A slow moving area of low pressure moved in from the Atlantic and crept across the parched land. That evening, on lonely sweeps of moor and hill, the fire in the forest hissed to extinction under steady rainfall.
Silas was driven directly to Fort William and briefly interviewed under caution. At first he was incoherent, unable to properly articulate and a doctor came from nearby Belford Hospital. “The man is in mild shock,” the doctor said, administering a sedative. “No more interviewing until tomorrow morning.” Silas was divested of his belt and permitted a cell under the watchful eye of a turnkey.
As raindrops tapped on small high level windows, squad members in the Community Hall disregarded the departure of Special Branch but would not be diverted by Silas’ predicament. They had been waiting all day for Alex to conclude what he wished to say about Noel. In memoriam. Silas would be discussed later, when they had absorbed his removal in police custody. “Finish Noel’s story about Lashkar Gah,” Ruairidh said, “and what happened subsequently. We can do nothing for Silas tonight.”
Alex waited until the last man had taken his shower before beginning. He had given long consideration to what should be said, then spoke candidly of his friend.
Noel was no sophisticate. He had taken the oath. As an infantry officer he believed in command and sacrifice to maintain the high ideal that was his justification for risking the lives of men. The ideal had a spiritual quality, inbuilt like faith. He had lost that faith and resigned his commission. The severance was brutal and he drifted, solitary, in noisy London. Diversion seemed merely to trivialise memories of service in the Army. He shunned old haunts and avoided acquaintances.
He kicked around London for eighteen months. Finding himself unable to escape the images of Lashkar Gah, he tried to purge himself of anger and guilt by reading up on political objectives in Afghanistan. In doing so he came to utterly distrust the main organs of a western media. The Press was dwelling on a Western commitment to educate Afghanistan’s female population, proclaimed as one of the reasons for ‘intervention’, a euphemism for war. It was too much. He well knew that after five years of conflict fewer females than before were receiving any education. And the ’intervention’ had been failing from the outset. Mujahideen, supplied with arms by the USA, were now the Taliban firing the same weaponry.
He came to believe that the media constituted Establishment organs, run by a reincarnation of WW2’s Political Warfare Executive. Criticisms of the ‘intervention’ were stigmatised, its causal relationship to the terror of 9/11 never to be argued as part of the over-reaction that included torture, ‘rendition’, and illegal detention at Guantanamo Bay. The general public considered itself informed. Exchanges of opinion were usually based on editorials giving sanitised versions of events. Any challenge of accepted thinking vis-à-vis the ‘War on Terror’, particularly after the 7/7 atrocity, was fraught with danger and likely to lead to injury or arrest on charges under new incitement laws or a broader ‘apologie du terrorisme’ catch that was exercising legal minds in the Council of Europe and elsewhere.
He read that UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles, were first introduced as ‘surveillance aids’, then used in targeted assassinations in Palestine. In 2002 the USA followed the example of Israel and began to execute men whom they alleged were Al-Qaeda members. There was no outcry at the extra-judicial killings. In the aftermath of that 9/11 attack in New York, the desire for vengeance overwhelmed principle. The declaration of war against ‘terror’ loosened the grip of law on American action worldwide.
UAVs were used in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The USA claimed that everyone killed had been precisely targeted and that all were terrorists. ‘Due process’ meant death. Hundreds died in drone strikes with thousands more maimed. News of civilian deaths struggled to penetrate a web of controlled media. Reporting of these events was brief and rarely expanded upon. Wedding parties, family gatherings, military positions occupied by allied soldiers; all had been missiled. A ‘Guardian’ article, a rare piece, once reported that in targeting 47 men, 1147 had been killed.
A House of Commons ‘Early Day Motion’ has been introduced and recorded recalling the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s great success in ‘exposing many national and international scandals, including revealing that the CIA falsely claimed that it was causing zero civilian casualties in drone attacks in Pakistan and confirming that the US had deliberately targeted rescuers…”
Noel read Hansard. He researched the internet. He read back numbers of the Liberal Press, the Labour Press, the Tory Press. He felt exploited yet proud of the men he had soldiered with, professionals every one, whose sense of duty remained untouched by grubby political manoeuvres back home.
The Lashkar Gah deaths had occurred at a sensitive time. Afghan troops had taken a Taliban position and been killed by an American drone days later. The scandal of American private contractors gunning down people had finally broken. The demand that immunity under the law be granted to United States military staying on in Afghanistan was being opposed.
A British officer’s eye-witness report of civilian deaths in a drone attack had therefore a potential to tip the scales against American geo-political ambitions in Asia. It was quickly established that although the strike was within the British sector, the drone had been American on an unspecified mission. An investigation of themselves was then undertaken by the USA citing the interests of national security. They concluded that no mistakes had been made and no reproach of their actions was merited.
Alex decided to end his monologue. It had been punctuated by pauses as he strove to recapture the intensity left him by his friend. The pitch of his voice lowered. “I cannot do true justice to Noel’s story. His struggle with the nightmares that came every night; the drone at Lashkar Gah, the dead and the dying, the cover up. Leaving London changed nothing. Wherever he went, there he was. His nightmares travelled with him.”
Alex rose to his feet and there was a silence. He looked down at the five seated men. They raised their eyes to meet his, but there was stillness in their gaze. Alex felt an urge to have them engage. He continued harshly.
“Noel’s family will be left thinking that he was a murderer and a suicide. US drones will continue to kill. These killings have consequences, and not just the grieving families or the enraged husbands and brothers that become terrorists. Two journalists died in Lochaber as a consequence of Lashkar Gah. The drones spread death everywhere. Noel believed that.”
“Why here? Was there something about Lochaber?” George asked. “He was angry and saw the propaganda, realised the hypocrisy, but he could have done something by staying in London.”
Alex said roughly, “I never asked him that. Maybe he did try. He was the old fashioned type, a gentleman. He often repeated a piece of First World War poetry, as though it was a mantra with him;
Happy and young and gallant,
They saw their first born go,
But not the strong limbs broken
And the beautiful men laid low,
The piteous writhing bodies,
They screamed, ‘Don’t leave me, sir’,
For they were only your fathers,
But I was your officer.”
Alex paused, and they all looked sharply at him, detecting deep emotion in his speech. “Noel told me that the writer was killed at CambraI,” Alex said finally.
The others leaned back in their chairs. No-one spoke. Alex walked away. The remainder of the squad dispersed to lay on their cots and await their evening meal. ‘The world is getting smaller’. How often had each one of them been irritated by that platitude. Now, incredibly, the political world they had come to Lochaber to escape, had reached out and found them.
Dinner was delivered late, a delay caused by the changing weather. The Argyll’s man didn’t elaborate. The men arose and took seats at the table where the soup was cold and the meat greasy. No-one ate much.
Afterwards, they gravitated towards the sofas and chairs. Speculation about Silas’ arrest occupied them for a time. It was an oddly antiseptic conversation. The death of Munro seemed a distant irrelevance and talk was stilted. Silas’ absence left no gap, as though he had never been one of them at all.