#8: And so to war
My writing hasn’t been going very well in 2022. Mainly because I haven’t been writing much.
The year started with promise as I wistfully described my obsession with flight. Then February suddenly arrived, and so did the Russians in Ukraine. Or rather, they arrived in the parts of it that they weren’t already in.
I started writing this piece on the third day of the invasion thinking that by the time I finished it, either it would be all over – or we’d all be embroiled in a new world war.
Now it’s August, and it’s neither of those things.
Initially it looked like a certain blitzkrieg victory would be handed to the Russians on a plate and with it, a new dystopian nightmare for the Ukrainians. For those of us watching the conflict unfold in the comfort of our living rooms, it has now become an almost irrelevant border skirmish in a faraway corner of eastern Europe.
On the first day of the invasion, I sat open-mouthed as Russian tanks stormed past CCTV cameras at border checkpoints while helicopters and missiles flew over Ukraine. I felt my eyes fill with tears.
It felt like a sudden loss of innocence, a moment in which I recognised that everything was about to change, and it would never be the same again.
I asked myself if this could this really be happening in Europe in the 21st century. Surely not. Surely the peace and stability we have enjoyed for the past several decades can’t be undone like that on the whim of one autocrat?
I remained glued to the news each day and soaked up every detail of what was, at the time, constant round the clock coverage. It felt as if within a week or so the whole continent would be tipped into war.
But news of the conflict barely reaches our television screens anymore. We’ve gone back to inhaling the nitrous oxide of Instagram. We’re more concerned with the cost of living, summer queues at airports, footballers’ wives scrapping in court, and who will be the next sociopathic narcissist to take over from Boris in September.
Image credit (and apologies to): Cold War Steve
But for Ukrainians, it remains visceral. They are still experiencing death, grief, and unimaginable suffering every day.
I was born in the 1970s, so the Second World War had ended only 25 years or so previously. It was well within living memory of the people around me. My grandparents were still only in their 50s when I came into existence – the same age I am now. Both of my grandfathers answered the call: one served in the army and the other in the air force.
Just as there are now Ukrainian school teachers, dentists, office workers, lawyers, engineers, factory workers and waiters putting on uniforms and heading off to the front with a rifle, they too went off to defend us against a threat to the way of life that they believed was worth giving their lives for.
Fortunately, they both came back so I got to know them as I grew up. I don’t think they saw any combat. If they did, they didn’t talk about it. One recounted to me harmless anecdotes about being in the army but none of the specifics. I remember a story about being taught to play the drums by a comrade one afternoon, when they had some time to kill in the barracks. That was about it.
My earliest comprehension of war as a child was almost exclusively shaped by World War II. Apart from the First World War which virtually no-one could remember first hand, I wasn’t aware that there was anything that came before or after those two conflicts. I only knew about the Great War, and then the rematch.
The narrative was simple. The Germans were the bad guys, we were the good guys, and we won – so justice prevailed.
I’m sure the Germans thought that they were the good guys, just as I’m sure there are many Russians right now who think they’re on the right side of justice too.
My grandmother was a nurse during the war and when it became obvious to her that I was keen on flying, she told me that she had once looked after a convalescing German pilot who had been shot down over Britain. As a token of his gratitude, he had removed his cloth Luftwaffe pilot brevet insignia from above his uniform breast pocket and given it to her. After she recounted the story, she opened a wooden box and handed it to me. It was a little creased but otherwise perfectly intact.
I was dumbfounded. How could she possibly accept something like this from the enemy? An emblem that represented such evil? How could she keep it and treasure it? Surely, she’d want nothing to do with him, other than solemnly undertaking her nursing duties.
As an adult I can understand the empathy and tenderness required to heal your enemy’s wounds, which in that moment transcended war. But as a child, I took the winged Nazi symbol into my shaking hands. It felt almost as if I was shaking hands with Adolf Hitler himself.
When I was at primary school my father invited a business associate to come to our house for dinner. His name was Heinz, and he was visiting from Germany. I didn’t have that information until the moment I was introduced to him. I became almost paralysed with fear. I sat at the table with my head bowed, quietly eating my food, convinced that at any moment he was going to pull out a pistol and shoot us.
Afterwards I asked my mother why he had been invited to dinner. She explained that he was visiting the country on business, he didn’t know anyone and so my father thought it would be nice to have him over for dinner.
“But... he’s the enemy.”
“What do you mean?”
“We fought the Germans in the war, so aren’t they the enemy?”
She laughed and patiently tried to explain to me that the war had ended a very long time ago and since then we’d all become friends and learned to live peacefully together, and it was unlikely that we’d ever fight each other again.
It was nearing Christmas and before he left, Heinz visited once more and brought a gift of twinkling lights for our tree. Like most Germans I have met since then, he was a lovely, kind and thoughtful man.
I was raised on war films and Commando comics that romanticised and glorified the Allied achievement over the Third Reich and the Empire of Japan. We were right, they were wrong, and we kicked their arses. It was as simple as that.
I understood that the war was serious and that many people had lost their lives, but to me it seemed exciting and glamorous. I was fascinated by history books on the topic and I’d eagerly seek them out on visits to the library. There was of course an endless selection of old victory films on TV. John Wayne or George C Scott would appear on our small screen in black and white every weekend afternoon with a wet cigar and a round green helmet.
Despite the increasing accuracy in my knowledge of what happened during the war as I got older, it still seemed distant. It was something remote that happened to other people in a far-off place in another time. It didn’t happen to me personally, and I was born too late to remember it. I was able to comprehend the sacrifice of those who fought and died, but it wasn’t my own sacrifice and it didn't really mean much to me.
It was over, forgotten. At an individual level, people were trying to put it behind them and move on.
I found the 6pm evening news incredibly dull as a child. My parents insisted on watching it most nights, so if I wanted to watch TV at all then I’d have to endure it for half an hour. The news presenter would occasionally announce a new hotspot with an exotic sounding name somewhere in the world where a conflict had broken out.
America was gripped by the Vietnam war in the 1970s, but it didn’t really involve us, so it was of no real consequence to me. Most of my information about Vietnam came later when films like Apocalypse Now and Platoon started arriving in cinemas, as America tried to search its soul and find ways to heal its ignominious defeat. I remember watching the TV series Tour of Duty and I thought it was pretty cool. It opened with the theme tune of Paint It Black by the Rolling Stones and I daydreamed about flying Huey helicopters, especially after reading Chickenhawk by Robert Mason.
I heard the presenters talk about Kampuchea for a while, but as a kid I thought they were saying “Camp Uchea” and decided it must be an unpleasant refugee camp somewhere with bad food.
The 1980s came along and the threat of nuclear war loomed large. I saw The Day After at the cinema and I was convinced we were all about to die in a holocaust. I became genuinely depressed, as if I didn’t already have enough to worry about as a teenager.
By now you probably know that I’m a fan of Carl Sagan, so I’m going to drop a couple of his quotes starting with this one:
“The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.”
The following year a couple of French secret agents snuck into the country, and they mined and sank the Rainbow Warrior while it was berthed in my hometown. It was a Greenpeace vessel that had been protesting in waters close to the French Government’s nuclear test sites on tiny atolls in the Pacific Ocean. A huge anti-French sentiment broke out with embassy protests and boycotts of French products.
A year later, my family hosted a French exchange student called Philippe who stayed with us for a few weeks. As well as improving my French, I took him to task over the incident. I don’t know exactly what I said, but I do remember his indignant reply: “Well I didn’t personally bomb the Rainbow Warrior! Not all French people are responsible for this you know.”
He was right of course; I was treating him just like Heinz. The French were suddenly the new enemy, what they did was wrong, simple as that. They killed one Dutch-Portuguese national who was on board the boat at the time, so hopefully it wouldn’t take several decades to forgive all French people and we could become friends again.
In the 1990s the Balkan peninsula was ablaze with religious fighting and ethnic cleansing. Sarajevo’s Sniper Alley became a household name, we knew to pronounce the soft ‘j’. The Gulf War came later the same decade and with it, a new dawn of fundamentalist terrorism that shook the world.
But even then, it was all on a TV screen. It was happening somewhere else in the world. It didn’t involve me or anyone I knew, not directly. It had no tangible impact on my life. It was easy to ignore.
From a young age I was in the scouting movement. We learned to tie knots, put up tents, help old ladies cross the road and raise money for good causes. Scouts wasn’t exactly the military, but it was born of that tradition – we still marched up and down in uniforms, made solemn vows of loyalty to The Queen and saluted flags.
In my mid-teens I joined the Air Training Corps, a civilian air cadet organisation closely aligned to the real military as we wore the same uniforms as regular service personnel. By then I was determined to join the air force as a pilot and fly fighter jets. I applied and made it through the first few stages of recruitment. I remember being interviewed by a psychologist on how I would feel if I was ordered to drop a bomb on innocent people.
I was only really concerned about flying and I just wanted to get my hands on a jet, so I mumbled some rubbish I thought they wanted to hear that I probably remembered from Top Gun: it wasn’t for me to decide policy, I was simply an instrument of that policy.
Thanks to my fondness for paramilitary organisations and through annual observances at school, I remember selling poppies every year to raise money for returned servicemen and attending a lot of dawn parades and ANZAC services. The memory of the men who had fallen was cherished, as it still is today in most countries, in parades and services at cenotaphs and monuments.
We were taught to remember the sacrifice of their generation, one that still lived among us but couldn’t talk about the terrible things they’d seen or done. Our job was simple: don’t forget. They had secured and delivered a way of life for us all, with a liberty and freedom that I already took for granted.
There would always be a group of veteran soldiers at the parades wearing their single-breasted navy suits with cheap metal buttons, regimental ties, worn-out berets and medals clinking on their chests as they marched past in dishevelled rows. There weren’t so many of them in wheelchairs in the 1980s, the lads were mostly still on their feet – but they looked old and sad.
As they leant on their walking sticks and each other and listened to the speeches and prayers, their pain was visibly still present – evidenced by the tears that rolled down their cheeks – even after all those years.
I wonder how they dealt with their trauma and mental scars. A lot of their buddies didn’t make it back and they probably watched them die. They would have scoffed at the idea of embracing Kintsugi – they'd have rather seen the Japanese at the end of their bayonets.
They were expected to bury it. Just suck it up with a stiff upper lip, because that was what was expected of men in those days. They were tough old goats made of sterner stuff, and that was the enduring stereotype. Men don’t cry. They don’t talk about it. Except on the one day of the year when they could stand beside their surviving comrades, the only other people in the world who could really understand what they went through together. It was their moment to open the valve on the pressure cooker and let it all out, so they could cope for another year. It was their day and it belonged to them, not me.
They probably looked at the youth of the day and thought they were ungrateful punks. They would have been right. I was generally more preoccupied with ensuring a steady supply of new batteries for my Nintendo and upgrading to a bicycle that had more than one gear.
Fast forward to now, and the unfolding events in Ukraine. I’m still watching it on a TV screen – when they bother to show it – but this time I care about it.
I’m emotionally invested in it. I’m outraged and saddened. My eyes cloud over whenever I see, sometimes uncensored, images of the moments people lose their lives, their homes, their families, and their innocence – which will never be restored to them. The only tangible impacts for me, for the time being safe and comfortable in my own country, are rising food and energy prices and the inconvenience of no longer being able to buy sunflower oil.
So why does it feel different this time?
I guess maybe it’s because I’m older and wiser? I have more life experience and so perhaps I’m better equipped to understand the horror those people are going through, better able to empathise with them?
It feels real to me, palpable.
Is it because I’ve had trauma and near-death experiences of my own, even if on a much smaller, personal scale? Is it because it’s happening closer to where I live?
Regardless, I instinctively feel like I should be doing something – anything to help. But other than donations and sympathetic statements, I have no idea what. If I went over there to either help or to fight, as some people have, I’d probably get in the way and make things worse.
I also feel ashamed for caring so much about Ukrainians. Is it because they look like me? Because I’m more familiar with their European cultural identity? What about Syria? Lebanon? Afghanistan? Kurds? The Rohingya people in Burma and the Uyghurs in China?
There are flashpoints all over the world where people are suffering atrocities equal to those in Ukraine. But like Jim Carrey’s ability to eat dynamite, they are neatly and conveniently contained in distant places that only result in a quick burping headline of indigestion on the 6pm news, before they move onto the sport.
The exodus of people fleeing into Europe from Ukraine is described as the largest refugee migration since World War II. According to the UN Refugee Agency there are over 6 million Ukrainian refugees displaced across Europe. They were instantly welcomed with open arms, shelter, food, supplies and toys by western nations – some, like Poland, didn’t really have much of a choice. The UK was slow to remove barriers to entry for these people, symbolically projecting the colours of the Ukrainian flag onto No.10 Downing Street while at the same time closing visa applications to refugees.
Things have improved with over 100,000 now registered in a national temporary resettlement scheme, but given our size and our resources, it could still be better when you consider that Germany has taken in close to a million people.
So why did we roll out the red carpet for Ukrainians, but we treat Syrians and Iraqis almost as criminals? We turn those people back to France with gunboats in the middle of the English Channel, or we force them onto flights to a new home in Rwanda. Are they not trying to escape the same horrors, the same persecution, the same unbearable conditions? Is it because they’re from a place further away, not on our doorstep, so it’s not our problem?
I was hugely moved in February by refugees from Pakistan and Afghanistan living in a Lithuanian camp asking to donate blood for Ukrainian troops, also offering to help and fight. “They did not get the solidarity convoys but they know war and what it does to people.”
I realise I’m not offering any solutions here. I don’t have any answers. This is not much more than a sad observation of the suffering, futility and inevitability of war through the lens of my own exposure to it. My grandfathers thought they were fighting the bad guys to ensure such a thing would never happen again. Each year we stand opposite cenotaphs promising to ensure that aim is remembered... and yet, here we are. It seems that each generation has a war that it is either trying to remember, or one that it’s trying to forget.
For most of us living in developed western economies, chances are our children don’t even know what war is. But they could be waking up to it soon. Ukraine is a reminder that our generation has taken peace and stability as something that is guaranteed. We actually don’t realise how precious it is and how easily it can be taken away.
“Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.”
As the Russians continue their campaign, one of their most revered citizens would have understood Sagan’s words well.
“Looking at Earth from afar you realise it is too small for conflict and just big enough for cooperation.”
Are we stuck in an endless loop? After all, haven’t we been at war in some form or another since the dawn of history? A quote from Those Who Remain: A Postapocalyptic Novel by G. Michael Hopf, suggests that we are:
“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”
We look to strong leaders in times of war then slip back into a self-indulgent daze while power, wealth and resources are quietly concentrated into the hands of the few, who plunge us into war again. We grow weak and fat on deliveries from Amazon and Uber Eats and look the other way.
Freedom? Liberty? Money? I didn’t notice. I don’t really have any control over those things. They have already been taken away from me. They’re controlled by somebody else.
Ukraine really could still go either way. Western nations are pouring arms and funds into the country, but ultimately hoping the Ukranian people will do the dirty work themselves. I guess only time will tell if future cinemagoers will be watching war films starring the Russian equivalent of John Wayne, or Martin Sheen instead.
I reckon Matthias Schoenaerts would make a good Vladimir Putin.
I’m at an age now when I’m too young to remember a war but too old to get involved in one. Maybe I could contribute by sitting in front of a screen somewhere in Whitehall and analysing some data or making propaganda films or something. While smoking a pipe.
Most of my friends have kids starting to hit their late teens and early twenties and who knows? They might be the next generation to go off to war. Or simply be killed by it in their own homes. Any parent I know would find that too terrible to contemplate.
That’s what’s happening in Ukraine right now, and the modern age tells us that it wouldn’t just be our sons heading off to fight – but our daughters too.
It puts my petty worries into perspective. I’m finding myself grateful for small things. I’m not going to give the barista a filthy look if I get the wrong milk. A tough day at work is not really a tough day. You can deliver sometime between the hours of 9am and 5pm? That’s fine, I’m happy you can deliver at all.
It makes me want to be kinder to people.
I don’t want our children to be sitting in front of a cenotaph twenty or thirty years from now with the metallic trinkets of their sacrifice pinned to their chests, no substitute for the tears in their eyes and the pain in their hearts – wishing that their children and grandchildren in turn will never know such suffering.
I sincerely hope it doesn’t come to that. I hope that Putin doesn’t remember where he put the PIN code for his nukes.
I hope we keep telling our children to remember, teaching them the lessons we had passed on to us, so they can grow up and help create a world in which we don’t have to fight. To keep wearing their scout uniforms, saluting at the cenotaph, learning the poems, the prayers and the hymns. To keep making the solemn promise never to pick up arms so they can continue to enjoy peace and prosperity.
Hopefully they will keep doing that, until, we ultimately find ourselves once again in the tragic part of Hopf's cycle.
Please keep an eye out for weak men in good times – you know what’s coming next.
Spitfires at Sawbridgeworth (1942) by Eric Ravilious, Imperial War Museum, London
