'Hurry up and wait' and other military orders
Published: Thu, 07/16/15
I was in the Territorial Army (similar to America’s National Guard), based in East Yorkshire in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. On occasion there would be officers and NCOs mess nights at the headquarters in York. This meant an opportunity for earning a day’s pay driving a minibus from wherever your company was based to York for the evening and back in the early hours of the morning. My company was based in Hull which is only about 50 miles from York. So the drive was just over an hour. The other companies were a similar distance away.
When you arrived as a driver you were generally put to work in the kitchen and kept hard at work until it was time to drive home. It got pretty tiring and I would have to make quite an effort to keep awake and drive safely. The passengers by this stage would generally be asleep for most of the journey. I always coped. However, I remember thinking that having a rest before driving back would be better than washing up, or whatever the assigned task was, until the moment came to drive home. Eventually there was an accident when the minibus belonging to one of the other companies crashed on the way back from a NCOs mess do. No one was killed but there were injuries and it was found that the driver had fallen asleep at the wheel.
After that, if one took on a late night driving duty, you arrived and were put somewhere quiet and told to get your head down until it was time to drive again. Someone else was engaged to wash up. Having drivers rest rather than work was always the sensible thing to do, but you did what you were told and did your best to cope with the consequences, even in the TA. It took a nasty accident for those who actually gave the orders to see sense and just let drivers rest and even sleep before driving late at night.
I was reminded of this nearly very tragic incident by the coroner’s verdict on the deaths of the three reservists who collapsed on an SAS selection march. Personally I would have stopped, taken off some clothing, drunk some water and probably got thrown off the selection process for not being willing to push myself hard enough. There again, I know my limits and probably would not have applied in he first place.
For those not familiar with the military it is a very strange environment. If you really think about it the military is there to take reasonable human beings and prepare them to go into environments where they will be expected to risk getting themselves killed while trying to kill other originally reasonable human beings. Yes, emergency workers like police, fire fighters and life boat crews put themselves in danger in the course of their work. However, they do so to save lives and restore order. The military effectively creates the problem in the first place and then seeks to make it as bad as possible before (hopefully) coming out on top. I know you can make the argument that the military is just there to defend our country and a genuinely neutral country like Switzerland might just about prove its case. If military force is occupying another country then there is offensive action, defending ‘national interests’ is a very
different thing to defending sovereign territory. That is a subject for another day. The point here is that there is a big difference between creating soldiers and making a warrior. This link here is about how the US Marines turn civilians into soldiers (or specifically marines since the marine corps is technically part of the US Navy) All military institutions do effectively the same thing, it is just that the US Marines are more theatrical than most. http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-logic-behind-making-military-bootcamps-intensive
Warriors think and take responsibility for themselves and their actions, a soldier follows orders. Obviously a military cannot operate without people following orders and that puts a huge responsibility on those giving the orders. The warrior does not abdicate the responsibility, so can a genuine warrior actually serve in the military?
I will leave that question hanging since we are contemplating one of life’s biggest paradoxes. How it is that war means that the worst things that human beings can do are sometimes done by our finest people? In a supposed democracy that is a question for all of us.
This weekend I am going to Bristol on Saturday to take part in a street defence seminar taught by Matt Roberts. Yes, it is good for me to be a student sometimes. Sunday afternoon we have another Fete demonstration to do, this time quite locally which might just get some more people interested in training.
Next seminar in Crewkerne on the 25th of July. http://www.somersetstav.co.uk/sd.html
regards
Graham