July 03, 2012
We went into the store and talked about whether there would be a war or not. We couldn”t second-guess the Americans, but Staff had been in the first Gulf War and he knew better than us. He”d been in the Army his whole adult life; he may not know anything else but he knew this. We chatted about a real war, excited like naughty schoolboys.
In between the war talk I tried to write down some more radio numbers. The lads laughed and in between the joking Evans asked me whose side I was on as if asking me whom I would support in a cricket match”England or the terrorists? Evans always made the distinction between England and the UK. He always said he was from Wales and not the UK or Great Britain. He had a Welsh flag in his room”not an English one, never an English one. So who was it to be”England or the terrorists? I pointed at the British flag on my uniform and he smiled. “But you”re not British, are you?” he asked. I argued that I was, and he told me to look in the mirror.
To Evans, politically correct niceties didn”t matter. If you were brown you weren”t British. The lads didn”t know I was from Pakistan or that I”d lived in Burnley all my life, but here was war and it was time to pick a side. Biscuits told me to ignore Evans”what did color matter? I was wearing the right uniform as far as he, an Englishman, was concerned. None of it mattered to me. I”d picked a side when I signed on the dotted line and swore an oath to defend the realm.
I had joined the Army to go to war. I just didn”t know what it meant and I thought I”d feel something a bit more than I did, but it didn”t feel like anything big at the time. Maybe it would mean more later. We”d trained for it and we were ready and curious. We didn”t even know we were going to war, it was just what Staff had said. It turned out he was right.
