A memorial for the living

IT WAS Samuel Johnson, a man not generally known for his humility, who once declared: “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.” More than two centuries on we’re still fighting wars, although these days, a cynic might say, the popular concept of heroes may hover somewhere between a football stadium and the Big Brother house.

A politically contentious invasion of Iraq may have further disinclined us to think too hard about what our servicemen and women undergo in our name, whether or not we endorse the decisions behind it.

This Friday is Veterans Day, a Government bid to heighten public awareness of those who have put themselves in harm’s way – and continue to do so – on behalf of their country. The concept was first announced by Gordon Brown, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, in February 2006, since when it has been held annually on 27 June.

Veterans Day involves events on a national and local scale at various locations. Stirling is hosting Scotland’s largest Veterans Day programme, between tomorrow and 12 July, including a Tattoo and a themed film festival.

As The Scotsman reported earlier this month, after servicemen paraded through Edinburgh in commemoration of fallen comrades in Afghanistan, there were concerns among some personnel over a perceived a lack of public appreciation of their role, and also at failings in the treatment of combat veterans with physical or mental scars, which were identified by an MPs’ report earlier this year. Last November the Health Secretary, Nicola Sturgeon, announced that those suffering from problems as a result of their military service would be given priority on the National Health Service, whether or not they were in receipt of a war pension.

We spoke to four veterans of different conflicts about their experiences and asked whether they feel appreciated for their service to Queen and country.

SHEILA STRICKLAND, FORMER ARMY PT INSTRUCTOR

SHEILA Strickland spent more than 22 years in the Army Physical Training Corps, latterly as Sergeant Major Instructor at 2nd Division HQ at Craigiehall, outside Edinburgh. She left 20 months ago. We meet in the classroom she now uses at Edinburgh’s Trinity Academy, in her present role as Edinburgh team leader for Skill Force, a charity which inculcates self-discipline, motivation and confidence in disaffected secondary school pupils.

Now 45, she joined the Army when she was 21 and already heavily involved in sport. “I was a professional sprinter and an apprentice baker, and I just wanted a bit more. I knew that in the Army there would be lots of sport. I became the first female APTCI [Army Physical Training Corps Instructor] to serve in an infantry battalion, with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders at Redford Barracks and in Northern Ireland.

“The Army made me what I am today. I gained confidence to try new things, but it also gave me self-discipline.”

Strickland served in the present Iraq conflict, helping set up gyms during the Op Telic 2 phase of the operation: “Let’s just say I was glad to get back. I’ve had some hairy moments, not that I’d like to talk about them, but I was paid to do that.”

We’re talking, coincidentally, on the morning when news breaks of the deaths of four more British soldiers in Afghanistan, including the first woman soldier killed there. Strickland believes the public does appreciate the difficult and dangerous job that the armed services are doing – but that it could appreciate it much more.

“Everyone has their own opinion [of the conflicts], but my view is that I was there to do a job. I didn’t have a political view.”

She regards Veterans Day as a good idea: “We normally just think about Remembrance Day, the people who have passed over, but this is for those who survive. We shouldn’t forget what they have done.”

MALCOLM DUCK, FORMER LIEUTENANT, ROYAL MARINES

THE pristine napery and glinting tableware at Ducks at Le Marché Noir, a well established Edinburgh restaurant, seem a far cry from the famous “yomp” across East Falkland to Port Stanley in May 1982 during the Falklands conflict. Yet Malcolm Duck, this year celebrating his 20th anniversary of running the restaurant, was on that grim journey, as a young lieutenant in 45 Commando. He had joined the Marines from school and already served with the unit in West Belfast, a very different type of warfare.

“West Belfast was a lot more about policing rather than just acting like soldiers. But there, if somebody got shot, the first priority was to get your man to hospital; the second was to get the guy who pulled the trigger. I had almost exactly the same bunch of guys in the Falklands but it was a big change of mentality: if a guy fell, you asked him if he was OK, patched him up if you could and moved on, because you had to win the firefight.

“What impact does it have on you afterwards?” he ponders of his experiences in the Falklands and in Northern Ireland. “Probably quite a lot. I’ve not thought about it until recently, but why do I work the hours I do, at the rate I do?” He wonders whether his non-stop activity might be a legacy of his days in the Marines, and admits he has difficulty in saying no to any challenge.

“I don’t think anyone is agin the services, although I think they do take them for granted, to an extent. A lot more could be done to help [those] coming back with mental injuries and whatever else, although Combat Stress [an ex-services mental welfare organisation who run Hollybush House in Ayrshire] are very good. But why does someone get a massive payout for a repetitive-strain wrist injury, while someone else gets nickety-nack for losing a leg and an arm? I think some kind of Veterans Day, to help understand the guys who have been in the services and what they’ve done, is not a bad thing.”

ANGUS SHAW, FORMER LIEUTENANT, ROYAL NAVY

SITTING in his wheelchair at his favourite spot at the Erskine Home, Bishopton, where he has spent the past three years, Angus Shaw, a dignified 101 years, recalls his Second World War service with the understatement common to his generation. Born on the island of Luing, he became a journalist and at the outbreak of the Second World War the Glasgow Herald sent him to Iceland, where he covered the Arctic convoys, taking planes munitions and other supplies to Russia.

Already in the Royal Naval Voluntary Reserve, he joined the Royal Navy in 1942, to become a lieutenant, planning and supervising the convoys. Once on a convoy himself, he was torpedoed and sunk, but says matter-of-factly he was not in the water for very long. He was one of the lucky ones.

“It was a very risky business indeed,” he says. “I try and forget the bad moments, which were in arranging convoys and realising that many of them were going to be attacked and sunk. I was speaking to fellows I would never see again.”

However, he doesn’t regret his Naval experiences. “I was serving my country, and I preferred to do it in the Navy rather than in field operations,” he says.

Servicemen and women, he reckons, simply take things in their stride, but he also believes that the public takes them too much for granted – “and I don’t think [a Veteran’s Day] will make one whit of difference, I’m afraid,” he says. “People don’t like to be reminded of unpleasant things.”

MURRAY LOMAX, FORMER GUNNER, ROYAL ARTILLERY

Originally a painter and decorator, Murray Lomax of Longniddry joined the army in November 1989, serving in Northern Ireland before seeing action during the first Gulf War as a lance bombardier in 40 Regiment Royal Artillery (The Lowland Gunners).

He joined up, he says, “because I wanted some new challenges and to see the world.” Today, however, he finds himself unable to work and is bitter about the way he has been treated. Since being discharged from the Army in 1996, he has been diagnosed with PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), and his health has been destroyed, he says, by a combination of the potent medications he was given in at the outbreak of the Gulf War – including vaccinations against the plague, anthrax and NAPS (nerve agent protection set) – and radiation from depleted uranium (DU) in Allied munitions to which he was exposed. In Iraq, he ended up at the front line, but his memory, he says, “is kind of scattered, for want of a better word.

“My doctor couldn’t understand why it was so bad. He sent me for an MRI scan and that showed fragments of metal inside me.” Concerned that the fragments may contain DU, he submitted that information to the pensions tribunal – “They say all you have to do is prove reasonable doubt, but that wasn’t enough” – and his MP, Anne Moffat, has raised his case in the House of Commons.

Returning to base in Germany in 1991 after the Gulf conflict, Lomax was suffering from trembling, depression and difficulty sleeping, as well as stomach pains and diarrhoea. He admits that he resorted to the bottle: “Nobody was helping me, so I turned to alcohol. That’s why I was discharged – ‘services no longer required’. I was treated as a malingerer, given £100 and a one-way ticket home.”

He says he was offered no help in terms of rehabilitation. For a while, he slept on his parents’ floor.

Today, still in dispute over the extent of his war pension and unemployed, he welcomes Veterans Day as a means of heightening public awareness. “But it’s aftercare that’s really needed. Who’s looking after some of these guys who are developing various illnesses but are just not being cared for? I think the public aren’t really interested

– yet every other week, a soldier is losing his life.”

• For details, see www.veterans-uk.info/veteransday08 For Stirling’s Veterans Day events, see www.stirling.gob.uk/veteransday