To serious for a visual
It started innocently enough, the obsession. To while away a flat afternoon I landed on a youtube of training to be a tube driver — just the ticket. Then, it seemed only natural, I shifted onto training to be a bus driver then thru the blue light services and into the Army. I had got hooked on youtube training films.
In the middle of all that Simon Jenkins asked in the Guardian The US and Britain face no existential threat. So why do their wars go on?
After watching the respectful 2012 BBC documentary series Sandhurst I can give him one answer — to learn to deal with hostile angry crowds like the ones the police were overwhelmed by in the 2011 London riots.
To pick up on that series and then zig zag back to Jonathan Dimbleby’s Ticking with the crows/Officers mess in 1989 and then to find buried way down the youtube list Fabziy is to see the evolution of the Army from a toffs and rotters outfit with nary a black face to something like a very good comprehensive school where the teachers also wear uniform, there is lots of PT and the favourite sport happens to be fighting.
When I first caught Fabziy I couldn’t believe my eyes — a sparky Jamaica sourced Londoner putting together frank, well paced, light touch thre to ten minute videos about life in the modern Army. You can spot them for yourselves here. Behind his up close view stamped: all opinion presented on my channel is personal opinion and I am not communicating on behalf of the Army in an official capacity I knew there had to have been heads who had nodded his project thru.
These sage heads pushing and shoving to widen access to the Army desire that if riots kick off post-Brexit then the forces behind the shields will be as much like the forces throwing bricks as possible, except that they got thru selection — a kind of citizenship qualification — and the others stayed on the streets.
The perpetual war in Afghanistan is the Army’s live fire training area. The place you all go to some time but not all come back from. Experience there gives bite to the teacher’s lessons — it brings home the man behind the door you have to bayonet.
There may come a time when this modern, de-racialised Army changes faster than society, a time when its caste of martial eggheads start thinking politically. When the old horse faced cashmere pullover officer class has died out women like Officer Cadet Eldridge will be in charge who say things like,
“… patriotism is a bit of an odd word — it’s more about defending values…”
Asked at her posting interview (forty eight minutes into the video) to imagine intervening historically she says,
“… I’d go and make friends with Lenin and make him stick more to marxist ideology than going off on purges and destroying the idea of communism as it was originally conceived…”
The shifting of the centre of gravity of the Army from Mayfair and St James’s to Hackney and Catford is no bad thing. Between Fabrizy and Eldridge we might just get on the streets a force that could be the making of something Simon, so let’s keep our hunting reserve in Afghanistan, dread place, active.
