The Internet Review of Books
  
Vol 1, No 004: June 10, 1999

Bloody Hell
[UK] [US]

Dan Hallock
Foreword: Simon Weston

ISBN: 0-87486-969-2

Plough Publishing House

£5.50

362pp

Not since Michael Herr's Dispatches unveiled the reality of what it meant to be a dog-soldier in Vietnam has there been a book which so cut through the "statesmanlike" bullshit with which career politicians cloak their determination to send the young men of each generation to die in a foreign field. Should be required bedtime reading for Tony Blair, Bill Clinton , and Jamie Shea.

This book should have been published three months ago, before NATO troops were committed to go and sort out the bloody mess that is the Balkans.

Foreword, by Simon Weston

Sometimes I think I never went to war — war came to me. It hit, burned, changed, and tempered me. And taught me many things.

Bad people, I learned, don't go to war. It's the young who go to war, the nice lads. And it's the civilians who become the real innocent casualties of war. But the people who actually wage war are so far behind the lines that they don't even get a smell of cordite, let alone hear the shells explode.

That's part of the reality of conflict. The other part is that, when you go to war, it becomes your job to kill people just as nice as you.

The Argentinian flying the A-4 Skyhawk that bombed the landing craft Sir Galahad in "Bomb Alley" was a guy named Carlos. He's a nice guy. I know him; I've met him and his wife Gracía-they're lovely people. I have no quarrel with him. When he dropped the bomb that killed so many of my friends and left me burned, he was just a man doing a job. It was 1982, and his country was at war with mine; he had a job to do. If roles had been reversed, I know I would have done the same.

Both of us have had our share of nightmares. He saw my picture in the Argentinian papers, and it haunts him to know he caused such pain. As he said to me, "Why do you have to be such a nice person?" It would have made life so much easier for him if I'd been the devil. But as it was, we were all nice guys.

I'm not interested in war anymore. I'm not interested in the reunions, getting together with the old mates and patting each other on the back, saying, "Damn, didn't we do a good job?" What, shoot and kill and bomb their side? Lovely. It's a job. If you somehow come out the other end the winner, you'll find there was nothing victorious or glorious gained in the conflict. The only winners are the financial houses, the arms industry, and the politicians who've used the system and current affairs to aid and abet their desire for power.

Then you've got two sets of soldiers, which are the losers and the losers. It's just a matter of who loses most heavily. There are no winners.

And afterwards...afterwards, an inescapable truth remains: you have to live with yourself. And if you can't live with yourself, then there's no point in being alive.

There was a time after the Falklands when I drank far too much, trying to hide the pain that was eating at me from the inside. I tried to hide from the grief I felt for the friends I'd lost, as well as my own very real grief for the person I knew I'd no longer be.

I had a huge grieving process to go through. Thankfully, I learned not to bottle it up, but it took a long time. Otherwise, I'm sure, it would have killed me. I've reconciled things within myself. I don't go around hating people. I can't hate Carlos, because I know he didn't deliberately try to kill me or Jimmy Weaver or Andrew Walker, or any of the boys. It's not a personal thing. The way I see it, I don't have a cross to bear; I count myself lucky to be alive.

I'm no soothsayer; I can't see into the future, and I definitely can't take back the past. All I can do is try-and, believe me, it can be very difficult-to live by the lessons life has taught me. I want to enjoy my life, and I want others to be able to enjoy theirs, which is why I put so much time into working with inner-city youth through my own charity, Weston Spirit. I can't enjoy life if I'm twisted up in hatred and bitterness. I've learned you can't afford to carry that kind of baggage with you. If you do, it will destroy you. Because without joy, life is desperate.

There will always be war. That's the truth, as I see it, even if it sounds defeatist. But that doesn't have to stop me believing in love. I much prefer teaching my children to ride bicycles than teaching them to fire guns. I believe that the more people you can dissuade away from violence, the better life is going to be, the more constructive life will be. But this won't happen if you sit back and take no action at all. We aren't just visitors to this planet. We have to take part to make a difference. And that doesn't mean going out and changing the world, altering its axis. It simply means each of us has to make a difference-in our own lives, in our families. We have to leave some small mark.

Ultimately, each of us has to take responsibility for our own actions, and for our own lives. There is no place for the old arguments. No matter who we are or what we've been through-the lessons of life have to take us forward. This is the message that lies, like a pearl, at the heart of Bloody Hell.

Simon Weston
Cardiff, 1999

© 1999 The Plough Publishing House, excerpted from
Bloody Hell by Dan Hallock £5.50
(ISBN 0-87486-969-2)

(And a mess, the book might well have pointed out, which was created by human greed, not destiny nor even the racial characteristics of Serb, Albanian, or even the US GI Joe just doing a dirty job to the best of his ability.)

It begins, strangely enough, with its second chapter, "Bloody Century", which starts with World War I (colonial adventures like Teddy Roosevelt's Spanish-American War is presumably omitted because it happened at the close of the previous century, though Britain's Boer War, which began at much the same time and ended when the new century was two years old, having given the world and the Third Reich the concentration camp), and ends with the Gulf:

"The PoWs that surrendered to our troops were a lice-ridden bunch. They were malnourished and had scabies. In many cases their officers had deserted them. . . Those men couldn't have blown their way out of a paper bag. . . And it was people like these that our soldiers were ordered to hound across the desert."

The book is full of terrible stories. It begins with Lee, who married Chi, a Vietnamese woman, and killed her and her daughter, Le, because he couldn't get permission to bring them home with him:

"Chi and I met one last time before I was supposed to leave. We both cried our eyes out. It was so bad, so much pain. We trembled in each other's arms. I left her and went back to my unit.

"Then she sent me a note saying to meet her at a cliff above the South China Sea, a very beautiful spot where we had gone a lot. I went. I was leaving tomorrow, so I had to see hder today.

"I took an officer's jeep and drove to the cliff. There they were, waiting, crying. We didn't talk, we just held each other, with Le in between us. We cried so much.

"I reached into my pocket and took out my pistol, put it to Chi's head and pulled the trigger. There was a splatter — then her blood gushed out — all over me. I held her tightly — with Le screaming still between us. I held her as long as I could — then let her go — over the cliffe and into the sea they both fell. I pounded the earth as hard as I could — I screamed ill I had no voice. I had nothing left inside me when I drove back. I should have died in Vietnam instead of living the thousands of deaths that I have.

"Back at the hooch no one said a word to me. I had walked in covered with blood and looked pretty bad — no one said a word, I left Vietnam the next day."

This is a long, long way from your standard heroic war prose, nor even the sort of macho stuff you will find in your average anti-war "war is hell" tract. As Denzil, a young Brit who lost his leg in the Falklands, testifies:

"We were fighting up a mountain towards all these well-defended positions. We had to fight for twelve hours, hand to hand, trench to trench — the old-fashioned way.

"And that's what we did: twelve hours of hell. Never mind all this 'God, Queen and Country' stuff. You were fighting for your mates. That's what it boiled down to."

Some of the anecdotes are quite bizarre, like the time Denzil used an Argentinian corpse to assist in his brew-up:

"I remember clearly something that happened right after that battle for Mount Longdon. There I was, surrounded by corpses, and I actually made a cup of tea using a body to shield my little cooker from the wind.

"I was doing it without the slightest bit of morbidness, and there was no disrespect to the Argentinian corpse lying next to me; it was still doing a job — it was actually stopping the wind blowing my little cooker out while I was making a cup of tea.

"I just turned him up a little on his side and made a bit of wind break out of the corpse. I did it without even thinking. I mean, it sounds horrible, and it probably is, but at the time it wasn't. I just did it out of necessity. I even had a quick look around to see if the guy had some water I could use. He didn't need it anymore, you know."

This is a remarkable book. Not since Michael Herr's Dispatches unveiled the reality of what it meant to be a dog-soldier in Vietnam has there been a book which cut through the "statesmanlike" bullshit with which career politicians cloak their determination to send the young men of each generation to die in a foreign field. Starting with Simon Weston's moving and inspiring foreword, and spanning the "bloody century" from World War I to the Gulf, it comes at a significant time, when the same old armchair generals have only recently been wildly and gleefully anticipating sending land forces to do battle in the hills of Kosovo. Should be required bedtime reading for Tony Blair, Bill Clinton , and Jamie Shea.


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