There's been a fuss here in North America about a female sports journalist who feels she got a hard time when she visited a male team changing room after a game. I just wonder if female journalists should be wandering around male changing rooms at all. I know if I, a guy, demanded to be allowed into the Canadian women's volleyball team dressing room after a game, I'd probably get short shrift. I might even be branded as some kind of a pervert. Why is it anyway that female sports journalists can demand to be allowed into males sports locker rooms? They argue that they can't do their job properly unless they have the same access as male reporters.
I have a theory. It's that you can't actually do a good job of reporting a sport if you've never played it. That's kind of why I'm not too bothered about not covering female volleyball. I know women and men play the same sports differently. To be honest, I think women's ice hockey is a far more entertaining and skilful game than the men's version. But I've never played women's ice hockey and I don't think I'm qualified to write about it and demand access to their dressing rooms after a game.
Oh, I could know who the players are, who the top scorer is and who everyone played for before they joined the team I'm reporting on: but without ever playing, would I really understand the game? Now, I could win myself a lot of publicity and fame if I did become a women's hockey writer, particularly if I could get some of them to harass me while I was visiting their changing room after the game. But I'd feel that I'd got the job as a gimmick.

I've got an update for those of you who read the blog about fake Martini Henry rifles being sold in Afghanistan. The Afghans are knocking out and selling fakes of the historic British firearm to cash in on a story that hundreds of examples of the real thing ended up in the country illegally after they should have been scrapped in the late 1800s. The rifles were supposed to have been sawn up to make them unusable but legend has it that Afghan craftsmen cleverly re-assembled the scrap parts and the rifles were turned on their former owners. Well, it looks as though the guy who put the botched scrapping story in the public realm was no less a personage than Winston Churchill. The story features in a book he wrote in 1897 called "The Malakand Field Force". I haven't managed to come across any earlier mentions of this illegal arms operation.

Maybe the problem's that I'm not many people's idea of what a writer should be like. I'm just an ordinary guy from a bog-standard Scottish home. Maybe I don't seem bright enough. “You don't write the way you speak,” one relative told me years ago, giving the one and only indication I heard from him that I might be a disappointment to him.
I went along recently to what they call here a “short story slam”, in which would-be writers compete for a prize at a local pub. The winner is chosen by a jury randomly selected from the audience and is based on a 10 minute “performance” of a short story. I say “performance” because many of the competitors realise that simply reading their story out aloud isn't going to cut it. I never enter because the jury always picks the most pretentious piece of tosh performed that night over some really excellent stuff. 
Anyway, this night I'm there on my own. The only table left is a table for four and I can have no objection when three other people plonked themselves down. In between stories I chatted with the three. They were all wannabee writers and I think at least two of them had had things published in some university arts magazines. I find out a lot about them. I am shocked by their lack of curiosity about me – I thought writers were supposed to be interested in other people. I don't think it occurred to them that I was a writer – never mind the author of a national bestseller.
Something similar happened recently when the local library played host to well known Canadian playwright Marty Chan. I wanted to ask Marty about writing dialogue. A famous, and I suspect reasonably rich, thriller writer I used to know has an absolute tin-ear when it comes to dialogue. I know that the standard advice is to listen to how people speak. But I also know from my time as a journalist and from transcribing interviews with politicians that many people don't speak in coherent sentences. I think there's a trick to realistic dialogue in fiction and I hoped Mr Chan could give me some pointers when I approached him. I mean, as a former journalist and writer of non-fiction, the stuff I’ve put between quotation marks so far has actually been spoken by a real person. Anyway, another Edmonton playwright interrupts me and says “Speaking of self-published, blah blah blah” and then monopolizes the conversation. Only, of course he didn't say “blah blah blah”. It was pretty obvious he was of the opinion that if I'd had a book published, it must have been self-published.  At the weekend, I was at another event hosted by the local library and featuring an Edmonton author who is doing really well for himself at the moment. I know, you want names. Maybe. I had a book in my pocket because I was expecting to have time to do some reading before a lunch-hour assignation later in the day. It was Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham. If you haven't read it, it's about the creepy “you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours” lives lived by professional writers. I remarked to this Edmonton author that it was enough to put a person off the business. It didn't seem to occur to him that I might have some notion about that of which I spoke. Once again a member of the Edmonton literary community showed a depressing lack of curiosity about an Ordinary Joe.
I really would have liked to have spoken to Marty Chan.  Years ago I read a book on beach in British Columbia and though it was in Standard English I was pretty sure it had been written by a Scots guy. It was called “The Camp” and his name was Williams or Williamson, or something like that. Years later I spotted another of his books in a second-hand shop in Edinburgh and this one had an author biography. Not only was the guy Scottish, but he was brought up close to where I went to primary school. Now I'd hate it if all the fictional dialogue I tried to write came over as being spoken by some guy from just outside Wishaw.

 A long long time ago a friend of mine went into the Army recruiting office in Inverness and inquired about joining the Queen's Own Highlanders as an officer. He'd a few Highers under his belt and felt he could serve Queen and Country best as an officer.
The Colonel Blimp character who was wheeled out to chat with him suggested that he lacked “life experience” and perhaps he might be better to come back when he'd served a couple of years with the police in Hong Kong. It sounded like fair comment. But then my friend learned that two private schoolboys from Ampleforth in Yorkshire had just been taken on as officers. He couldn't help feeling that the Sixth Form Dorm at Ampleforth hardly compared with the slums of Kowloon when it came to teaching life lessons. One would almost think that kids from comprehensive schools were not welcome to be officers. There may be a case for saying that a kid from pretty much the same background as the rank-and-file Jocks might prove a liability, especially when it came to ordering men to almost certain death. But I think I'd rather base my confidence in an officer on him knowing what he was doing, rather than his parents being able to afford to have him privately educated.
Of course, it's not just the Army that had some odd ideas when it comes to recruiting people. Another friend of mine went for an interview with the Scottish Office. This was in the days before the creation of the Scottish Parliament, when Scotland was still ruled by a colonial administration split between London and Edinburgh. In the latter days of Thatcher Rule there were not enough elected Tories in Scotland to hold all the ministerial posts available in administration. Anyway, my friend was shocked to be asked at the interview who she would invite to a dinner party. She'd had never been to a dinner party in his life and felt the interviewers might as well have asked what he felt were the qualities required of a good fox hunting horse. She didn't get the job. Although one of the key qualifications was a sound knowledge of Scotland the job went to an English woman who'd been in the country three weeks. Her hobby was hosting dinner parties. And although she'd been told not to discuss her interview she blabbed to all the other candidates about the dinner party question. The interviewers knew she'd ignored the instruction, my friend somehow managed to let that slip to them, but that didn't prevent them appointing her.
There are days when I'm very glad I live in Canada.

I was reading a book a couple of months ago about the Royal Air Force and was surprised to find that a lot of the language the pilots used in WW II was part of my childhood vocabulary almost 30 years after the war ended. Those guys sure made an impression. Up until I read this book I had no idea that “jammy”, which we used for undeserved luck, was RAF slang. Is there such a thing as deserved luck? But I digress.
How different my generation was from the youngsters today who want to speak like urban American black “gangstas”. At least the guys we were taking a lead from, albeit without realising it,  helped save the world for democracy, or at least paid a key role in holding back the Nazi hordes when Britain stood alone – if you don't count India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the West Indies, and other odds and sods from the Commonwealth/Empire.
Or so I thought. More recently I was reading a book about the first penal colonies in Australia. I found that many of the criminal exiles spoke a language unintelligible to non-criminal outsiders. It was called “flash” or “cant”. And lo and behold the word for a juvenile who grabbed stolen property from a thief and darted away through the crowd with the evidence was “kiddy”. I remember my grandpa always talked about “the kiddies” and I'm sure he didn't mean child criminals who should have been behind bars. I refer to small children as “kids” all the time. So, I use 18th Century criminal slang all the time. I wonder what “rap” lingo will be used in 200 years time. I'm sure some of it will.
In a third book, yes I do read a lot, I came across the surprise origin of a word a lot of my school mates used for 'crazy”, usually “fighting crazy”. The word was “raj”. It turns out the word in Romany in origin. I would never have guessed. There was time when a gypsy was as welcome in the average home as a modern-day rapper determined to prove he's still “real”. Or whatever the term is.

I don't know how many memoirs there are from the First World War written by Germans. But I'd be interested to see what they have to say about killing prisoners. I've just finished a book, first published in 1929, in which a variety of British servicemen recounted their experiences during the war. What stuck me was that more than half of accounts mentioning the murder of surrendered or surrendering Germans were from former members of Highland regiments.
One account detailed how during the Battle of Loos in 1915 a platoon of Highlanders found about 20 Germans at their mercy in a captured trench. The Germans, who wounded some of the Highlanders as they stormed the trench, begged for mercy. Then one of the Scots shouted “Remember the Lusitania” and the Germans were slaughtered. The deaths of almost 1,200 civilians when a German submarine torpedoed the ocean liner were widely regarded at the time as a war crime. Another member of a Highland regiment told how that no German was left alive after his unit took a German trench at Ypres in 1917. In another book, a private in the 7th Camerons also recalled the murder of prisoners at Loos. 
Now, it could be that Scottish soldiers were more honest about whether they killed surrendered Germans. Or it could be that they were more likely to kill prisoners than most other British soldiers. The Canadians and Australians were also notorious for killing Germans who could have been easily captured.
About a year ago, while working on a companion volume to Scottish Military Disasters, I was going through some battalion histories from the First World War. Most did not explicitly mention the killing of surrendering Germans but simply noted with satisfaction that there were no survivors from such-and -such a German machinegun post after had been over-run. But the history of the Glasgow Highlanders was not so coy. The history tells the story of an officer of the Worcestershire Regiment who asked a sergeant from the unit how many German prisoners he’d taken during a recent battle. “Prisoners,” replied the sergeant. “None, my ammunitions no done yet.”
Winston Churchill would have understood. During his days as a war correspondent during the Boer War he quoted a British soldier complaining about his officers stopping his unit finishing off some captured enemy troops. “I never saw such cowards in my life,” the disgruntled soldier said of the Boer prisoners. “Shoot at you until ‘til you come up to them and then beg for mercy. I’d teach ‘em.”  In the Second World War this feeling was often translated to the pithy phrase “too late chum”. There's also the question of scared men being unable to flick a switch in their heads which turned them from frenzied killers, careless of their own safety, back into caring compassionate human beings. During the First World War these men were described as “battle drunk”.  
Now, soldiers who don't take prisoners can hardly expect to be taken prisoner. Something like one in four Scots who enlisted for military service in the First World War was killed. I wonder if there's a connection. As well as German retaliation for the murder of prisoners by the Scots, Germans who knew surrender was pointless would fight to the death and take as many Jocks with them as possible. One English soldier reported with “dismay” that the Scots were against taking prisoners because they claimed the Germans didn't take any.
The writer and poet Robert Graves wrote that a “division of Lowland territorials” was notorious for killing German wounded. A private from the London Scottish had a nervous breakdown after being ordered to take no prisoners during the Somme Offensive in 1916.
The Scots didn't have a monopoly when it came to killing prisoners - far from it. However, I'd be interested to see what the Germans had to say about the Scots and prisoners. Oh by the way, it's an accepted fact that the Germans were the first to kill prisoners as a matter of policy, in late August 1914.

I heard a pretty sad thing on the radio a couple of months back. It was on the BBC World Service. There was an item about some middle-class English teenager who was managing a carpet factory in one of the former Soviet-stans. His sole qualification for the job seemed to be that he was a middle-class English teenager on what is now called a “gap year”. This is when a youngster whose family have piles of cash goes travelling for a year before going to University. As far as I can gather nearly all British children who attend private school do this. Often at least part of year is spent doing some humanitarian project run by a Non-Governmental Organisation. The bulk of people working for British NGOs seem to have attended private schools.
Now what to me was sad was that there were probably plenty of unemployed carpet factory workers in the United Kingdom who could have run this factory. But they never got the chance.
When I started work what they call “interns” were rare. These are youngsters who can basically afford to work for free. They hope that if they do a good job they will be taken on as permanent employees. At worst the work experience looks good on their resume/CV. What this means is that in many fields of employment, the media for sure, the only people getting hired are rich kids. That seems a terrible, terrible, waste of the talent pool available. What happens to the talented kids who can't afford to work for free? They don't work.
There was a time when Scotland led the world in medicine and engineering. The list of Scottish inventions is long. This was because there was a time when Scotland was a world leader in offering free education to the masses. Now, it's a myth that this meant that any poor kid with brains could become a doctor or an engineer. Too often, poor kids had to go out and work to help support their families. But some, a lucky few, were plucked from poverty and allowed to fulfil their potential. The kid won, and society won by having the best medical or engineering talent in the country put to work. Now, thanks to intern system the best we can hope for is a mediocre middle-class kid. Yay!

I think it's a bit sad that during the World Cup Scots were wandering around with T-shirts bearing the letters ABE. ABE means Anyone But England. That's just hurtful and there's no doubt that many English people were hurt. During international football tournaments many English people throw their support behind Scotland, Wales or the Irelands if their own team is not playing or has already been knocked out. That is a far more generous attitude than that shown by wandering around in an ABE T-shirt.
Yes, the English can be insensitive when it comes to the feelings of their neighbours. As a kid I remember that the so-called “national” coverage of football matches between Scotland and England was so biased and inflammatory, thanks to the likes of dreadful English pundits such as Jimmy Hill, that it was a disgrace. And in athletics it was funny how when a Scottish runner was winning a race he was British but when he failed to cross the line first he became Scottish again. But two wrongs don't make a right.
Let's just tell the English that it's nothing personal. And that the T-shirts only against the English Football Association. It did after all cancel the world's oldest international football fixture because it claimed the Scots just weren't good enough to be worth playing.

If an American leak says it’s true, then it must be. That seemed to be the attitude of the bulk of the Canadian media last week when it was revealed that a US military bureaucrat had logged the deaths of four Canadian soldiers in 2006 Afghanistan as being the result of so called friendly fire.
Instead of being the starting point for a story about Canadian soldiers being killed in a so-called friendly fire incident, the story was that the Canadian military had lied when it said the men had died in a gun-battle with the Taliban. Basically for two days Canada’s military leaders were asked why they’d misled the public about how the soldiers died. It was only on Day Three that it seemed to occur to reporters that the bureaucrat who filled in the log, one of 75,000 documents released by WikiLeaks, might have got it wrong. Now, common sense would have suggested that the log should have been taken with a pinch of salt from the get-go. Honestly, what are the chances of four friendly fire deaths being kept secret for almost four years? A number of Canadian soldiers were involved in the battle in which the four died and we’re supposed to believe that not one of them spoke up: that no former colleague told the families of the dead how their loved ones really died. At any given time there are a number of Canadian journalists embedded with the military in Afghanistan. Are we supposed to believe that the ones there at the time were incompetent or complicit with the military's lie? The media coverage of the leaked friendly fire report certainly caused the families of the four soldiers – Shane Stachnik, Frank Mellish, William Cushley and Richard Nolan - some distress. Basically, they were being painted as naïve for taking the military’s word about how the men died.  Too many Canadian journalists are, literally, suckers when they hear the words “cover-up” and “leak”. Common sense and good journalistic procedures are cast aside and they don’t care who gets hurt. I think the fact that no soldiers have come out of the woodwork in the past week declaring that they're glad the truth has finally come out about it being a friendly-fire incident says a lot.

It never ceases to amuse me when I read the author biographies in books the kind of jobs they claimed to have had. Most people have one area of work which they pretty much stick to the whole of their lives. But a lot of authors claim to have had several occupations. Are we seriously supposed to believe that these people have led such amazingly full bohemian lives that they've been a fruit picker in New Zealand, a parachute packer in Greece, a Shetland fish factory worker, a hospital porter in Florida and a barman in Ottawa? They may have done the jobs briefly but they weren't really a fruit picker, a parachute packer, hospital porter or a barman. In most cases they dabbled in this work while at high school or university to earn some much needed cash. That's way different from actually being one of these things. That would mean waking up five or six days a week knowing that you were going to spend seven or eight hours covered in slimy fish guts or waiting hand and foot on a bunch of ignorant arrogant drunken slobs. Day after day, week after week, year after year, decade after decade. It's about an attitude of mind, not proficiency with a filleting knife. Doing it for a couple of days or weeks as a Temporary Person Passing Through doesn't mean you really understand what the job is about.

It's not often I'm tempted to throw a book I'm half-way through into the bin. But I came close to chucking William Manchester's biography of Winston Churchill “The Last Lion” last weekend. Manchester was lamenting the crippling slaughter of Britain's brightest and best during the First World War. I couldn't have agreed more about the awful waste of so many of the nation's bravest and best – and let's not forget the of the volunteers of 1914 and 1915 who survived but were scarred physically or mentally 'til their dying day.
But then, next sentence, I realised Manchester was only referring to officers. I could just about stomach his reference to the dead as the “flower of England's youth” but to ignore the flood of working chaps who volunteered to fight the frightful Hun was just too much for me. Obviously, to Manchester two of my great grandfathers were not great loss. We'll never know what their children might have achieved if they'd had a wage-earning father in the household. One of my grandfathers, whose Dad died on the Somme, had a cousin who despite his working class upbringing became a university professor. That cousin would come to my grandfather when he was stumped by a maths problem. My grandfather was sold to the British Army as soon as he was old enough to join the colours. His health was destroyed by the Army and he was unable to capitalise after his medical discharge on his skill at repairing television and radio sets. 
When I was teenager, I helped research a book celebrating 200 years of the Glasgow Herald and the job involved going through two centuries worth of the paper. What struck me was how the First World War marked a watershed. The Herald was the mouthpiece of Glasgow's merchants and socially ambitious shopkeepers. Before the war the poor of the city were regarded as people who needed a helping hand to mitigate the poverty of slum life. After the war, the poor were The Enemy; in league with the Bolsheviks of Soviet Russia.  No repression was too severe for them. The United Kingdom was no longer united. Class war had been declared. The losing side included the widows and children of the volunteer soldiers killed in such battlefields as the Somme and Gallipoli. In a kinder, saner, world, the fact the volunteers died following the officer sons of the merchants and shopkeepers would actually have helped knit society together.
I agree with Manchester that Britain never recovered from the First World War. I don't agree that only the officers were any great loss.

Sorry it's taken so long to get blogging again. I've been away.
I was in Britain around the time of the General Election. I couldn't believe that none of the BBC television commentators could be bothered to find out how to pronounce the name of the first constituency to declare a winner - Houghton. The correct pronunciation is Haw-ton. The commentators to a man, and they were all men, pronounced it How-ton. This was despite the elections returning officer saying the name correctly when he announced the winner. Houghton is a long way from London but that doesn't excuse such a lapse in professionalism. What these London luvvies appeared to be saying was that Houghton is so unimportant that they couldn't be bothered to say it properly. To me, a former print journalist, that would have been like saying " I don't care how you spell your name, I'm going to spell it anyway I like.” It's not as if the BBC commentators were caught be surprise when Houghton was the first to declare a winner and didn’t have time to find out the correct pronunciation. The elections workers there had vowed weeks before that they would be the first to declare. This might seem like a pretty minor point but it seems to be is a symptom of a drastic decline in journalistic standards. When I was training young journalists, I couldn't stress strongly enough the importance of spelling names correctly. "If you can't get the names right, readers are going to wonder what else you've got wrong," was my standard admonition. "Spell a name wrong and your story has lost all credibility and you've wasted everyone's time writing it."
Of course, the issue of mispronounced names pales into insignificance with the increasing tendency here in Canada for trial by media. Only yesterday morning I heard that some accused of a major crime had only been released from prison a day or two before the allegedly doing the deed in question. I always thought that for someone to have a fair trial it was important that the jury didn't know that the accused was a career criminal. I'm sure the half-witted reporter who revealed this gem of information thought they were pretty smart. In Scotland, once someone was charged, journalists had to wait until after the trial was completed to show off the little gems of information they'd dug up. When I worked in England, I was surprised at how much the papers could get away with saying about the accused prior to trial and someone not end up in jail for contempt of court. The lack of protection for an accused's right to be tried only on evidence given in court - which wouldn't include even a hint of a previous criminal record - in Canada turned out to be even worse. No matter how many times the judge reminds jury members that they can only consider the evidence heard in court, they can't help remembering earlier media coverage of the case. I sometimes think that the sum of Canadian reporters' knowledge of court reporting is drawn from what they see on US television. Now, in the US the media abuse freedom of speech to conduct what can only be termed "trial by media". Now, I've sat on the press bench in too many courts of law to confuse what happens in them with Justice but I can't help feeling that an accused gets a fairer trial in them than he or she would on the 6 p.m. television news.

I hadn’t realised what a revolutionary development the typewriter was until a couple of days ago. It must have changed the 19th Century communications world in much the same way as the internet has changed ours.
I recently spent a day at the National Library of Scotland going through handwritten letters from fur traders in Canada to their boss back in London. To put it mildly, some of the handwriting was pretty difficult to read and that wasn’t just because the ink was fading. A lot of time must have been wasted back in London trying to decipher some of the handwriting. And I’m guessing that the fur traders were proud men who wouldn’t allow someone with a better hand to write their letters for them.
I’ve got an old typewriter, circa 1924, which I bought for next to nothing when it was declared surplus to requirements at the Inverness Courier in the mid-1980s. A new typewriter had been purchased and its new owner passed their old one to the next person in the typing pecking order, who in turn passed their old machine down the chain until eventually the typewriter in the basement, used to type address labels for the newspapers sent out by post, was declared surplus.
If I was a conman I would claim that the typewriter I have was the very one the original Loch Ness monster story was typed on in 1933. But I happen to know that the report was sent in by the paper’s Loch Ness-side correspondent and would not have been typed up at the office prior to going to the typesetters. By the way, the correspondent called it The Beast. It was the paper’s editor Evan Barron who changed it to “Monster”. The rest is history, or if you prefer, mystery. But, sadly, it doesn’t involve my old typewriter.
 

I may be a little late with this one. I've just learned that the last remaining adult villager who witnessed the Scots Guards' 1948 massacre at Batang Kali in Malaya has died. Tham Yong's fiancé was among the 24 ethnic Chinese rubber plantation workers executed by a patrol from the Scots Guards who believed the men to be supporters of a local Communist guerrilla band, if not active members of it.
Last year the British Government refused to hold a proper inquiry into the massacre. I guess without the old lady, there's little hope that there will ever be a meaningful inquiry now. Several members of the patrol are still alive and their admissions that, contrary to official statements in 1948, the workers had not been shot "while trying to escape" led to an investigation by British civilian police detectives in the early 1970s. The inquiry was shut down when the ruling party in the UK changed. A lot of people would say these old soldiers should be left in peace. I certainly don't want to see any of them in a police cell. What I hate is a successful cover-up. Tham Yong was on record as saying the women and children were removed from the plantation compound in army trucks before the shooting started. That suggests more than a "rogue patrol" was involved. Batang Kali has been compared to My Lai in Vietnam. Is the comparison fair? I don't know, because the full facts about Batang Kali have never come out. I do know that Batang Kali remains a blot of Britain's reputation in much of the Third World. To ignore a cover-up is to be complicit in it.

A couple of years ago I saw an American “fly-on-the-wall” documentary series about life on a US aircraft carrier. This was after a US plane attacked a Canadian live-fire training exercise in Afghanistan and killed four of the men taking part. If the incident had happened a week earlier, there would have been five dead and I would have been the fifth man. I was horrified to learn that the pilot involved Maj. “Psycho” Schmidt had placed his 500 lb bomb exactly where I would have been standing if I’d been doing a newspaper story on the exercise – next to the anti-tank rocket launcher and the machine-gunners. I’d stood in that very spot while covering a daylight live-fire exercise and would have taken the same vantage point if I’d attended the night-time version. Luckily for me, the exercise was conducted a few days after I flew back to Canada.
But back to the documentary. The planes from the aircraft carrier were flying in support of US troops fighting in Iraq. The pilots’ frustration at never being called in to bomb or strafe anyone during their entire deployment was obvious. They wanted to do what millions of dollars had been spent training them to do. I wonder if “Psycho” suffered from the same frustration. I suspect he did. He and his supposed patrol commander were flying a similar mission to the pilots from the aircraft carrier – only over Afghanistan. I say “supposed commander” because the other pilot proved to have little control over “Psycho”. The pair spotted gunfire on the ground near the Kandahar airfield and the flash of what might have been an anti-aircraft missile being launched. The area near the base was often used for live-fire training exercises. The flash Psycho and his supposed commander saw was from the anti-tank rocket launcher being fired during the exercise. The men on ground didn’t even know Psycho and his buddy were high above them in the Afghan night sky until the bomb that ruined so many lives came whistling down. The two Air National Guard pilots were well above the range of machine gun fire or a shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missile. But for some reason they flew down towards what they thought was hostile fire. They radioed US control for information on who might be shooting – there was always a concern that the Bad Guys would infiltrate a night-fire exercise. Control had no immediate information about any exercise that night at the Tarnac Farm training area and advised the pilots to wait while a further check was done. But Psycho couldn’t wait. He killed four Canadian soldiers and maimed a couple more. Sadly, he was a very good pilot and an excellent aim. After the bomb was unleashed, one of the two pilots, I can’t remember which, said something along the lines of “I hope that was the right thing to do”.
Nope.
Psycho was no ordinary National Guard reservist. He was former regular and an instructor at the US Navy’s Top Gun training school. Both he and his buddy got what many regard as slaps on the wrist. Questions were raised about why US air control didn’t immediately identify the ground fire as coming from a Canadian exercise and the drugs issued to pilots to keep them alert during long standby patrols over Iraq and Afghanistan. Embarrassing questions which some people perhaps didn’t want answered or raised at a court-martial. Some plea bargaining was done. Psycho, probably on the advice of his lawyers, wouldn’t speak to the Canadian media. But his mother would. When, as a reporter on the Edmonton Sun, I asked her if her son had the slightest sliver, scintilla, of doubt about whether he should have dropped that bomb, she hung up on me. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. But apples seldom blow people to Kingdom Come.

 I’ve been mulling over the thought that maybe it takes a brave man to admit he’s scared. I think anyone in their right mind gets afraid once in a while. Someone remarked long ago that “So-and-so doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘fear’, poor chap can’t even spell it.” That may be a way of saying that there’s something wrong with someone who has never known fear.
So, if everyone gets scared, I guess it’s what they do about it that makes the difference. I think maybe it’s a cliche that men don’t fight for Queen and Country, or even for their regiment, but for the men in their section. That may be true sometimes, just as acts of courage are often done in the heat of the moment, sometimes in anger and rage, with little thought for the consequences. If you don’t think you’re going to die, are you really brave? But I think in many more cases it’s fear of being thought a coward by the rest of the section that makes someone stick things out and not take to their heels. No-one wants to be the first to break in a group in which a lot of time and effort has been invested in trying to earn the respect of the others. Often continuing to risk death seems a better option than running, or, as I’ve seen a couple times, rolling up into a ball and whimpering.
There’s a guy I know that I’ve got a lot of time for. He was in the Special Forces and saw a lot of action. Then he lost his bottle. He couldn’t go on and he transferred to the Military Police. Not the safest job in the Army but safer than what he’d been doing. Only the blow-hards, the guys who talk tough but never seem to be there when the excrement hits the rotating blade, failed to respect his decision. There were times in which I wish I had his courage, the courage to say “Enough, no more”.

When I was a kid in Scotland we had a playground game at school called “Best Man Falls”. We basically practised dying for The Queen: for all I know, some of my little classmates grew up to do just that. The game consisted of choosing how you wanted to die- machine-gun, hand-grenade, throwing-knife, bazooka, etc - and then running at an opponent who dealt out the requested death. The person who best simulated being blown up or torn to pieces was the winner.

The Scots are immensely proud of their military history. The Scottish Soldier is a national icon. Soldiering is something we Scots believe we do better than most. But many, myself included until I decided to write this book, base this belief on a less than complete survey of history. If you take the Queen’s Shilling, you do the Queen’s business; as determined by the politicos.  Sometimes that business is distasteful, sometimes it’s more dangerous than it has to be, and sometimes your life is placed in the hands of people who, if brains were gunpowder, wouldn’t have enough to blow their own nose.

I came across something out there on the Internet which seemed to suggest that some people feel that Scottish Military Disasters is an anti-war book. Those who know me, know that I’m no pacifist. What the book is, or at least is supposed to be, is a wry but honest look at the Scottish military experience over the centuries. The book is first-and-foremost intended to be informative and a good read. But no book worth reading is completely lacking in some sort of message. I’d be pleased if it made people think hard about what they are asking when they send our young men and women out on the Queen’s business. Those who “died” in our Lanarkshire playground games of Best Man Falls got up again. The same can’t be said of the battlegrounds of Afghanistan or Iraq.

A couple of years back, when I was in Afghanistan to cover the first Presidential elections, I kept my eyes open for one of the famous Khyber Rifles. Legend has it that in the late 1800s the British Army scrapped its Martini Henry rifles, the ones the Brits use in the movie Zulu. . The rifles’ barrels were cut off before they were sold to a scrap metal dealer in India. The dealer sold the rifles to the Afghans and after bazaar craftsmen put new barrels on, the rifles they were good as new and were turned on their former owners. The story is that you can still buy these Martini Henrys in Kabul. I know a guy who thinks he's got one and I saw one for sale on Chicken Street there. But I think the rifles are made by the great-great-great-great grandsons of the craftsmen who rebuilt the original army surplus consignment. A close look at them reveals many of them are dated 1919 but have Queen Victoria’s royal cipher on them. The letters making up the makers’ name “Enfield” are often the wrong way around or upside down.

Actually, my visit to Chicken Street in the company of another journalist was quite funny because at the time of the first Presidential election nearly all the Europeans working for aid agencies in Kabul were out of the country or laying low. As we came around the corner, there was a well respected British television journalist, John Simpson, doing a stand-up to camera saying that Chicken Street was deserted. He didn't look happy when he realized we were standing behind him.

If you’re reading this, I’d like to thank you. Thanks for taking the time to look around the site and thanks for your interest.

I’d be interested in knowing what you think of the site and I’d welcome any suggestions you have for improving it. I’d also be interested in hearing from you if you’ve read the military disasters book and finding out what you thought of it.

For brief period the site included a live-chat feature which was supposed to allow a real-time dialogue between visitors. But it was abused by people trying to advertise what I took to be porn sites. I didn’t follow any of the links to find out where they led because I’m suspicious of porn sites. I keep thinking religious extremists will set up a porn site that destroys the computers of anyone who visits it.

A couple of months back I suggested turning this blog into a discussion forum. I’d hoped we could start a “what if” feature. The first “what if” was “what if the Jacobites hadn’t turned back at Derby in 1745”. That one attracted a single reply, which I posted in the hope of stimulating further discussion. It didn’t happen. Maybe visitors felt they were being asked to sing for their supper. I just thought it might be worth trying to provide a discussion forum for people who share an interest in history.

So, if anyone is interested in getting a forum going, please use the “Contact” section of this site to send in a “what if” and perhaps even set the ball rolling with their own view on the topic suggested. I’ll post the material and with luck that will avoid the abuse that led to the ‘live-chat” section having to be closed down.

I’ve never been sure about blogs anyway. I’d be really surprised if anyone was interested in the minutia of my daily slog to make enough money to pay the rent and put food on the table. I find myself toning down the content of my blog entries because I have to make a living and I can’t afford to piss more people off than I already have done. I’m fairly sure the US military blacklisted me because of the fuss I made about their aircrews killing British and Canadian troops in circumstances very far from being shrouded in the fog of war. The battlefield is a dangerous place and accidents will happen – but there are accidents and there are trigger-happy jet-jockeys who don’t care who they kill, as long as they get to kill someone. Mindful of an incident from the First Gulf War, I joked with some Canadian soldiers in Kanadahar about taking cover if they heard a jet overhead, as it could only belong to the US air force. A week later a US jet did fly over and four Canadian soldiers were blown to pieces by the bomb the pilot dropped. I might write more about that – and the pilot’s mother – in my next blog posting.

Once again, your feedback and suggestions would be really really welcome.

I wonder if anyone else feels that Britain’s Special Air Service may have been a victim of its own success. In the old days, it was made up of enthusiasts, both the officers and men. Officers who did a tour of duty with the unit were often jeopardizing their career prospects by taking a two year break from service with their parent regiments. But these days it seems like service with the SAS is almost compulsory if an officer wants to reach the front rank of Britain’s generals. Maybe too many careerists with little understanding of the work are there to get the T-shirt before moving on to bigger and better things.

Perhaps, in the old days, the men were more likely to stand up to the officers, within the confines of good military discipline. And perhaps the older breed of officer was more inclined to listen to good advice from men with far more experience under their belts than they had. I’m told that the regiment is becoming known as the bitchiest in the British Army. The financial rewards associated with toe-ing the line and receiving promotion are far greater than they have ever been. A job application from Troop Sergeant Major for a lucrative contract with the XYG private security corporation is more likely to be successful than one from a humble trooper. Hardly an atmosphere conducive to forging a band of brothers. And for those who opt to remain in Her Majesty’s service, promotion from the ranks with an officer’s pension on retirement is not to be sneezed at. Crossing the Ruperts and Rodericks of the present-day officer corps carries a potentially heavy financial penalty.

Or maybe I’m just a poorly informed old romantic. As we used to say, "There's no fool like an old fool".