‘I’m conscious of friends who served alongside me and are no longer there’
Kingsley Donaldson (45), who served in the Army for 16 years, is director of the Causeway Institute for Peace-building and Conflict Resolution International. He lives in Belfast with his partner Helen and daughter Charlotte (1), and has two sons from a pr
People see us with our poppies and medals in our uniforms but they don’t see the survivors’ guilt behind all that. On Remembrance Day I think of family who were called up in the Troubles and I’m also very aware of those friends who served alongside me and are no longer there.
I enjoyed my time in the Army and I’m fiercely proud of my service. I was interested in joining up from a young age. My father, uncles and brother all joined so there was no problem at all for me following in their footsteps. I was an Army cadet while I was at school and I wanted to go straight in but they said ‘No, we think you could be an officer and you should go to university’. So I went through the Officer Training Corps at Queen’s University and then joined the Army Reserves for a couple of years. I was deployed to the Middle East and while there they asked if I wanted to stay.
I joined the Royal Tank Regiment and was moved into a specialist area focusing on weapons of mass destruction. I stayed in the regular Army for 16 years and one day.
I decided to leave when I realised that the chances of fighting were more or less over.
I had finished commanding my regiment so it was time to go and do something different. As you progress you become a ‘Whitehall warrior’, as they push you into the Ministry of Defence. I finished as an advisor to the Army chief, a lieutenant-colonel.
I left just over twoand-a-half years ago and it’s a strange thing to do. Military skills are very useful in the new
world I live in, but I recognise that some of the old-fashioned ways we had in the Army are not appropriate in civvy street.
In the Army if you say something has to be done in a certain way by a certain time, then it will be done. I’m learning that doesn’t happen in the real world.
Remembrance Day is a strange experience for me, as I remember on a number of different levels. I’m secretary of the Northern Ireland First World War Centenary Committee so there’s the enormity of the First World War.
And then there are those friends and loved ones of recent times.
You can have some intensely personal thoughts in a collective space.”