King Harry the Candid
Published: Thu, 01/24/13
There was a story which did the rounds when I was in the TA. It
was quite a few years ago but video games were already starting to
become popular. In fact they were quite a novelty since if you had
a home computer at all it probably wouldn't have the processing
power and graphics capacity to run such programs anyway.
Apparently the Armoured Corps commissioned a simulator for tank
gunners. As you can imagine ammunition for the main armament as
found in tanks is pretty expensive so the idea was to train
soldiers without spending thousands of pounds creating very loud
bangs and puffs of smoke. The simulator was a success but the
problem was getting the trainee gunners to actually spend enough
time practicing on the thing. Then someone had the bright idea of
putting the simulators in the NAFFI (the soldier's canteen) as
slot machines. The off duty soldiers then spent their evenings
playing at blowing up enemy tanks at their own expense and
incidentally got to be very skilled gunners in the process.
I was reminded of this story by the fuss this week about Prince
Harry's candid comments about being a soldier in Afghanistan.
He said quite a lot of interesting things about being a soldier in
today's British army but a couple of the most interesting
things were that he admitted that killing Afghans was a regular
occurrence and that playing video games was a good preparation for
such an activity. The big uproar that resulted seemed to be
because Harry had spoken out of turn. No one can deny that British
troops kill the natives of Afghanistan when they resist occupation
by Western forces, or that the killing is often done using forty
five million pound helicopter gunships against tribesmen armed with
AK47s and the occasional RPG7 rocket launcher. We can't really
even argue that primitive tribes people should just be grateful for
occupation by wonderful civilised people like us and not be so
difficult to control. After all the West armed and trained the
fathers and grandfathers of these same insurgents so they could
effectively resist the Soviet attempt to modernise the same
country. These people know how to fight for their freedom and
independence so we can't complain if they don't make a
distinction between Soviet and Western occupation, lets face it one
helicopter raining down death and destruction on your home and
loved ones looks much like any other regardless of what language
the pilot speaks. Prince Harry's crime was to tell it like it
is, soldiers paid with our taxes and equipped with devastating
weaponry also paid for with our taxes are killing people in a far
away land. These soldiers have also been trained to operate such
killing machines from an early age by "playing" with X
boxes and other computer games. Of course I realise that once in a
theater of war soldiers have to look out for one another and cover
each other's backs. So when Harry provided fire support for
troops on the ground he was doing his duty and saving the lives of
other British soldiers. All credit to him for that but should he
be there in the first place? War is not a game, killing other
human beings is not a sport. So thank you to Harry for reminding
us what really happens in modern warfare. Pity he isn't going
to be king, he could be known as "King Harold the Candid".
Real martial arts training seeks to equip the student for effective
self-defence while revealing the realities of hurting another human
being and the real costs of being hurt. Well, thats what I try and
do anyway. Find out for yourself this Saturday in Salisbury, UK or
in May in the USA. http://www.iceandfire.org.uk/train.html
PS I have still got a potentially controversial posting to send
out, maybe tomorrow.