Madam,

Having recently retired from The Royal Welsh Fusiliers (one of the most operationally experienced combat infantry battalions within the British Army) and returned to my native village to live with my family, I thought it proper to write in about an ongoing article which your paper has been running.

I would like to ask our various party representatives how they would go about tackling the shortage of soldiers within the British Army, especially those within infantry, tanks, artillery, who would be required to do the harshest of work, should they, the politicians, decide to order their generals to deploy their forces.

I ask this because of their recent negative comments and lack of understanding on the army’s recent recruitment drive as to why men and women want to choose a career in the forces.

I, like many of my peers, came from one of those poor rural Meirionnydd families that our representatives talk about. I joined at the age of 18 having seen on the news of the atrocities being committed in Bosnia to innocent civilians, and of the British Army’s involvement in trying to keep the peace under the UN. I joined because I wanted to be part of something that would make a difference to what was happening in front of my eyes. I wanted to serve my country and I wanted to do something that was more than just a pay cheque at the end of the month.

If you’ve had to listen to a mother’s screams throughout the night, after her baby’s life was obliterated by a Serb shell; spend months on end living with little sleep and the good chance of a violent death every day; if you’ve had to place a wounded brother onto a helicopter not knowing if you’ll see them again; or carry your friend’s coffin after he decided to end his life because nothing made sense to him in living anymore, then you will know. Those of us who have experienced the realities of war, don’t look for further wars to fight. We don’t seek to glorify or exalt what we have done in in our people’s eyes, but we do expect our communities and our communities’ representatives to understand that the army, and recruitment into the army, is a necessity of the society that we live in; and is a professional career much the same as any other.

So my question is to those people who do not agree with the army’s recruitment of soldiers from our communities, bearing in mind that no soldier below the age of 18 is allowed by law to go to an operational theatre of war. Whose children would you want to serve our nation and what part of society should they come from? How would you continue to man the professional army that you rely upon to keep you in the life and society that you’ve become accustomed to?

I find it sad that our representatives question and marginalise our youth’s selection of careers and aspirations when it comes to serving their people within the forces. Surely our communities’ representatives’ time and effort would be better spent holding the government to account on improving the social inequality of those rural communities which we soldiers come from, and return to, or improving access to better mental health care, social housing, further education, employment, etc.

Yours etc,

Name and address supplied.

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