My Life, Our Times by Gordon Brown

Author:Gordon Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-11-09T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

AFGHANISTAN: A WAR WITHOUT END?

No letter of condolence is routine. And letters to a family who have lost a loved one in war are difficult beyond imagining. As prime minister I wrote over 300 letters to parents and partners of those killed in Afghanistan and Iraq between the summer of 2007 and spring of 2010. Every letter was personally painful. By my side as I wrote, I always had four separate notes – a statement of how the soldier had died, a report from their commander on their qualities, a list of their achievements in life, and information about their family and closest relatives.

It is even harder to write about someone you know only from second-hand reports. I always knew how a letter in itself may offer little consolation at this time of most intense grief, but I thought that over time some comfort might come from knowing the esteem in which the lost soldier was held by colleagues and friends. In every letter there was an offer of further help, which was sometimes taken up. I was determined that each had to be genuinely about the individual and not impersonal. I pored over details about the dead soldier’s bravery in action and their character and qualities.

In my first weeks in office, aware that my writing was at best difficult to read, I had my letters typed. But I felt the letters lacked a much-needed personal touch and quickly moved to writing in longhand. When the Sun newspaper filed a story in November 2009 from one grieving mother, who complained that I had treated her son with contempt because of my bad handwriting, I was close to tears. In the letter, based on the information I had, it was simply impossible to persuade her that everything possible had been done to save her son, or to demonstrate, even when I later talked to her by phone, that my words were heartfelt. I simply hoped that in some small way the family would be strengthened in their hour of grief.

In the three years I was prime minister, I was writing such letters every few days. And, after RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire was closed for runway repairs in April 2007, just months before I became prime minister, almost every week the body of a soldier would be flown back to the military airbase at RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire. After the Falklands, where the majority of our war dead from that conflict remain, the practice had been established that the bodies of all those killed in combat would be repatriated for burial at home, with each death investigated by the coroner at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. After the move to RAF Lyneham, the route to the special armed forces department of pathology in Oxford was through Wootton Bassett, now Royal Wootton Bassett, a small market town to the south-west of the base, before heading east along the M4. A tradition grew that as the hearses drove along the high street, the local residents would stand in silence to honour our heroes.

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