Hanging our war heroes out to dry

HOW strange and wrong it is that the actions of soldiers are often judged by those whose closest experience of danger is crossing the road, or putting too much sugar in their tea.

Soldiers are used to being needed one day and scorned the next. One moment, politicians pose alongside soldiers in combat gear. The next moment they make laws and sign treaties which leave those same soldiers absurdly vulnerable to prosecutions for actions taken under extreme pressure, in circumstances few of us can imagine.

You might have thought, after the Government pledged to protect soldiers from vexatious complaints about their conduct in war, that this sort of thing was at an end.

But the experience of former SAS sergeant Colin Maclachlan shows that the key lesson has yet to be learned. The Ministry of Defence casually informed him that long-ago events in Iraq, which he had described in a book manuscript submitted to the MoD, are being investigated by the police.

Mr Maclachlan described how he had shot severely wounded Iraqis, 13 years ago, as an act of mercy.

This event is bound to be compared with the shooting of a badly wounded Taliban fighter in Afghanistan by Royal Marine Sgt Alexander Blackman. And while the circumstances could not be more different, the MoD has in both cases hung the soldiers involved out to dry.

Mr Maclachlan, who was deployed behind enemy lines out of reach of professional medical care, acted as soldiers have done to friend and foe throughout history. Seeing men hideously injured and in great pain, with no realistic hope of recovery, he killed them to end their misery.

Everyone with experience of real warfare knows that such things happen, but are seldom publicly mentioned – mainly for the sake of civilian morale. There is even a precedent, in the Falklands War, in which a soldier who shot a terribly burned Argentine prisoner was investigated and rightly spared prosecution.

We cannot expect men and women to go into battle on our behalf if we refuse to recognise that war is utterly unlike civilian life, and cannot be ruled by civilian ideas of right and wrong.