The man behind the deli-counter thinks we’re here
for St Patrick’s Day, ‘You came for the parade?’ he asks. I tell him we missed
it. Anyone who’s been to the USA from the UK will be used to having their
accent misidentified, so the deli-guy’s assertion that I’m Irish is no stranger
than that of the girl at the hotel who insisted on addressing me in German, or
the homeless fellow who repeatedly asked if I was absolutely sure that I was
not Australian (I failed to convince him on that account unfortunately). The
man behind the counter looks perplexed; it’s the morning after St Patrick’s Day
in New York and much of the day’s trade has yet to finish last night’s
drinking, let alone reach hangover stage. He looks over my shoulder at my
brother and then I realise why he’s unconvinced by my answer - my brother is
wearing an emerald green beanie. The man behind the counter smiles again. He
mustn’t be able to read the wording across my brother’s brow from back there.
If he could he would have seen that it reads not ‘These Irish Eyes Are
Smiling’, nor some Gaelic motto, but ‘Royal Marine Commandos’.
My brother first started talking about joining the
forces when he finished college at the age of 18. He had always struggled
academically, and for a long time had suffered from low self-esteem, due in no
small part to the taunts he received concerning his weight from both
schoolmates, and I’m ashamed to say, from his older brother. He began working for a flight consolidator,
selling cheap airline tickets over the phone. During this time he shed the
puppy fat, and began to develop himself socially, though with me at university
and him very much ‘one of the lads’ we grew increasingly apart. He first
considered the Army – the principal reason (it appeared to me) being the opportunity
to ‘see the world.’ Imagine, everyday selling aeroplane tickets to exotic
locations whilst you sit behind your desk in a dull office in an even duller East-Midlands town. Not hard to see
the appeal of postings in Belize or Canada. My initial reaction to this was not
enthusiastic to say the least. I was at my angriest back then, before age and
illness mellowed me, being as I was downright belligerent and didactic whereas
now I might be considered merely awkward and argumentative. Anyway my anti-imperialist
ranting did nothing to dissuade his interest in a military career, but he
decided to put things on hold for a while. He began working in a ‘proper’ high
street travel agent, and his yearning to travel was sated somewhat by numerous
bargain priced jaunts around Europe. We even went out to Toronto for a week
long break after I came out of hospital. We were becoming closer as brothers
than we ever had been before, and David seemed happier than I’d ever known him
to be. He was in fantastic shape; he ran the Great North Run to raise money for
Leukaemia Research, jogged and lifted weights every day, swam frequently and
ate well. It was during this time that he declared his intention to join the
Royal Marine Commandos. Why the marines? Well it’s a lot, lot harder to be in
the marines than the regular army. The training regimen includes gruelling 30
mile ’yomps’ in full kit with rifle, survival exercises that cause the marines’
body temperatures to drop by over 5 degrees and all manner of painful sounding
runs, marches, assault courses and other such activities. I guess he wanted to prove that he could do
something difficult, something that he could do well. God knows I couldn’t do
it, politics aside I can barely run to the end of the street without losing my breath,
and I have an acute disliking of coldness, wetness, and close proximity to
sharp objects, exploding things and moustachioed men who shout a lot.
So how am I supposed to view my Brother’s impending
enlistment? Can my pride in his achievement of passing their arduous induction
camp tests co-exist with my disapproval of much of this country’s foreign
policy? How easy would it be for me to criticise NATO actions in the Balkans if
its my own brother performing these very tasks? It’s easy to demonise the
uniformed, be they Police, Prison Service, or Paratroopers, to see them as a
gestalt entity, that moves and thinks as one. You may argue that this is only
right, that by joining such a body, one does surrender individual concern, and
must therefore accept the responsibilities of the whole. My brother is not
interested in politics, and as a marine he will have to obey commands without
question, (unless of course they were to contravene say basic human rights or
war crimes conventions) as like it or not a chain of command can only function
properly in such a manner. When an
organisation has the right to detain, arrest, kill or wound, component parts
cannot act with complete autonomy, independence or individual intent. He has
surrendered the right to act in his interests, to the duty to act in the
military’s interests, which in turn acts ostensibly in ours (and I stress
greatly the word ‘ostensibly’).
Of course is not that simple though is it? My
brother doesn’t expect me to give up my right to criticise the futile and
inhumane bombing of Iraq, any more than I expect him to adopt my personal
belief system and leave the marines. My concerns about him joining the armed
forces are far more to do with his personal safety, than his collusion in what
I may consider to be immoral or even illegal actions. For example: As a
recovered Leukaemia patient I’m obviously concerned about his potential
exposure to DU (Depleted Uranium) as used in tank shells and so on. That’s not
to say I’m any less concerned about DU rounds poisoning the battlefields of
Southern Iraq, quite the contrary, in fact with a personal involvement in the
military I’m now even more committed to pacifism and the oxymoron that is ‘more
humane warfare’. Likewise my worries about the MOD pumping him full of drugs,
as practised upon Alliance troops during the Gulf War, do not detract from my
belief that the conflict should never have occurred in the first place. If
anything it is strengthened by it.
I was thinking about these things a lot whilst we
were in New York. We’d gone, not for St Patrick’s Day as I mentioned before,
but for my brother’s 21st birthday. On his special day, we visited
the USS Intrepid, a decommissioned Nimitz class aircraft carrier moored in the
Hudson Riverk, off Manhattan’s West-side. A relic of the cold war era, it had
served in WW2 and Vietnam, and had even been responsible for recovering the
astronaut capsules from the Apollo missions. It now serves as a Sea Air and
Space museum, and even boasts among its exhibits an SR71 Blackbird reconnaissance
plane (from the audioguide: ‘How accurate was its camera? What missions did the
CIA pilots who flew this plane undertake? We may never know’). Amongst the
cinematic technofetishism of F14 ‘as featured in Top Gun’ Tomcats, and Air
Cavalry Bell Huey helicopters (Apocalypse Now), it was easy to forget that
these amazing machines, this immense piece of engineering, were entities of
policies I fundamentally disagree with. I am fascinated by enormous constructs
such as aircraft carriers. I have such a poor mind for science that I can view
their ability to even float, let alone launch aeroplanes, as something so
incomprehensible as to be almost paranormal. Yet their role has for the most
part been to enforce policies and practises that I don’t support upon other
people with deadly force. Of course the USS Intrepid was never going to be a
place for reasoned post-cold war analysis; I found the exhibitions’
occasionally jingoistic anti-Communist rhetoric amusing rather than pernicious,
but then I’m not an impressionable youngster, who may be about to sign up to
serve a military and a government whose intentions he doesn’t fully understand.
As we left the Intrepid, I talked with my brother about what we’d seen that
day, and what he may have to see a lot closer up in the future. I was heartened
to hear him say that he had found the commie-bashing a little silly, and that
he had no desire to kill foreign types just for the sake of it. I said we could
talk about anything he’s unsure about. I guess that’s the most important thing,
being able to talk about it, no matter how different our life choices may be.
By the way – Catering at the USS Intrepid Sea Air
Space Museum is provided exclusively by McDonald’s. Please feel free to make of
that whatever allusions, conclusions and allegories you will.