Unbowed
Daily Mail
www.dailymail.co.uk
24th September 2009
It was a day that he set aside his personal agony for the sake of friendship and honour.

Plastered in bandages and in excruciating pain, Fusilier Thomas James left his hospital bed for the funeral of the comrade who was fatally wounded alongside him. In a humbling symbol of the suffering of our troops in Afghanistan - one which the Ministry of Defence might have preferred to keep out of public view - he paid his respects to Fusilier Shaun Bush. Fusilier James lost his right arm in the same Taliban bomb blast that killed his friend five weeks ago.

He carries many other wounds that are yet to heal. But he asked for no sympathy as he was helped into his uniform and placed in an ambulance for a 20-mile drive to pay tribute to his dead friend. Within the hour, he had arrived on time at Coventry Cathedral, where he was pushed into the church to pay his respects to his friend.

Hundreds of mourners looked on as Fusilier James made his way into the cathedral, a heroic symbol of the suffering that many more of our soldiers face in private.

Fusilier James is one of hundreds of hidden victims of the Afghanistan conflict which is rapidly approaching its eighth anniversary. In July there were 101 casualties who required hospital treatment and although the figures fell back in August to 76, the Army has endured its bloodiest summer since the war started in late 2001.

The Ministry of Defence has faced criticism for its reluctance to detail the precise nature of the injuries suffered by its combatants, citing medical confidentiality and privacy. Since the New Year alone, 664 men and women have returned to a hospital bed. Even then, there have been complaints about their standard of care.

Yesterday, wheeled around by an unnamed colleague, Fusilier James used his own mutilated left hand, with half the little finger gone, to hold on his lap a portable 'negative pressure wound therapy' device, which encourages healing. The machine creates a vacuum around a wound, sucking the edges together and keeping the flesh moist to encourage quicker healing, while draining off excess fluid. His injured right eye was covered by a patch, there was a large wound on his left arm, cuts and scratches continued to scar his face, and a dressing was placed on the stump of his right arm, above the elbow.

But that tally of injuries was put to one side for the sake of the late Fusilier Bush, 24, who was the 207th British victim of the war in Afghanistan. The two soldiers, serving with the 2nd Battalion The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, were on foot patrol in Sangin in the badlands of Helmand province on August 15 when a bomb went off, fatally wounding his platoon commander Sergeant Simon Valentine.

Fusilier Bush rushed to help and a carefully planned explosion left him fatally injured. After treatment on the spot, he and Fusilier James were flown back to the Royal College for Defence Medicine in Selly Oak, Birmingham. Ultimately, nothing could be done for Fusilier Bush, and he died ten days after the blasts. Fusilier James is still receiving treatment there.

The Bishop of Coventry, the Rt Rev Dr Christopher Cocksworth, described Fusilier Bush as a dedicated soldier who met his death thanks to an act of great bravery, but also 'full of humour, love and goodness', and as a much-loved son, brother and nephew. I stand before you as a British subject, thankful for his readiness to risk his life for a safer, better world.'

Among those who attended the funeral were Fusilier Bush's girlfriend, Amy Taggart, his father Carl, his brother Lewis, and sister Hannah.

Speaking before the funeral, Brigadier Trevor Minter, the colonel of Fusilier Bush's regiment, said: 'He was such a brave young man. When the Improvised Explosive Device hit his patrol and his sergeant was wounded, they knew there would be more threats. Yet Shaun Bush went forward to try and help and sadly was mortally wounded in the attempt. Shaun was the bravest of the brave.'

Why this picture fills me with awe, pride... and fury
Just the sight of this Daily Mail lying on my doormat was enough to start the tears. There was the picture of Fusilier Tom James so terribly injured, his right arm lost in a savage Taliban bomb blast. He had struggled from his hospital bed, donning uniform to attend the funeral of the comrade who was fatally wounded beside him. No pain, nor fear, would stop him honouring his mate.

The night before (Wednesday 23rd September 2009), like many, I had watched the almost-unbearably moving BBC documentary, Wounded, which told the stories of 19-year-old Andy Allen and 24-year-old Tom Neathway, also horrifically injured in Afghanistan.

No one who witnessed the agony of these once superbly-fit young men learning how to walk on 'stubbies' (short artificial limbs) could ever forget the sight.

When Andy was first allowed the longed-for visit home to Belfast, we saw one or two people in his enthusiastic welcoming committee look away in sudden, emotional horror at the first glimpse of the young man who had lost both legs and had feared he would never regain his sight.

It struck me as a powerful metaphor that he should so long to see, whereas so many of us have turned away from the unbearable reality of war.

That is why The Daily Mail front page was so important, and why Wounded was compulsory viewing.

It may well be that the Ministry of Defence might prefer the British public not to be made so acutely aware of the horrors of the war in Afghanistan. We've all read the statistics - the numbers of those who have given their lives in the brutal conflict in a pitiless faraway land. Yet none of us really knows the numbers of wounded, or the extent of their injuries. It's been kept hidden.

Yesterday's film and front page helped expose the truth in all its graphic and painful detail. I believe that such moments of visualisation are essential. They bring us face-to-face with the bloody reality of a war fought in our name.

And we should see. We need these pictures. We cannot turn aside from suffering, because to witness such heroism will, in the end, make us better people, too. This is not the place to discuss the rights and wrongs of the conflict - although, like many people, I am haunted and enraged by the evidence of what is taking place in that benighted land.

It is not in any way to diminish the sacrifice of these wounded young men - and of so many who have lost their lives - to question the cause.

(And here, I should declare a personal interest, since my daughter is shortly to marry a soldier who did two tours of duty in Iraq, and may well be sent to Afghanistan.)

What I can do is question the predictable sentiments uttered at the funeral of Fusilier Shaun Bush by the Bishop of Coventry this week. I don't blame the Rt Rev Dr Christopher Cocksworth. You have to make big statements at a soldier's funeral, even if the sight of his friend in a wheelchair, minus his arm and with other dreadful injuries, might make you think twice about your words. After praising the 207th victim of the war, the Bishop said: 'I stand before you as a British subject, thankful for his readiness to risk his life for a safer, better world.'

Well, I beg to differ. The heroic young man who died did not give his life to create some mythical 'safer, better world' (How? I wonder), but made the greatest sacrifice for his comrades. And what makes me proud to be British has nothing to do with the questionable aims of rulers and governments, who have, let us remember, taken young men into war for centuries.

No, what must make us all hold up our heads is the personal courage of the dead, and the even greater fortitude of the walking wounded who defy the worst enemy of all - despair - and have the will and spirit to create a new life within a maimed body. These are the unbearably young men such as we saw on TV and on the front page yesterday who shrug and say: 'You've got to get on with it.' They take your breath away. Tom James, Andy Allen and Tom Neathway (and so many others) should make us all humble - and I am not sure that we, as a nation, even come close to deserving them.

Weigh it up in your minds. Think of Tom Neathway, determined to walk on 'long legs' (his new artificial limbs) at his medal parade - and achieving it, while his proud father wipes tears away. Remember Andy Allen cradling the newborn son he could, after all, see. Think of the sheer youth of the men and women who sign up for that most old-fashioned of concepts: duty. Think of the dignity and responsibility of officers who lead from the front, and weep when their men die.

Think of the unrecorded acts of heroism which happen every single day in Helmand province. To quote the great war poet Wilfred Owen, who died in World War I: 'These men are worth your tears.'

Compare those truths with the panoply of foolishness which constitutes so much of modern life: the parade of two-bit celebs, and shameless public figures who cling to money and power, and rich City jerks who spend as much on a bottle of vintage wine at lunch as some people can earn in a month, and drunken, porn-obsessed young men and frivolous young women with no thoughts in their heads except the pleasures of today.

To die for that? I don't think so. Yet the very moment when a young man (or woman) rushes forward into hell to try to save a comrade or to recover a dead friend's body - those vital seconds when all thoughts of self are pushed aside and love (yes) takes over - that is when evil is defeated.

That is when the cruelty of the insurgents who made the Improvised Explosive Devices, packing them with dung and dirt to make them more lethal, is countered. 

That is when we recognise that the profound courage and selflessness of ordinary men is this world's most powerful weapon in the eternal struggle with the forces of darkness.

And that is when we are reminded, with an awful clarity, that we still have magnificent young people in this country for whom the words 'duty' and 'honour' still mean something.

Of course, heroism is not confined to the battlefield. In the television documentary we saw Andy's mum, Linda Allen, struggling to come to terms with what had happened to her precious son, and reflecting that had she been able to foresee his suffering, she might never had had children. Yet she was there at his side, supporting him even in his moments of depression, and any mother could identify with her stoicism. What about the big smile on the face of Andy's young partner as she carried their son in to see him?

And the joy of the dedicated medics when the patient finally achieved another small personal goal? The way they turned what's agonising into a challenge and a game.

Oh yes, it is the nobility of ordinary people who become extraordinary which makes me so proud of the country
They, the soldiers and their loved ones represent what is finest about humanity. We, sitting at home with our opinions about war and its justifications, have only to look at the picture of Tom James to fall silent. Let us see the wounded limbs of our boys. Let us wish them every comfort in our hearts, and support all the charities which seek to provide for them.

This is the only way we can begin to understand what is being endured in the hell-hole of Afghanistan - and honour all the more those who face it, and its consequences, with such astonishing courage.