It seems nowadays that television and radio presenters are encouraged to banter on-air with other members of the program team. The theory is that this makes them appear more human and accessible. What it actually often does is demonstrate that there are a lot of people involved in television and radio who should not be encouraged to go off-script. They reveal themselves as vacuous and even rather stupid. Frankly, I don’t care if the news-reader has a cat or what the weather guy thinks about the latest sports result. It’s boring!
Another aspect of North American news broadcasting which I hope doesn’t spread is the cult of personality when it comes to the programme anchors. Stand-in presenters are forced to announce that they are covering for so-and-so, the usual presenter. It’s almost as though the presenters are bigger than the programme. Quite frankly, I don’t care who is presenting the show, as long as they do a good job. No more silly people who use the "assumption of ignorance" introduction. I hate listening to people who think if they didn’t know something, then no-one will know it. I once listed to two or three minutes of some daft woman telling me what Diego Garcia wasn’t – ie. a liqueur or a Mexican movie star. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she’d told us in the programme  trailer before the news on the hour that it was an island.
It’s a cliché that TV anchors are pretty-boy and pretty-girl airheads. I know of several who are highly professional and astute journalists. But I also recall one of the stupidest people I’ve come across in my entire life being made an anchor on the television news. Isn’t it interesting how often stupidity and arrogance are wedded?

This is embarrassing. Anyone who reads Book Brief regularly will know how often I bring up how I used to tell trainee newspaper reporters that one silly mistake in their copy destroyed the credibility of the whole story and they’d pretty wasted their time.
Well, it turns out there’s a mistake in Scottish Military Disasters. Perhaps luckily, it isn’t something many people are going to spot and lose faith in the book. I said that the Battle of Gully Ravine in 1915 left my great-grandmother in Glasgow a widow with two young children. Well, it turns out my grandfather had a sister he never mentioned to me. Robina, or Ruby as she was known, died in 1925 at the age of 14 from TB, a disease which claimed the life of her step-sister Mary.
Fortunately, I’ve been given the chance to put the record straight: Scottish Military Disasters has just been released as an e-book. The error probably wouldn’t spoil anyone’s enjoyment of the book but it’s been bugging me since I learned about it three or four months ago.

I’ve promised to use my powers for good. So, here’s a plug for the most excellent King’s Own Scottish Borderers museum in Berwick upon Tweed. The museum is now closed on weekends, which isn’t going to help visitor figures. Military museums have come a long way since I was kid when all they were were a couple of glass cases with moth-eaten uniforms, some medals, and the obligatory bible/whisky flask which stopped a bullet – and the KOSB is no exception to that trend.
The decision to close old barracks, which is home to the KOSB museum and the Berwick museum, was made by English Heritage. To my mind the KOSB museum faces some challenges the other Scottish regimental museums don’t. The first is that English Heritage has big plans for the old barracks complex that don’t include a regimental museum – or the town museum. But the regimental museum has a perpetual lease. I suspect Death by a Thousand Cuts may be seen as an option by English Heritage. The KOSB museum relies heavily on visitors from the nearby caravan park, which usually gets a new batch of occupants on Friday/Saturday. This means that Sunday is usually the first day the caravan park folk get a chance to look the museum over. Odd that English Heritage is closing the barracks, and therefore denying access to the museums, on Sundays.
The other challenge is that the creation of the Royal Regiment of Scotland saw the KOSB being merged with the Edinburgh-based Royal Scots. The fear is some Whitehall pencil pusher is going to decide that regimental museums at both the barracks in Berwick and Edinburgh Castle is an extravagance. The Royal Scots museum is excellent but the knowledge of the staff there about the KOSB is naturally limited. Regimental pride has always been a corner-stone of the British Army and the various museums help foster that, with a pay-off in terms of recruiting. There’s been an upsurge in interest in family history and the various regiments, thanks to Scottish enthusiasm for things military and conscription, have played a major role in the lives of many Scots. It would be criminal to allow some bureaucrats, some Whitehall Warriors, to consign the torch-bearers for Scotland’s proud military heritage, the regimental museums, to the dustbin.  In fact, it’s an insult to the memory of those who died fighting.

A former Canadian soldier has launched a lawsuit against the Department of National Defence because he alleges he's been kicked out of the Army due to the fact that he's not fit for active service. Ryan Elrick had both legs blown off in Afghanistan by a Taliban bomb. He retrained as intelligence analyst, a job that doesn't require running up any mountains. .

But the Department says there's no room in the military for anyone who can't go on active service due to a physical disability. Some observers note that the Department's own headquarters has many military members who while not missing a limb are, due to a gross lack of physical fitness, unable to put on a rucksack and hike up an Afghan mountain clutching a General Purpose Machine Gun. And yet none of them is being kicked out.

Yes, there are things that Elrick can't do any more. I used to know another guy who was seriously injured in Afghanistan but was allowed to continue serving with his regiment. This other guy, I won't name him just in case, in his disabled state was actually an asset to that regiment. Not only was he an inspiration to others when it came to showing pluck and determination but his continued employment boosted morale by demonstrating that the Army looks after it's injured heroes - rather than throwing them on the scrap heap.

The Canadian army is winding up its combat mission in Afghanistan. Many of you may not even be aware that Canada had a combat mission in Afghanistan. The first Canadian troops deployed to Kandahar airport in 2002 and then switched to Kabul. But the casualties only started to really mount in 2005 when a battalion strength battle group took responsibility for Kandahar Province. The last major anti-terrorist sweep is now over and if Canada’s lucky it will have lost a total of just under 160 troops in Afghanistan by the time the Quebec-based Van Doos fly out.
The war memorials are being packed up. That’s probably quite wise. I remember going to the British Cemetery in Kabul when I was in the city for the first presidential elections. There was a plaque on one of the walls which surround the old cemetery for the seven Canadians killed up to that point– four by a US plane, two killed by an improvised explosive device and one to a soldier who died in the bear-hug of a suicide bomber. Most the old grave stones in the cemetery, some in memory of British soldiers who died in 19th Century wars, had been pieced together again after the Taliban took sledge hammers to them. The graves had gone undisturbed during the 1919 War between Britain and Afghanistan;  but the Taliban are something else. And I don’t think there’s any guarantee they won’t be back. Kandahar is the Taliban heartland.
War memorials are all well and good. In nearly every community in Britain one stands in mute testimony to the tragic losses experienced in the First World War. The names of those killed in the Second World War and some subsequent conflicts have been added, but the list of dead from the First is nearly always by far the longest. But perhaps the best memorial is not a block of carved stone. Perhaps the best memorial for the dead is to look after the survivors better. Too many of the injured, both physically and mentally, are effectively cast adrift. 

Trust me on this; moral courage is far rarer than physical courage. I heard something on the radio a couple of days ago about soldiers and killing. It mentioned that soldiers who weren’t sure they were doing the right thing when they opened fire often had problems later dealing with what they’d done. It also made the point that most soldiers don’t actually shoot at the enemy anyway. I think it came out that two or three British paratroopers, highly motivated troops usually, were responsible for most of the 13 deaths on Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland in 1972; one of the few occasions in which ballistic evidence is available.
Anyway, that got me to wondering what the Scots Guardsmen who took part in the 1948 Batang Kali Massacre in Malaya had been told. The cold-blooded murder of around two dozen ethnic-Chinese rubber plantation workers can’t have been easy to talk a bunch of National Servicemen into committing.  We know from affidavits provided in the 1970s to a British Sunday newspaper by some of members of the patrol involved in the massacre that they were told if they didn’t want to take part, they could guard the women and children. We know that the official version that the plantation workers were shot while trying to escape is tosh.  But I for one am unclear to exactly what the Guardsmen were told by their commanders to justify the massacre. The arrival of trucks to take the women and children away from the plantation makes it obvious that this was not the work of a “rogue” or out-of-control patrol. They came through the jungle rather than along the road because they believed that offered the best chance of catching communist guerrillas at the plantation.  I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the plantation workers were indeed active supporters of the guerrillas, and some of them might even have been more involved than that.  But the British Government doesn’t want you or me to know what was going on that terrible day in December 1948. It recently refused to hold a proper inquiry and in 1993 successfully persuaded the Malaysian Government to abandon its attempts to get at the truth. Once again, I ask: “Who is the British Government protecting?”  I’d be very surprised if it’s a bunch of squaddies.

New research suggests that U.S. soldiers are more likely to suffer from PTSD than their British counterparts. Apparently almost one-in-three U.S. soldiers believe they are suffering from PTSD.  The figure for British troops is supposed to be four-in-one- hundred.

I’d be surprised if the difference is really that great. PTSD is big business and medicine is a business in the United States. Here in Canada, we get a lot of US television and that means being bombarded with advertisements for snake oil to cure conditions that don’t exist. “Feel tired and sleepy at the end day? You may have Van Ruypert’s Syndrome – ask your doctor about  Meddiquik.
Canadian figures suggest that Canuck soldiers fall somewhere between the British and American figures. About 12% report suffering from PTSD or depression. The British figure of 4% doesn't include depression. Don’t get me wrong; I believe there is such a thing as PTSD, though it’s a blanket term that covers a number of problems, some of which date back as far as war itself.  Unlike US General George Patton I don’t believe assaulting people is a cure.  But I do suspect that a lot of people who think they have some form of PTSD are mistaken.  The PTSD industry is actually killing people because vulnerable service personnel are committing suicide, in part due to the amount of nonsense their heads are being filled with. 

So, while Americans may be too quick to decide they have PTSD and perhaps even unconsciously ape the symptoms, the British may be under reporting it. The British Army is still a very macho-culture and to many of its members even mentioning PTSD is an admission of weakness. Instead, many try to self-medicate the demons away through mis-use of alcohol or illegal drugs. Somewhere in between there is a sensible middle ground. The sooner it’s found, the better.

There’s a glimmer of hope that the British Government may still be persuaded to hold a proper inquiry into the Batang Kali Massacre in 1948. That’s when a patrol of Scots Guards executed around two dozen ethnic Chinese rubber plantation workers in Malaya. Official claims that the men were shot while trying to escape from questioning have long been discredited.  According to media reports from Malaysia, the families of the workers have succeeded in getting Legal Aid to help meet the costs of seeking a judicial review of a recent British government decision not to hold a public inquiry into the killings. The families had been warned by British government lawyers that they could be on the hook for hundreds of thousands of pounds in legal costs.
British Government has been determined for more than 60 years that the truth about the massacre should remain hidden. A Scotland Yard inquiry in the 1970s ordered by Labour after a Sunday paper published admissions from some of the soldiers involved that there had been a premeditated massacre was shut down when the Tories took power. In 1993 another Tory administration succeeded in persuading the Malaysian authorities to drop a police investigation into the killings.
The use of army lorries to take the women and children away from the plantation before the mass murder began points to this being more than the work of a rogue patrol. For me the big question is who is the government protecting? It doesn’t have a particularly strong record when it comes to protecting squaddies. So, what is Whitehall so afraid will come out?

Several years ago, while packing my bag to go back to Afghanistan, I got to wondering about war. It seemed to me that war was a lottery which you won if you came out alive or without being turned into a living vegetable. By staying at home, I could win without having to buy a ticket. What I was getting at was the lack of tangible material benefit resulting from putting your life and health on the line for sake of Queen and Country.
In ancient times, the risk to life and limb of going to war could be set against the chance of plunder. There were tangible pay-offs. Now we fight for the advancement of abstracts such as “democracy” and the interests of the nation/society in general. This would be easier to stomach if the whole country was pulling together and no-one was making a profit. But it’s a sad fact that the end of the Second World War was greeted by a big fall in the value of stocks in New York.
Imagine my surprise when I learned from old regimental history that soldiers in Queen Victoria’s time often earned a healthy gratuity or pension if they won an award for bravery. I think the Victoria Cross still comes with a financial award but it’s token. Plundering defeated enemies, or in real life civilians who happen to be on the wrong side, is wrong. But so is expecting our men and women to perform feats of courage with no real reward. It could be said that “a good war” enhances promotion prospects and that should be enough in the way of tangible benefit. But promotion in any organisation is seldom linked to merit or a job well done.  And let’s not forget that some of the bravest men in the front line, who may have changed the course of battle by storming a machine-gun post singled handed, were drunks in peacetime who couldn’t be trusted to remember what day it was. Promoting them would not be doing them any favours.

I’ve searched in vain on the internet for information about the fate of the young Scots Guardsman who was taken off ceremonial duties at the Royal Wedding after making some disparaging remarks on a social media site about the bride.
Eighteen year-old Cameron Reilly also made some very unpleasant anti-semitic and anti-immigrant comments on the social media site. I’m kind of concerned that this idiot has been given a gun at public expense and taught how to kill people. He seems, at his present level of maturity and brain function, to be one of the last people who should be given a firearm.
But, he is only 18-years-old. And a lot of money has already been spent on training him. The part of me that says just boot him out of the Army is wrestling with the part that says he should be given a chance to straighten-up and fly right. I suspect that young Guardsman Reilly didn’t confine his rants to social media sites and it concerns me that no-one appears to have made a serious attempt to persuade him to put his brain in gear. Or maybe someone did. If they did and he ignored the chance to mend his ways, then he probably should get the boot right now. If not, then he should get a second chance – but only one.

So, it now turns out that as recently as 1993 the British government helped torpedo an investigation into a massacre of around two dozen rubber ethnic-Chinese plantation workers in 1948 by a Scots Guards patrol in Malaya. Malaysian detectives had wanted to come to Britain in 1993 to interview former soldiers who have admitted that the workers were killed in cold blood and that there was no  mass escape attempt; as the British Government claimed in 1948. But the Foreign Office managed to pressure the Malaysian authorities into dropping their inquiry into the massacre.
A Scotland Yard inquiry, launched after members of the patrol came forward to admit there had been a massacre in the early 1970s, was also closed down when Labour was voted out and replaced by a Tory government. It’s not clear if the 1993 inquiry shutdown was due to another Tory government being in power.
What happened at Batang Kali is pretty well known by now. The two big questions remaining are “why” and “why the continued cover-up”. The British government does not protect squaddies. Who is it protecting? The women and children at the plantation were taken away in army trucks. A “rogue” patrol doesn’t order up trucks. It obviously continues to suit Her Majesty’s Government that there is an “official” shot-while-trying-to-escape version of events and a second “unofficial” version in which the finger of blame is pointed no higher than the members of the Scots Guards patrol.
Last November the Government refused to hold a new inquiry into the massacre and now it is threatening relatives of the victims with having to pay the legal costs of a judicial review of that decision if it fails. Isn’t it time the full truth came out? Don’t we owe both the victims’ families and the surviving patrol members that? I’ll say it again, the British Government does not run cover-ups to protect squaddies. 

The Americanization of Canada continues apace. I always felt sorry for US sailors forced to serve aboard ships with names such as the USS Alvin Hunsucker III; named for some long-dead and forgotten hero of the Great Republic. Well, not quite forgotten, I suppose their great grandchildren know who they were and what they did.
Now the Canadian Coastguard has decided to name nine new patrol vessels in honour of members of the uniformed services who have been killed on the job – two soldiers killed in Afghanistan, two Victoria Cross winners, two Mounties, two members of the Coastguard and one fisheries officer. What I wonder is how do they chose who to honour? More than 150 Canadian soldiers have died in Afghanistan. Is it fair to pick out just two? Was their sacrifice greater than the others? Were they somehow braver? One of the soldiers selected is the only woman to be killed in combat. Is a woman's death more important than a man's? That seems a bit sexist. I'm all for doing everything we can to honour those killed, but this ship-naming lark seems like a very slippery slope. 

Luckily, there aren’t a lot of jobs in which you can get other people killed. Sadly, reporting from war zones is one of them. Listening to the radio, I heard about four journalists from the New York Times who were captured by pro-Ghadafi troops in Libya. They were beaten; their Libyan driver has vanished and may well be dead. One of the journalists was Stephen Farrell. He and his Afghan helper Sultan Munadi were seized in Afghanistan back in 2009. A British soldier, Cpl. John Harrison, and Munadi were killed during Farrell’s rescue. I’d like to think Farrell’s just unlucky. Back in 2001 Yvonne Ridley sneaked herself into Afghanistan before the Taliban were outsted power there. She was caught and the two Afghans helping her were arrested. I’ve asked contacts in Afghanistan and Pakistan whether it is true that the two were executed. No-one has been able to tell me. I remember Ridley from her days at the Journal in Newcastle upon Tyne. I wouldn’t have put my life in her hands. One of the problems with journalism is that journalists increasingly tend to come more and more from privileged backgrounds. In the world they come from, people don’t get killed or murdered. I remember one journalist who was killed by gangsters. The thing is that she didn’t believe they would kill her. She didn’t carry on in spite of the death threats, she just didn’t take the threats seriously.  On the other hand, I took death threats seriously. It’s not clear to this day how many murderers I went to school with; because a lot people think one guy confessed to a killing he didn’t commit in exchange for the real killer not murdering him, his sister and his mother. I never backed away from a story because of death threats but I took them seriously and I took precautions. However, I did pull out of one story, only time I did so in my whole career as a reporter, which involved organised crime because it would have involved working with another reporter to tie up an important loose end. I just didn’t think she had the brains to take the precautions necessary to keep both of us alive –  too much of a glory hunter. I tried to get the information other ways but it turned out that the only way to get it would have involved bringing in someone I couldn’t trust. You can't file a story if you're dead. Glory hunters, both in the military and in journalism, all too often get other people killed.

So, one of the “Highland” battalions of the Royal Regiment of Scotland may well be about to get the chop. Future British Government spending cuts on defence are expected to mean the RRoS will be reduced from five battalions to four. The speculation is that either the 4th Battalion (the old Highlanders) or the 5th Battalion (the old Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders) are most likely to get the axe.
In the old days it would have been the Argylls that got the chop as the most “junior” unit. But the Argylls have powerful friends, so don’t rule out The Highlanders vanishing instead.
Let’s get beyond the imaginative bankruptcy that led to successor to three of the most storied Highland regiments, the Gordons, the Seaforths and the Camerons, being saddled with the uninspired moniker of The Highlanders.
Once a battalion is killed off, it can’t be brought back to life. The experience of the Argylls when it was reduced to company strength in the late 1960s and then rushed back to battalion level in 1971 serves as a stark warning. The unit was plagued with disciplinary problems for years afterwards and the rapid reconstitution must be considered a major factor in its woes.
The infantry has been cut too hard too many times in the past by clueless civil servants. I’d suggest that rather than disband a battalion, the RRoS should spread the redundancies across the existing five battalions. This will mean that one battalion will need to be supplemented by at least a company from another battalion for service in Afghanistan – but I thought the ability to do that was supposed to be one of the benefits of creating a super-regiment.  Of course, I may be sadly out of touch and augmenting at company strength may already be common practise. I remember last time I was home, The Rifles paraded through Edinburgh following their return from a tough time in Afghanistan – but the guys marching in front of the news cameras were wearing Tam o’ Shanters, which suggests there were a number of RRoS guys attached to The Rifles. Anyway, retaining all five battalions may make the return to sanity, when it’s realised that we don’t have enough infantry soldiers as it is, a lot less painless and wasteful.
By the way, as far as The Highlanders name goes, maybe the Gordons should have bitten the bullet at the time of the amalgamation with the Queen’s Own Highlanders (Seaforth and Camerons)  and the new unit could have become the Queen’s Own Highlanders (Seaforth, Camerons and Gordons). Or the unit called have been called The Highland Brigade. Maybe it’s a little confusing to label a battalion as a brigade but there is a precedent – the old 94th Foot, the Scotch Brigade. Folk could have called the 4th Battalion RRoS "The High-Bees".

What constitutes a combat death? The Canadian media talked about the “the first combat deaths since Korea” when Canadian troops started getting killed in Afghanistan. I tend to think that getting your head taken off by an anti-tank rocket counts as a death in combat. That’s what happened to Daniel Gunther of the Van Doos back in 1993 while he was serving as a peacekeeper in Bosnia. Of course, combat suggests having the chance to fight back and that’s not something Gunther had the chance to do. But then the bulk of Canadians killed in Afghanistan have died as a result of roadside bombs and they didn’t have a chance to shoot back either.
It’s quite possible that the bulk of Canadian journalists don’t even know about Gunther. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the Canadian government lied about how Gunther died in order to avoid going off-script when it came to peacekeeping missions. The deliberate murder of a Canadian soldier would upset the plot line – instead it was claimed he was killed accidentally by some stray shrapnel. Secondly, until Afghanistan, most Canadian outlets didn’t care about the country’s soldiers. Stories I wrote for the Edmonton Sun would appear a year later in the Toronto based media as if they were new. News is like fish, it doesn’t keep well. We used to joke when Sun Media’s own Ottawa Bureau used to send military stories which began “Sun Media has learned…..” that “Yeah, from reading a year-old Edmonton Sun”.
And are combat deaths somehow more important that training deaths? Years ago, in an effort to do something different for Remembrance Day, I did an article about training deaths. Few people realise how dangerous training can be. The old “train hard, fight easy” doctrine comes with a price.  The number of training deaths suffered in the UK during the Second World War was long a state secret.

I’m not going to bore you by adding my voice to those wondering what the heck the Canadians and British hope to gain by joining the U.S./French air assault on Libya. The air campaign defies all political logic. The Libyans have to sort this out for themselves – we can’t save everyone. No-one wants another Rwanda but in revolution nearly always brings the monsters to the fore. There appears to be a leadership vacuum when it comes to the rebels and I’m worried about who is going to fill it. And let's not go into how attacking tanks and artillery positions counts as enforcing a No-Fly Zone
No, I want to talk about the Aussies in Afghanistan. Thanks to the wonders of Facebook it turns out that some of the Aussies don’t have a lot of time for the Afghans they are supposed to be protecting. “Ragheads” was one of the more polite names used to describe the local population. I can sympathise with foreign troops in Afghanistan because if there’s one thing that all the ethnic groupings there share, it’s an almost universal dislike and distrust of foreigners. The Afghans regard themselves as poor but pure and all they want is to be left alone. Sadly, over the past 200 years, the British, Russians, Americans, Pakistanis, and Iranians have all reckoned the Afghans can't be left alone. When I was in Kandahar province back in 2002, it was obvious that any continued trouble-free Canadian presence was heavily dependent on providing tangible and almost immediate economic benefits to the local population. But the Aussies who posted the derogatory material on Facebook were not behaving professionally. I bet the Taliban and their allies are have a field day posting the Aussies’ Facebook comments on thousands of Islamic websites. Not helpful, Digger. In fact, I’ve got to wonder is the morons involved should even be allowed near fire arms.
I’m a little disappointed because the Aussies I met in Afghanistan were all very professional – mind you they were members of the Australian SAS or on attachment to it. Great neighbours.  One day I might tell you about the day some members of the  Canadian special forces unit JTF2 locked themselves out of their office at Kandahar Airport.

The recent Coroner's inquest on a British soldier, Cpl. John Harrison, killed during the 2009 rescue of  New York Times journalist Stephen Farrell in Afghanistan got me wondering what I would have done if I'd been captured by the Taliban. I guess hope for a quick and painless death – or, very much less likely, a negotiated release. The Canadian troops I was with at Kandahar used to joke with me when we went to local villages that if I didn't stick close to them I end up in a “Taliban snuff movie”. What I wouldn't have done was hope to rescued – particularly if I'd ignored numberous warnings not to go somewhere and got myself capured through my own stupidity. Hostage rescues in Afghanistan are kind of dicey anyway, Farrell's Afghan assistant, Sultan Munadi, was killed during the rescue and Linda Norgrove was killed last year by a US grenade during an attempt to rescue her. By the way, I think the US military should get some credit for admitting it was responsible for the death of aid worker Norgrove.
Perhaps I'm being a bit  flippant here, but perhaps the New York Times could have arranged and paid for Farrell's rescue – I'm pretty sure the paper has budget not far short of what the British Army gets these days. There are plenty of so-called security contractors (when did “mercenary” go out of fashion?) with the technical know-how to conduct a rescue operation. Actions should have consequences and those consequences should not involve the death of another person.

A lot of the websites which seem to be aimed at squaddies and former squaddies refer disparingly to “Walts”. I don't think I've seen a dictionary definition of Walt yet but it seems to me to be a term for some kind of military fantasist. Could Walt be short for Walter Mitty? The fantasist hero of a short story by American humourist James Thurber.

Years ago I came across an Australian-based website which specialised in exposing military frauds. I think it was called Australian and New Zealand Military Imposters. Australia seemed to have a lot of Australians claiming falsely to have served in Vietnam and Brit immigrants claiming to be former SAS. That got me thinking about a fellah who regularly appeared in the local media claiming to be a hardened combat veteran who served with a non-Canadian unit. Like the imposters in Australia this fellah claimed to have served in a special forces role. I'd heard he'd been a cook on a submarine. I questioned a fellow journalist who'd done a story about this guy about what evidence there was to back up the claim of special forces service. It seemed to come down to a military discharge certificate – the kind both an elite combat infantryman or a cook would be entitled to. There were also some photos of this character holding a rifle with what looked like some exotic flora in the background. Once again, it could have been taken before this guy went out on another highly dangerous mission or it could have been a cook taking a break from the pots and pans to be photographed with his personal weapon.
Some people would, and did, say “Where's the harm?” in this kind of charade. Well, here's the harm. This guy was  spouting a lot of bullshit, both to the Canadian public and the young Canadian soldiers heading off to Kandahar, about War. He was  filling folks' heads with nonsense, gleaned from cheap paperbacks and Commando Comics at time when Canada was making  a very serious military commitment which has so far cost the lives of more than 150 Canadians in Afghanistan. That shouldn't ought to be encouraged.

A couple of weeks ago I was walking across the carpark at the local shopping centre when I heard a vehicle being revved high again and again. Knowing what awful drivers people here in Alberta are, I made sure I knew which vehicle the racket was coming from and kept a close eye on it. I had a feeling that it was going to reverse out of its parking space at high speed and I didn't want to be in its path when that happened. Right enough, the driver suddenly slammed it into gear and shot out backwards from the space. He shot right into a car in the next section of the carpark. I reckoned he might try to drive off without leaving his details for the driver of the car he'd just hit, so like a good citizen I took down his number. The guy saw me and got out. He wanted to know what I was doing. I told him. He accused me of being a racist. Did I mention he was from Africa? It hadn't seemed important to me but it obviously was to him. By the way, suprisingly, there didn't seem to be any visible damage to the vehicle he hit.

For my last couple of years at the Edmonton Sun I was one of the crime reporters. To me, there was no such thing as a “daring robbery”. The word “daring” suggests something admirable. There's nothing admirable about stealing. Most criminals are sad and pathetic people. A lot of them seem to see themselves as Robin Hood characters. Fortunately for the cops, most of them aren't that bright.
On the other hand, “battling grannies” never fought off “cowardly thugs” in my stories either. What did the reporters who accuse muggers of being cowards when their victims fight back actually want the criminals to do? Knock the old lady to the ground and stamp on her head? Aborting the robbery maybe the only decent thing the crook does that day. I didn't want to write anything that might discourage some inadequate scumbag from doing the right thing at the last minute. Don't get me wrong, anyone who attacks and steals from someone weaker from themselves is a coward, but not half-killing a weaker someone who fights back is not cowardly.
And while I'm on the subject of crime reporting: another thing I could never bring myself to do was to describe a criminal as a “suspect” when cops had no idea of their identity. For example - “The suspect is described as a white male, 5'6”, and wearing a dark jacket”. If that's all the cops have, they don't have a suspect. They have description of a thug, knifeman, raider, robber, mugger or attacker. That person only becomes a “suspect” when they have a name to go with the crook.
Isn't it odd how little things become more annoying as a person gets older.