Letter sent from my tank in Gulf War 1 to local newspaper in Hampstead, London, nearly 30 years ago!
On Monday the Ham & High received this letter, written in the Gulf on February 27, from tank troop commander Lieutenant Richard Bramford [later Richard Lyntton], who was born in Highgate and lives in Camden Town.
“TO OUR relief, the attack finally went in on Sunday evening. The powerful artillery pieces went into action and one magically forgot about the human destruction produced by these “grid square” removers. So what happens then?
Life as a BCR – Battle Casualty Reserve – pulls your mind in two distinct directions. I spend half the time thinking about the “crunch”. Having spent two years training, do I have the expertise, nerve and guts to command x3 Challenger tanks in the heat of battle? Do I actually want to? What must it be like to sit inside an inferior Iraqi tank and have the turret blown off? (Now that we are clearly winning, I cannot help feeling sorry for the enemy.)
On the other hand, how do you convince soldiers under your command that we have done our bit just by sitting in the desert for six weeks without firing a single shot? How do you convince them that sheer boredom is actually more likely to keep them alive? The answer is: you don’t.
Right up to the start of the offensive and subsequently, we have all had hours and hours to decide what we think.
Either you don’t want to do it but you will if you have to because that’s what we’re paid for, or you just can’t go home without “killing” an enemy tank because there won’t be any “war” stories to tell and the whole trip will have been a waste of time.
Our Challengers [British tank] were supposed to have been transported on transporters into Iraq, but there was a traffic jam at the breach! The first load of reserve tanks are sticking close to the 1st British Army Division, and thus we, the second, have been forgotten about for 48 hours. So while the media bubbles over, the troops flock to free Kuwait City and the whole attack is well ahead of schedule, we are left [to] twiddle our thumbs.
So what? Well, we still get up at 7am, cook breakfast on the stove, check out the vehicle, rest, have lunch and generally carry on in much the same way as we did in barracks two months ago.
The highlight of the day is mail. Those soldiers who are wise, have written lots of letters back in the transit camp in Al Jubayl and therefore can expect at least two or three every day.
Then there are all those “letters to a soldier” which the man with the least amount of mail gets every day. Just like the old war stories, and I could never really understand what all the fuss was about, the letter is the one morsel of privacy you get amongst all the excitement. You sleep, eat, think, shit under the ever-watchful eye of the rest of your crew. A letter is the only proof that you are still an individual with feelings, friends, people who love you and have a life somewhere else apart from the desert. Hampstead Heath, for example.
If it’s raining, we get inside our “bivi” (tent), if it’s sunny, we chill out in the sun. But until we see someone with a leg blown off or watch a friend in the next vehicle get blown up by an anti-tank rifle, or see the pathetic sight of the Iraqi prisoners of war with limbs missing, it does not seem as though we are at war.
Perhaps someone who has not seen this kind of carnage should not be allowed to make decisions that lead other innocent people into scenes of death and destruction. As I sit here waiting to “replace” a casualty, even I am filled with a morbid excitement to see “what it is like”.
It is this disregard for the most reasonable course of action, together with this unique kind of curiosity which is perhaps one of the largest obstacles to any peace-loving fellow… Furthermore, I suppose I can really only decide once I’ve done it. Let’s hope I don’t have to. Time to get my head down.”
[Ham & High Newspaper, London, March 15th, 1991]