Engines of War

I could hear them first, a sound like a train in the distance, suddenly becoming impossibly loud. And then there was the old knowledge that these were our engines of war, sent by far off ministries to practice here in these wet valleys of west Wales. It bought back memories of years of aerial surveillance, of being the focus of harriers skimming the top of the trees above my bender when living in some woodland in the borders. Now I was back, having been doing a reading nearby and the planes were a reminder of my former life, the world we're in today and also something older.

It was hard not to consider that the planes were maybe sent originally from England, scouring the air among these British mountains and that once some parallel of the very real if distant war we’re now engaged in was played out in these hills, or hills not far away, long centuries ago; Marcher Lords raiding across the border to keep a relatively poorly armed adversary in check. For two hundred years after the Norman invasion there was bloodshed in this land; the Welsh could not drive out the English who in turn could not exert enough control to completely subdue their apparent enemy.

Today the ones we fight may seem as far removed from us as the Welsh once did to medieval English minds, may seem to many in our number as deserving of the harshest treatment we can serve on them; our troops are now the buffer that will keep them from our towers and our towns. But years roll on and casualties pile up and now we call in planes just like the ones that tore above my head the other week, a riling fly by or benign dry run that in another place, for some innocent bystander would mean death.

Is this how we win hearts and minds? Is there any memory now of the notions that we entered this war with? Those trumpeted and fantastic ideals that promised everything even as the US troops, following the lead of their former Chief Commander, ploughed straight ahead with alienating ordinary Afghans, house arrests and bolshy convoys casting off the goodwill that there was, while money was diverted into salaries of NGO’s amid a desperately poor population, or else to tribal chiefs of shifting loyalties, or white elephant projects of infrastructure on another level entirely to priorities of those scratching the barest of livings from what little soil there is.

So now there’s a new plan, the emphasis will shift to some extent and yet it’s hard to say just how the war will ever be resolved. As we all know all too well, the history of intervention in the country points to the potential of something other than short lived, if not perhaps on the same scale as the centuries of intermittent strife we had in Wales. And all the while our forces stumble on, bolstered with bloody mindedness if nothing else, some great game or prolonged tragedy that we believe we cannot turn from.

Whether or not you think this is a conflict we must continue to engage in, what cannot be denied is the responsibility to hold our representatives to the honouring of blameless human life. The fight there has been a brutal, sometimes thankless task and making our presence in any way beneficial has been neither easy nor in any way uncomplicated by conditions on the ground. But if this war is to achieve anything at all, even by the narrow standard of keeping streets safe in London and New York, then we have to give an equal respect to life in Central Asian villages. To do anything less is not only morally bankrupt but counterproductive to the point where we have to ask just what it is we're doing there. We have to find a way ahead that does more good than harm. Abiding by the Geneva conventions would be some kind of start.

On my final day of living in the borders a decade or so back, the jump-jets weren't in evidence for once. Lazy drones of microlites and the gentle sounds of other light aircraft filled the sky, the sun shone through and days of heavy winds had finally died down. There seemed some sense of peace at last and even the distant sound of chainsaws in the woods didn't do much to disturb me. But this was all before the towers fell. So may we somehow see those days of peace again, hold onto the feeling of it, somehow spread it out. But I won't forget the visceral sensation of coming so close to the scream of those engines in the air above me, only just clearing the trees, just as I can only imagine what it must be like when that sound could spell out hideous injury or something far more sickeningly final.