Conflict “has the potential to wrestle morality” from soldiers, a senior officer has said, as the army expands mental health resilience training to prevent ‘moral injury’. Brigadier Paul Tedman, Deputy Commander of the MoD’s Joint Helicopter Command, said the army was working hard to bring moral training “to a really fine edge”. “The challenges of…
How the Brexit document BREAKING NEWS could have looked…
The RAF has flown the Brexit deal document from Brussels to London for Boris Johnson’s signature. I have it on reasonably average authority that the choice of an aircraft from 32 Sqn (The Royal Flight) was only one of a number of options considered… We join an urgent Zoom call between Sara Oizys (SO, a…
Why a padre’s frozen vigil in Bosnia remains my image of remembrance
Every act of remembrance is different. For service personnel and veterans remembrance is not so much an event as a way of life. Memories of friends lost in the service of their country are not dusted off annually, to be boxed up again afterwards. They are constant. Parallels are everywhere. The story of the Unknown…
Ten years after Afghanistan: do soldiers struggle with what they leave behind or what they come back to?
Ten years ago this month I deployed to Afghanistan on my last operational tour as a British army officer. Nothing on that tour was any more dangerous or troubling than anything else I experienced in my career, but even after a decade it still sticks out as one of the most intense periods of my…
Battle of Britain 80th commemoration: Flying among clouds with the ghosts of The Few
I dip the wing tip into a cloud and gently ease back the control column. The Spitfire pirouettes through the sky in a balletic arc. The weather outside my snug canopy is as glorious as it was for much of that summer in 1940 when earlier versions of this aircraft, accompanied by the growling Hurricanes,…
Lessons from the Hanoi Hilton: ‘Lockdown breakers’ risk social backlash, says author of study into American POWs in Vietnam
Neighbours who failed to stick to Covid-19 isolation rules could be shunned when lockdown is over, the author of a research paper about Prisoners of War has suggested. Lessons from a new study of American captives from the Vietnam conflict suggest there could be a backlash against members of society judged to have endangered the…
addingtonWord 