Military

Umm, folks, can we stand down on this story please? Yes, you, you, you, you and you.

I did a little digging yesterday and here\’s the state of play.

CS Dura\’s widow and children do not have an absolute right to continue to live here. This much is true.

However, it is almost certain that they will be given leave to do so. So sayeth the Home Office.

So sayeth also the people running the campaign. However, before such leave is given, they will in fact need to ask for it, something which they have not done as yet….something they are likely to do after they return from a post funeral trip to Nepal.

To reiterate. They are not being threatened with deportation. They are being told that they need to ask to stay and that if they do it is (almost certainly) going to be granted.

We might indeed want such a right to be enshrined in law, that those left behind by one who dies in our service live here as of right, but the situation is not as black as currently painted.

So, I think it\’s generally agreed (whether rightly or wrongly) that massive defence spending is what brought the US out of the Depression.

We\’re told here that we risk a Depression unless we provide a similar fiscal boost. So, what does the Government do?

The Armed Forces yesterday became the first significant victims of government attempts to reduce spending in the face of the advancing recession.

Two programmes worth £20 billion will be cut and delayed after defence chiefs were told that there was not enough money to go ahead as planned.

The announcement throws into disarray the Army’s £16 billion update to armoured vehicles, while the Royal Navy’s £3.9 billion project for two new 65,000-tonne aircraft carriers is postponed for two years.

Fuckwits.

The United States should expect a terrorist attack using nuclear or biological weapons within the next five years, a US study said.

The thing is that this is true.

And also not all that worrying. There has been a terrorist attack with biological weapons in the US in hte last decade….someone started posting anthrax, remember?

Whether it\’s worth throwing another few hundred billion at the Dept. of Homeland Security to try and head off a repeat is another matter….

The "pirate mothership" destroyed by the Indian Navy in the Gulf of Aden last week was actually a Thai fishing boat that was itself being hijacked and whose crew was tied up below decks.

The sunken vessel, which was destroyed by INS Tabar, an Indian frigate, on the night of November 18, was the Ekawat Nava 5, a deep sea trawler – not a floating pirate armoury loaded to the gunnels with supplies of ammunition and explosives as India had claimed.

Wicharn Sirichaiekawat, manager of the Bangkok-based Sirichai Fisheries, the ship\’s owner, said that the true story emerged when one of his crew was found alive, adrift in the Indian Ocean, but that 14 others were still missing and at least one dead.

The story was confirmed by the International Maritime Bureau, the marine watchdog.

Sigh.

I went home, hit Google and suddenly realised that I did know a little about Tull after all. I had seen a brief segment of Ian Hislop\’s Channel 4 documentary Not Forgotten, which featured Tull in his capacity as one of the first black professional footballers in Britain. However, when I discovered that Tull had also been the first commissioned black officer in the British army, that he\’d fought in the first battle of the Somme and died at the tender age of 29 in the second, my hunger to write his story grew.

You know, I\’m really not sure that this rings true. Professional footballer, joined up as a private, made sergeant, commissioned, yes, got that.

But first black commissioned officer in the British Army? I suppose it rather depends upon what we mean by British Army and Black. For example, the early years in India were marked by a great deal of inter-marriage and I\’d be astonished if one of the sons of the early nabobs didn\’t end up as an officer. But would we consider such to be black? In today\’s parlance, perhaps….although I\’m not sure about whether we might consider some of those regiments to be "British Army".

Skinner\’s Horse for example, the man who founded that was, to use an old phrase, a half caste wasn\’t he?

Anyone actually know more about this though? I can imagine that Tull was the first in WWI, possibly the first since the late Victorian period, but I really would be rather surprised if he was the first overall. There\’s a few centuries of British Army before that…..

The number two gallantry medal for actions involving the enemy, behind only the Victoria Cross.

So a Gurkha Corporal is awarded one (along with others) for the following action.

Corporal Mohansingh Tangnami, 29, from the western part of Nepal, was recognised for his steadfastness under enemy fire throughout the tour.

On one patrol, he carried a wounded comrade to safety before braving fire again to collect the man\’s ammunition and gun to prevent it falling into the wrong hands.

Good man that. His reaction?

"I still don\’t believe that I met the Queen," he said today.

And there are still people who oppose proper pensions and the right of settlement in this country for these men?

There is a long tradition of the military suppressing news that it considers detrimental to national security by slapping a D-notice on it.

But when the D-notice committee decided that the time was ripe to publish its own official history, nobody imagined that it would fall victim to its own system. The history of the D-notice committee has, in effect, had a D-notice slapped on it by the D-notice committee.

Yes, itºs that time of year again. Remembrance Day is approaching.

Read about the Poppy Campaign here.

Finally, some sense in this matter:

In reality, Mr Justice Blake said…….. "The court is conscious that at the heart of military life and the sacrifices that soldiers make in the discharge of their duties is the military covenant. "Rewarding long and distinguished service by the grant of residence in the country for which the service was performed would, in my judgment, be a vindication and an enhancement of this covenant."

Damn right, they fight for us, are willing to die for us, it really isn\’t all that much to ask that we offer them the opportunity to live amongst us.

Yes, while these two stories do indeed show a gap in compensation, it\’s not quite the gap that this writer thinks it is.

What price a life that might have been? If you are an 18-year-old footballer whose chance of a professional career was ended by an over-zealous tackle that broke your leg, then it is £4.5?million.

If you are a young soldier who loses both legs and suffers brain damage in action in Afghanistan, then it is a fraction of that sum.

I do not begrudge Ben Collett the millions he was awarded in compensation this week, but can it be so readily assumed that every young sportsman or woman who shows early potential will go on to fulfil it, and earn accordingly?

Collett, now 23, and about to begin a degree in English at Leeds, has his health and an independent life ahead. The same cannot be said for L/Bdr Ben Parkinson, the most severely injured British soldier to survive a landmine explosion. His paltry compensation of £151,000 was increased after a media campaign.

The larger number is the total compensation for lost wages that the footballer received. His wages as a top flight footballer would have been large, I think we can all agree (about that sum per year probably) and have then been reduced by the probability that he wouldn\’t make it into that top flight.

The compensation received by the soldier is the immediate compensation. He also (unless I am extraordinarily wrong about how such things work) gets a pension from the Army.

Yes, I too think that his compensation is too low but we should at least be comparing like with like: full sums with full sums, not full sum without ongoing payments.

Russia and Abkhazia.

You know, I think this one really might be all about the oil.

Not the drilling of it, the transport of it.

Have a look at this map.

If you want to get oil and gas from the Caspian to Europe (which we do want to do) without going through Russian territory (which we do want to do and which Russia would prefer we didn\’t) then you\’ve pretty much got to go through Georgia.

And if you\’re Russia, knowing that your own economy is hugely dependent upon oil and gas, that the countries just to your south are gearing up to increase production, you\’d rather like to be able to control the transport of that, wouldn\’t you?

So, if not toppling the regime and installing a puppet, at least browbeating the Georgians so that they don\’t get uppity ideas about allowing more pipelines across the country…..well, attractive geo-political manouvre, no?

You\’ve even got a couple of minor little ethnic disputes that you\’ve kept bubbling away or 15 years to act as pretexts….

I\’m not normally this cynical, but perhaps this really is all about the oil (pipelines)?

This was always likely, wasn\’t it?

L/Cpl Matthew Croucher will become part of a select of group of just 20 living George Cross holders when the Queen awards him the medal, which is given for acts showing the same level of heroism as the Victoria Cross.

The Marine had less than seven seconds to make up his mind on whether to risk sacrificing his own life to save his friends when the hand grenade rolled onto the ground during an operation in Afghanistan earlier this year.

Without hesitating he chose to chance death and save his three fellow Royal Marines.

The maximum payout for a severely wounded British soldier, currently set at £285,000, is expected to be increased to £570,000, in addition to a guaranteed income for life.

Campaigners have long argued that payments made to soldiers such as Paratrooper Ben Parkinson, who received £152,150 after being seriously injured in a landmine explosion in Afghanistan last year, are unacceptably low.

My prediction? Some little shit will start insisting that this only applies to people wounded from now on.

Giving injured troops priority in the NHS also seems entirely sensible although again I see a potential problem. If troops are vital workers, then so are policemen, NHS workers themselves, outreach workers….how long before we have a truly two tier NHS, one where those who work for the State get priority?

Would have been so much simpler not to have abolished the military hospital system, wouldn\’t it?

A report from the frontline out in Afghanistan.

So the French Marines have a display day. So they have some fake hostage release exercises as part of that display day. All pretty normal so far.

Fifteen civilians and two soldiers were injured in the incident which involved a demonstration by members of a marines parachute regiment of hostage liberation exercises.

Four of the 17 were seriously injured, with two described as critical, following "incomprehensible" scenes at the barracks near Carcassone, in the country\’s south-west.

The problem? Someone issued live ammo instead of blanks. Or rather, someone used live ammo instead of blanks.

One soldier had been detained last night. Although no explanation was immediately forthcoming for why the wrong ammunition was loaded into weapons, police said there was no suggestion it was a deliberate act.

Military men might want to contest that no suggestion. I can\’t imagine any way that a trained soldier wouldn\’t know the difference.

Sigh.

The interpreters, many of whom are married with children, applied to move to Britain under a scheme set up in coordination with the UN’s refugee agency UNHCR. But this first requires applicants to travel to a third country to gain refugee status.

The process is far more time-consuming than simply airlifting the Iraqis direct to Britain – an option that is open only to those who are still working for the British Forces in southern Iraq or a government department.

Ali, who had been waiting in hiding in Iraq, was told in April that he would be among the first batch to go to Amman to apply for asylum. British officials in Basra gave him $6,200 (£3,100) to cover his expenses – married couples received slightly more.

Ali and the rest of the group were then told that “the procedure would take just six weeks”, he said. “When we reached Amman, the UNHCR said we would have to stay six months, maybe longer.”

Wonderful, don\’t you think? That people should have to sit in Jordan for 6 months while the bureaucrats play with pieces of paper? For no real or apparent reason of course: it\’s already been decided that they should come here, that we owe them a debt and that we should pay up on that debt.

So why are the fuckwits doing this to them?

Tee Hee.

A couple from Oregon lived through the ultimate redial nightmare, however, when they found a three-minute answering machine message from their son, a soldier in Afghanistan who had inadvertently called home during a battle.

The family told KPTV, in Portland, Oregon, that Stephen Phillips and comrades in his military police unit were engaged in a gunfight with Taleban insurgents when his phone pressed against his Humvee and redialled his parents in the town of Otis.

Sandie Petee, Mr Phillips\’s mother, and her husband, Jeff Petee, were out at the time but returned to find the message. They could hear shooting, swearing and desperate pleas for more ammunition.

Alex picks up on a fun story involving the flogging of very dodgy ammunition by a bunch of 20 year olds to the Pentagon\’s client forces.

What makes it all the more fun for me is that my buddy was the underbidder on that contract. Several times in fact. Clearly too expensive as he intended (and priced accordingly) to deliver in date useful stuff.

A lot of people are wondering how this little company got that contract.