We love the troops, but not their war
ROBBIE Williams, Alexandra Burke and the Saturdays are performing at a 60,000-seat concert in Twickenham next month, in aid of Help For Heroes.
Look at the other celebrities associated with the charity – Simon Cowell, Jeremy Clarkson, David Beckham. Admittedly there's no-one particularly cool there, but they are household names, suggesting that the cause of helping wounded soldiers and their families is now at the heart of the mainstream, and therefore devoid of political ambiguity.
The figures back this up. In February it was reported that Help for Heroes had raised 40m. The charity said it had received, on average, 47,000 a day since it started in October 2007.
Britain in 2010 is a far cry from the US of the late 1960s, when soldiers returning from Vietnam would be branded 'baby killers' by right-thinking members of the counter-culture.
Yet here, the campaign in Afghanistan, while not a battleground of a wider culture war like Vietnam was in the US, is hardly popular.
According to a Newsnight poll in February, 64 per cent of people think the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable.
The official line – that we're in Helmand to make the British streets safer from terrorism – is not generally swallowed. And yet we love the troops more than we have for decades. It seems we have learned to separate the soldiers from the wars they fight. And unlike the Americans, our celebrity supporters of the troops leave the politics out of it.
Here's Paris Hilton, announcing a campaign for free MP3 players for US troops: "It's easy to take for granted our freedom and happiness and forget about those who are endangering their lives every day to make it possible."
Compare it with the blurb on the Help for Heroes website, which cites individual tales of wounded soldiers, and concludes: "They are just blokes, but they are our blokes; they are our heroes."
There's none of that American stuff about fighting for freedom, just the reality-TV-style human interest in ordinary lives.
But the separation between soldiers and the wars they fight is to an extent illusory. Joining the army is not a politically neutral act. I suspect that most soldiers want to see action.
While it might be politically correct now to support the troops while opposing the war, it remains taboo to delve too deeply into the reasons that people join the army. And here we must turn to the arts.
The Oscar-winning war movie, The Hurt Locker makes the point that war, though hell, is also addictive.
We follow the leader of a bomb disposal team through various skirmishes in Iraq, then see him back home, depressed by civilian life, crippled with indecision at the choice of cereal in his local store, glumly unblocking the drains, when he'd rather be risking death defusing an IED in Baghdad.
Maybe we support our troops partly because we understand this trait in ourselves, that it's possible to feel most alive when facing death, that the white heat of mortal combat could be the high point in a man's life, while in another part of our minds we're grateful to those who signed up so the rest of us don't have to.
Far safer to shop for the cereal, unblock the drain, then at the end of the day slip a war movie into the DVD player – and make a donation to charity.
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Sunday 12 February 2012
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