Day 8 Week 2

Grateful another day has passed uneventfully - thank you St Therese.

4 o'clock in the morning and sleep is elusive. Seemingly more people die between 2 and 4 than at any other time, it must be a natural watershed for mankind. Unsure of the spelling of 'elusive' I have just looked it up in the dictionary and it says 'difficult to catch or remember', how appropriate.

Why am I suddenly always angry? I always used to find the fun in things and now I only find the irritation. I lay in bed looking at the little glowing stars on the ceiling which were put there by C and R years ago - they used my bed as a trampoline to stick them up and during bouts of sleeplessness they used to provide comfort, but not any more.

Is he fighting? Has he moved to the front? What is the front?

Prior to deployment the families were invited to a briefing by the Army to explain the finer details, but I couldn't face it. Attending would have proved difficult and so that provided the ideal excuse not to attend. I didn't want to know. But now in the torture of a dark, cold, unwelcoming night, I want to know everything. Or do I?

Apparently it's true that the equipment is crap. (None of this comes from H and C but from other sources.) Soldiers in the British Army really do supplement their kit out of their own pocket. It's as if we train doctors and then say 'you're really well qualified now, but would you mind forking out for a couple of intensive care beds before you start practicing', or 'engineer, we'd love you to build the new spur on the M25, but our concrete's not up to scratch so over to you'. There's a whole burgeoning industry in purchasing warfare produce because our stuff is so inefficient.

Several years ago the MoD decided that it was no longer necessary to store supplies in readiness for active service, so they sold everthing off - mostly to developing countries - and closed the stores down. That was just before the second Gulf War, and consequently when hostilities ignited we had nothing. So we went back to our customers and said can we have it back please?Unsurprisingly they said 'yes, but at a premium'. So, in a wonderful example of financial mismanagement we eventually had equipment for people we sent off to do their best (and let's not forget, be prepared to die), repurchased at vastly inflated prices from far away people we thought we could initially rip-off. Who can forget the sight of the first batch of British soldiers standing out like sycamores in their dark green combats against the golden desert sand.

Anger. I just feel anger at the stupidity of it all.

The story goes that during the Bosnian conflict, our state of the art satellite radio system failed. So mobile phones were teamed up with Welsh speakers in a reinactment of incomers using native Americans to transmit signals which would be incomprehensible to outside ears.

I did 'the shop'. I went to Tescos and happily spent a fortune in the pharmacey on every remedy under the sun, covering everything from athlete's foot to constipation, and the look of gratefulness on C's face when I gave it to him was humbling. But why should I not only have to be prepared to give my son to the science of kill or be killed, and still have to provide resources that everyone knows are not available to him. Is my memory failing or was James Bond once saved from the epitomy of evil by a loving Taliban? We live in an age of Orwellian historical air-brushing.

I don't want to be angry like this all the time.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Back in my youth I was a pacifistic rebel. Listening to Bob Dylan and reading political diatribes by anyone who dare to stand-up against authority, I really did believe it was possible to change the world. Injustice was to be challenged at every juncture. The answer was apparently blowing in the wind so where has it all gone?

Does the anger come from impotence?

It's not just death I fear, it's dreadful injury. Brain damage. Loss of limbs. Loss of dignity. Loss of my beautiful boy.

They're not evil killers. If you met them you'd think they were students or kids on a gap year. They're polite and fresh faced and full of hope and goodness. The image of Rambo could not be further removed from the reality of the crop of young people in the British Army that the politicians send off to do their bidding. Churchill said 'war war starts when jaw jaw stops', and how true is that. Old men should be sent off to fight - not the young with their lack of fear and awarenes of how precious life really is - then with the self preservation that nearness to death brings, the fighting would soon stop.

Sorry for the rant.

Speak soon. A soldier's Mum x