Their Cruel Lives

My first job on leaving college as an impressionable teenager was in a military hospital in the west of Scotland where I saw men severely injured and/or maimed as the result of war.

An overriding memory I have is of a basement in the hospital with unending rails of military great coats and multiple shelves of suitcases containing the meagre belongings of the men who did not go home.

Images of these men stayed with me for the rest of my life and this is how I imagined their life before their war, the terror of their battles and what could have been had they not been injured and doomed to spend the rest of their invisible lives in hospital.

Don’t call these youngsters Heroes, which only glorifies war. Instead call them Victims who under horrific conditions found themselves capable of Heroic actions.