaining are “why” and “why the continued cover-up”. The British government does not protect squaddies. Who is it protecting? The women and children at the plantation were taken away in army trucks. A “rogue” patrol doesn’t order up trucks. It obviously continues to suit Her Majesty’s Government that there is an “official” shot-while-trying-to-escape version of events and a second “unofficial” version in which the finger of blame is pointed no higher than the members of the Scots Guards patrol.
Last November the Government refused to hold a new inquiry into the massacre and now it is threatening relatives of the victims with having to pay the legal costs of a judicial review of that decision if it fails. Isn’t it time the full truth came out? Don’t we owe both the victims’ families and the surviving patrol members that? I’ll say it again, the British Government does not run cover-ups to protect squaddies. 

The Americanization of Canada continues apace. I always felt sorry for US sailors forced to serve aboard ships with names such as the USS Alvin Hunsucker III; named for some long-dead and forgotten hero of the Great Republic. Well, not quite forgotten, I suppose their great grandchildren know who they were and what they did.
Now the Canadian Coastguard has decided to name nine new patrol vessels in honour of members of the uniformed services who have been killed on the job – two soldiers killed in Afghanistan, two Victoria Cross winners, two Mounties, two members of the Coastguard and one fisheries officer. What I wonder is how do they chose who to honour? More than 150 Canadian soldiers have died in Afghanistan. Is it fair to pick out just two? Was their sacrifice greater than the others? Were they somehow braver? One of the soldiers selected is the only woman to be killed in combat. Is a woman's death more important than a man's? That seems a bit sexist. I'm all for doing everything we can to honour those killed, but this ship-naming lark seems like a very slippery slope. 

Luckily, there aren’t a lot of jobs in which you can get other people killed. Sadly, reporting from war zones is one of them. Listening to the radio, I heard about four journalists from the New York Times who were captured by pro-Ghadafi troops in Libya. They were beaten; their Libyan driver has vanished and may well be dead. One of the journalists was Stephen Farrell. He and his Afghan helper Sultan Munadi were seized in Afghanistan back in 2009. A British soldier, Cpl. John Harrison, and Munadi were killed during Farrell’s rescue. I’d like to think Farrell’s just unlucky. Back in 2001 Yvonne Ridley sneaked herself into Afghanistan before the Taliban were outsted power there. She was caught and the two Afghans helping her were arrested. I’ve asked contacts in Afghanistan and Pakistan whether it is true that the two were executed. No-one has been able to tell me. I remember Ridley from her days at the Journal in Newcastle upon Tyne. I wouldn’t have put my life in her hands. One of the problems with journalism is that journalists increasingly tend to come more and more from privileged backgrounds. In the world they come from, people don’t get killed or murdered. I remember one journalist who was killed by gangsters. The thing is that she didn’t believe they would kill her. She didn’t carry on in spite of the death threats, she just didn’t take the threats seriously.  On the other hand, I took death threats seriously. It’s not clear to this day how many murderers I went to school with; because a lot people think one guy confessed to a killing he didn’t commit in exchange for the real killer not murdering him, his sister and his mother. I never backed away from a story because of death threats but I took them seriously and I took precautions. However, I did pull out of one story, only time I did so in my whole career as a reporter, which involved organised crime because it would have involved working with another reporter to tie up an important loose end. I just didn’t think she had the brains to take the precautions necessary to keep both of us alive –  too much of a glory hunter. I tried to get the information other ways but it turned out that the only way to get it would have involved bringing in someone I couldn’t trust. You can't file a story if you're dead. Glory hunters, both in the military and in journalism, all too often get other people killed.

So, one of the “Highland” battalions of the Royal Regiment of Scotland may well be about to get the chop. Future British Government spending cuts on defence are expected to mean the RRoS will be reduced from five battalions to four. The speculation is that either the 4th Battalion (the old Highlanders) or the 5th Battalion (the old Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders) are most likely to get the axe.
In the old days it would have been the Argylls that got the chop as the most “junior” unit. But the Argylls have powerful friends, so don’t rule out The Highlanders vanishing instead.
Let’s get beyond the imaginative bankruptcy that led to successor to three of the most storied Highland regiments, the Gordons, the Seaforths and the Camerons, being saddled with the uninspired moniker of The Highlanders.
Once a battalion is killed off, it can’t be brought back to life. The experience of the Argylls when it was reduced to company strength in the late 1960s and then rushed back to battalion level in 1971 serves as a stark warning. The unit was plagued with disciplinary problems for years afterwards and the rapid reconstitution must be considered a major factor in its woes.
The infantry has been cut too hard too many times in the past by clueless civil servants. I’d suggest that rather than disband a battalion, the RRoS should spread the redundancies across the existing five battalions. This will mean that one battalion will need to be supplemented by at least a company from another battalion for service in Afghanistan – but I thought the ability to do that was supposed to be one of the benefits of creating a super-regiment.  Of course, I may be sadly out of touch and augmenting at company strength may already be common practise. I remember last time I was home, The Rifles paraded through Edinburgh following their return from a tough time in Afghanistan – but the guys marching in front of the news cameras were wearing Tam o’ Shanters, which suggests there were a number of RRoS guys attached to The Rifles. Anyway, retaining all five battalions may make the return to sanity, when it’s realised that we don’t have enough infantry soldiers as it is, a lot less painless and wasteful.
By the way, as far as The Highlanders name goes, maybe the Gordons should have bitten the bullet at the time of the amalgamation with the Queen’s Own Highlanders (Seaforth and Camerons)  and the new unit could have become the Queen’s Own Highlanders (Seaforth, Camerons and Gordons). Or the unit called have been called The Highland Brigade. Maybe it’s a little confusing to label a battalion as a brigade but there is a precedent – the old 94th Foot, the Scotch Brigade. Folk could have called the 4th Battalion RRoS "The High-Bees".

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.