In the window of a modest florist’s shop, here in Smalltown, Georgia, there is a wire coathanger from which droops a bleakly empty, low-ranking soldier’s uniform. Beside it, on a black-draped table, rest some cheap Bulldogs team memorabilia, a burning candle, a medal, a battered Zippo lighter and a photograph of a vibrant, living, smiling, achingly young man; from somewhere inside, a country song attests through the whine of the pedal steel guitar that “I’m proud to be a soldier-boy” and passers-by pause to tip solemn hats at this shrine to the florist’s son who fell in Iraq.
It is unbearably mawkish and desperately unBritish. Yet I have a hunch that General Sir Richard Dannatt, the head of the British Army, would tip his hat, too - just as, pushing the ickiness to the back where it belongs, do I.
In an impassioned speech on Friday General Dannatt expressed his dismay at the morale-sapping apathy shown to our troops who serve in Iraq and Afghanistan. A young soldier, he said, deserves respect for his courage; he wants to know “that people in his local pub know and understand what he has been doing”.
Rhetorically, he asked how many councils would even consider a homecoming parade, which took him neatly to a comparison with the United States where, instead of what he sees as a widening gulf between army and nation, he says, correctly, that there is “outstanding” support shown for the military and its personnel.
There are, to be sure, good and bad reasons for this – though none that I can see involve the widespread xenophobic prejudice among Europeans, who concoct a version of Americans as war-hungry imperialists enjoying a scrap with Johnny Foreigner; most Americans, indeed, incline too far the other way and would prefer never to have to meet Mr Foreigner at all.
But when needs must – which is to say, when they are commanded – exemplary support, practical and psychological, is furnished for those who have to go to war. Some of this, it is fair to say, is because the US has form in these matters. Infamously, many veterans of the mess in Vietnam returned to indifference and even taunts; today, those same vets are diligently committed to ensuring that their sons and daughters do not suffer similarly for their part in an unpopular war.
It is also the case that the war in Iraq is a much bigger deal in the US, affecting many more people than in Britain and thus lending wider experience in understanding and coping with the problems it sends home. The American population is five times that of Britain; the number of troops in Iraq is 32 times as many. In proportion to the size of the population, therefore, more than six times the number of young men and woman are sent away and more than six times the number of family and friends are drawn into the anxiety that is the body count on the evening news.
In some communities, nobody is spared. Recruitment is proactive, especially in the poorest, rural areas, where army marketing men make synchronised swoops upon complete generations of the semi-literate who have not previously travelled 20 miles – which is, of course, precisely why they sign on the treacherous dotted line, lured by the only promise they have ever had of education, training and escape from inheriting their parents’ soul-sucking grind. When they return alive there is therefore a whole village that has known them since birth to let out the breath it has been holding and to tie their yellow ribbons round their old oak trees; when they return dead, there is always a florist’s window.
These shrines, together with tearful, televised declarations of family pride in he who sacrificed his life “for our freedom”, conspire to give the false impression that the American people simply don’t get it; that they have been bamboozled into believing political propaganda that would have Iraqis, rather than Saudis, flying planes into skyscrapers – so stupid those Americans, they get what they deserve. This is harsh and it is wrong.
The directly bereaved divide into two distinct and opposite camps, both equally understandable. On the one side are those such as Cindy Sheehan, who lost a son in 2004 and took to campaigning bitterly against the war that took him from her; on the other are those such as the florist, whose only balm for grief is to convince herself that he must have died for good purpose. Until we walk a funeral mile in their shoes, it is unfair to draw inference from either.
Most Americans, not directly bereaved, do get it. More than 70 per cent oppose the war, they believe they were lied to and their President’s approval rating has him as probably the least popular to hold office in history. Nixon included.
Most Americans understand why their children enlisted and also that this means they must then do as they are told. Most Americans, it is also true, have an enthusiasm for the patriotism that the British have relegated, for some puzzling reason, to football – and a respect for the uniform that, to some eyes, symbolises it; it is routinely seen on the streets and few who wear it will pay for their own Bud Light.
Most Americans, even the unworldly inhabitants of Whippoorwill Creek, are quite able to separate the war that they perceive to be, variously, ill-judged, mistaken or wicked from the kids in spanking new fatigues who set off from airports each day, glassy-eyed with terror – not of warfare, just of flying on their first plane. Most Americans instinctively understand that if, at some point in the ensuing, ghastly, 15-month tour of duty, one of them chokes on sand and blood while crying for his mom, he needs to know that there is more than one mom thinking of him.
General Dannatt is right. If most Americans can make that separation between war and its warriors, it is monstrous that the British, by and large better educated, better travelled and better informed, cannot or will not make it too. Then act upon it. With tickertape just for starters.
