Regards, Ivan
Posted on 04/05/2003 5:22:14 PM PST by MadIvan
SHE tried to be as gentle as she could. "I am very sorry but you will never be able to join Her Majesty’s Forces. You are colour-blind I’m afraid."
It wasn’t a total surprise that my perennial difficulty with pastel shades had transformed itself, officially, into a disability that barred me from service with the Army, RAF or Royal Navy - at least according to my Broughty Ferry doctor.
Even all those years ago, such a verdict wasn’t deemed to be too much of a handicap to life’s chances. Volunteering to become a sailor, soldier or airman in the years following the end of compulsory national service wasn’t exactly a trendy thing to do. This was the Swinging Sixties, after all.
So, down the years, have the armed services become estranged from the community from whence they spring? My school doctor’s barring me from even applying for the Queen’s Shilling and finding out about service life meant that only the hoary tales of our fathers and grandfathers served to inform my generation of a life under orders.
Only those at opposite ends of the social scale joined up. A few of my contemporaries at school became officers because they reckoned it was a career. They found themselves massively outnumbered in the mess by the same public school entrants who had run the British Army since time immemorial. Many more of my council estate neighbours joined the ranks because it was a job, pure and simple.
And so it has continued ever since... the once-honourable profession of arms has become more and more divorced from everyday life - and looked upon askance, too. This has never more been the case than with soldiers. There was always a bit of a cachet with airmen - they could always pretend that if they didn’t fly Tornadoes, they at least knew someone who did. Similarly, sailors joined up to see the world, and often did.
In the public’s mind, however, the poor squaddie was the poor relation. An automaton who marched up and down to someone else’s tune, he only had to look good and do what he was told. Sure, he had to take his chances on the streets of Northern Ireland - and sometimes get himself killed - but Joe Public didn’t really know what to make of that conflict anyway.
No more! If ever a perception has been changed in the space of a single day and a single action, it has been that of the profession of arms, or at least of the infantry soldier, on Tuesday of last week in the burning heat of southern Iraq.
There, under the glare of the world’s television cameras and before the eyes of an almost disbelieving press, one of Scotland’s oldest regiments did more for the reputation of the British Army than anything in the last two decades.
It was Gethin Chamberlain, correspondent on our sister newspaper The Scotsman, who provided the graphic eyewitness accounts of the Black Watch’s incredible deeds. His reports not only ensured that he should never have to buy another drink in Tayside but also that the regiment’s fame was enhanced yet again.
Not since British troops defeated numerically superior forces 7,000 miles from home in the Falklands had servicemen from these islands done so much to enhance the standing of soldiering.
Yet all the Black Watch did was to take off their tin helmets and march into Basra in their Tam o’Shanters and red hackles.
A relatively minor bit of theatre perhaps, but seldom has any action been so necessary to prove to a beleaguered populace that the troops were there to liberate - not kill - them and never, surely, has a single action so transformed the public perception of a conflict.
Before the Black Watch’s initiative, the entire coalition’s efforts to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people had been held up to public ridicule in many a headline and on many a television station.
After them, and their distribution of smiles, as well as Duncan’s chocolate bars, it was as if not just the ‘Gallant Forty-Twa’, but indeed the entire American/British enterprise, could do nothing but succeed.
The Jocks’ ‘rough wooing’ - carefully planned incursions into enemy territory allied to patient seek-and-destroy missions - set the tone for the whole war.
It led to fulsome tributes, not just across Britain but across the globe, and proved that the world’s toughest infantry could turn on the charm with the best of them.
As a Dundonian who still lives in Angus, I find it particularly heartening that it has been the Black Watch that has shown the way. The oldest Highland regiment was raised in neighbouring Perthshire and recruits, still, in the cities, towns, villages and straths of that part of Scotland.
My uncles served in it, and its famous red hackle gave its name to a favourite local whisky as well as to umpteen pubs. Its battle honours are as great as any in the British Army.
However, if truth be told, nobody - not even in my neck of the woods - really understands and appreciates what a magnificent institution we have in our midst.
If it is a truism that we take the best things in life for granted, then surely it was never more accurate than with our very own Scottish regiments - and particularly the Black Watch.
What I find incredible is that an outfit can retain such a good conceit of itself that it can reach a pinnacle of achievement such as was gained last week, even after decades of being under-appreciated.
What we fail to realise is that such is the esprit de corps of these officers and men that they are always liable to outperform our expectations... not because they believe they owe it to us - but because of the ferociously high standards they demand of each other.
And in a Scotland where so often second-best is deemed to be good enough - be it in the classroom, on the sports field or in the political arena - the Black Watch has shown us a different way.
They have done it at a time when, with typical parsimony, the powers-that-be have often denied them the best of equipment. Their very weapons, even their uniforms and boots, have had to be fought and argued for from a stingy civil authority.
Yet the Jocks have come smiling through - tough as old boots, cussed as they come and, make no mistake about it, liable to get as drunk as lords when it’s all over.
But, above all, they’re able to befriend and reassure a terrified populace even as they blast their tormentors off the face of the earth. That’s the Scottish soldier. That’s the Black Watch.
I have been enormously proud of their achievements in the past week, but I suppose I will remain in a minority amongst my countrymen. Mind you, I don’t suppose the Jocks will give a damn.
Regards, Ivan
My father in law was color-blind too. He didn't let it stop him. He obtained by guile (or bribery) a copy of the color vision screening test and memorized it before taking the Army physical.
For his trouble, he got to spend five years in the Pacific in such beauty spots as Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Saipan, and the Occupation of Japan. Shot at frequently, blown up once (on Iwo - he wasn't scratched but his jeep was destroyed.)
BTW . . . Suas leis a'Fhreicadan Dubh!
Regards, Ivan
In Az Zubaya, with freed Iraqi children, heroes from Black Watch.
Back atcha!
Back atcha!
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