By Esther Addley (THE GUARDIAN, 11/11/06):
On the stroke of 11 o'clock this morning, Peter Brierley will be standing in the foyer of Tesco on Commercial Street in Batley, west Yorkshire, with a trayful of poppies and a collection tin, when he will pause and bow his head to remember his dead son. Lance Corporal Shaun Brierley died on March 30 2003, a week into the Iraq war and having just crossed the border from Kuwait, when the Landrover he was travelling in hit a piece of debris, overturned and crushed him.
At the same moment, 109 miles away, Pam Bradley will put down her scissors in the hairdressing salon she owns in Rugeley, Staffordshire, and think of her son Nicholas, who has just returned to Basra on his second tour of Iraq. His two weeks' leave coincided with the funerals of two close colleagues who were blown up by a roadside bomb, while Nicholas was on a sleep shift back at the barracks. "They told them what had happened," says his mother, "gave them half and hour to hug each other, get over it, but then they had to go back on patrol."
In London, at the Cenotaph, Rose Gentle, her husband and two daughters will be standing in memory of their son and brother Gordon, "just a typical boy", who died on June 28 2004 at the age of 19. On the morning of his death, Mrs Gentle turned on the TV and saw the body of a soldier who had been killed, his face obscured. Four hours later, she was told it was Gordon.
Pauline Hickey will be at the memorial on South View Road in East Bierley, west Yorks, having walked in procession from the neighbouring village of Birkenshaw, as the locals do every November 11. Earlier this year the name of her son Christian became the first to be carved on the memorial since the first world war. Sergeant Hickey was killed on October 18 2005, three days before he was due to come home, blown up by a roadside bomb while walking alongside his Landrover.
Meanwhile Eddie Hancock and his wife Rose will be at the church in Wigan where later this month they will bury Mr Hancock's son Jamie, who was 19 and on his first tour of duty. He was shot and killed on Monday while on sentry duty inside his Basra barracks.
Silence can seem like the best and only response to stories of such wasteful loss; devastating beyond measure to the families they shatter, inarticulable to the rest of us in whose name these young men supposedly died. And so, at today's Armistice Day commemorations, and the similar events tomorrow for Remembrance Sunday, millions will pause in their homes and at their own civic rituals for an arbitrary two minutes' worth of it. The "festival" of remembrance - an odd word - of the military dead is always especially poignant when troops continue to be killed in action; this week, Iraq's grim tally of British dead rose to 121, in Afghanistan it stands at 41.
And yet this is not a week when the coalition dead of Iraq have been silent. George Bush has suffered a humiliating rebuke in the US midterms, with 37% of Americans citing the war - and the US soldiers who have died fighting it - as the principal reason why. Donald Rumsfeld, blamed among other things for costcutting measures that cost US military lives, is gone. In the UK, the Court of Appeal has this week been considering whether the government should, after all, be compelled to hold a public inquiry into the events leading to the conflict: the case has been pushed not by opposition politicians or committed pacifist campaigners, but the mothers of two teenaged boys who died in Iraq while fighting for Britain.
Mr Hancock, too, has spent this week speaking to as many media as will hear him about his son, and condemning in scorching terms the politicians who deployed him to Iraq as liars and traitors. "I am just basically some common man off the street," he said yesterday, "and I have a very, very narrow window of opportunity. This time next week, my son won't be news. This time tomorrow he won't be news." He is eager, he says, to face a government minister on live TV, "but in a week's time my phone won't ring." Is he worried no one will remember his son? "Can you tell me the name of the last person who died in Iraq? That's your answer."
The narratives of war, whatever form they take - songs, stories, poems, films - are always constructed in anticipation of the memories of future casualties. Rhetoric about the "glorious dead" - "their name liveth for evermore" - may have collapsed, after the Somme, into Owen's bitter musing on whatever "passing bells" would sound for the doomed youth of the Great War, yet we continue to intone that "at the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them", both a solemn commitment and a curse. (As the writer Geoff Dyer has noted, these words For the Fallen were written in September 1914, before the war dead had actually died. The rite of remembrance, in other words, is as much about the anticipation of deaths as the remembrance of past ones).
But as the events of this week have shown, remembrance is not passive: it's political. Rose Gentle, one of the two mothers at the Court of Appeal this week, has come to know this well. She didn't plan to become an activist, but angered by receiving a letter from the government a full seven weeks after Gordon's death, and then another from another soldier saying that her son had been issued with inadequate equipment at the time of his death, she went to Downing Street to hand a letter to Blair. When she returned to her home in Glasgow, the phone began to ring. She now has a database of 2,000 families who have joined her Military Families Against the War campaign. Many of the British bereaved are represented on the list, she says.
Gordon had been in Iraq, his first posting, for just three weeks when he died. She had two brief phone calls while he was there, "a quick one to let me know that he had got there, and one on the Friday before he was killed. He just said that Iraq was a bit crazy, and they had just been missed by bullets, but he said, 'Don't worry mum, I'll phone you back in two weeks. I love you mum.'"
The lingering, unwanted memory, "the thing that haunts me", she says, is the image of Gordon's shattered body on the television. And yet what she wants is "for no one to be able to forget. We don't want anyone to forget any of the boys who have been killed. They should all be remembered. Just as in the first and second world wars."
Gentle has kept his room exactly as it was before he left for Iraq, and goes and sits quietly on his bed when she gets up, and before she goes to bed, day after day. At the going down of the sun, and in the morning.
Similarly, after her son Christian's death, Pauline Hickey felt determined that he should be remembered. So she and her husband asked a local councillor if his name could be added to the village's existing war memorial. Britain's small town geography is dotted with war memorials - churches and village squares, railway stations and schools and factories - but the majority commemorate the first and second wars, and it is unusual to add a name to an existing monument.
The Hickeys were told of their son's death at 4am the morning after he was killed. "Initially the phone rang and woke us up. I went downstairs and there was a knock on the door. It turned out that they hadn't been able to wake us by knocking. I opened the door and saw there was an army [representative] there, and I just knew."
As last winter progressed, Pauline Hickey too found herself getting increasingly caught up in something that she would eventually come to recognise as a crusade. "When I started looking into the reasons why the occupation of Iraq occurred, I couldn't keep quiet. At home I have been collecting information on a daily basis, I still go on the internet every day and read all the papers and things. I have seven A4 folders now, full of information about Iraq. It's something that I feel so strongly about. Nothing can bring my son back, but if we can prevent another catastrophe we all have an obligation to speak."
After the ceremony this morning, she and her husband are going for a meal with Chris's widow Gemma and his old friends from home. "There will probably be quite a lot of them because he was very popular in the village." A recent inquest found that her son was unlawfully killed in an attack mounted by members of the Iraqi police itself. "There's not a day goes by without me thinking, what a waste. My son had a lot of living to do, he loved life, and it's been denied. For what? He was going to train at Sandhurst, he had high hopes of a good career in the army, and he has died in a foreign place in the middle of the night, [killed] by people who he was there training. If that doesn't say to people they aren't wanted there I don't know what does."
Peter Brierley lives less than four miles from Pauline Hickey. Inspired by the Hickeys' example, he asked his own local council to add Shaun's name added to the Batley memorial; it has not been carved, but a plaque was affixed earlier this year. "It's really important to me to keep Shaun's name alive," he says. "I remember when the first soldiers in the war died, they were soldier three, soldier five, soldier nine. I didn't want Shaun to be soldier 22.
"In the first and second wars we were talking thousands and thousands of dead, but today they are few and far between, and they are also spread all over the country. Instead of maybe 20 people from Batley dying in one year, you are getting one person from here, one from somewhere else. It is not something that you can build a full memorial to. But war is totally different in that now you have TV cameras alongside the action. I think that has helped people to remember the soldiers. It keeps it in the mind that there are still soldiers dying."
People, says Brierley, want to remember, and there certainly exists a need, a compulsion even, to commemorate death. Just outside Lichfield in Staffordshire is a 150-acre former gravel pit that has been planted with 50,000 trees and now serves as the "National Memorial Arboretum", a site where 60,000 people come each year to remember ... anything. There are memorials here to the dead of the first and second wars, of Suez and the Falklands, to commemorate dead policemen and fire fighters and also stillborn babies and those who have died in road accidents and ships that have sunk. It is a private charity of remembrance, founded around the time of the millennium and whose popularity, according to its general manager Charlie Bagot Jewitt, is booming year on year.
"There is a human need to have somewhere to go to remember the dead," he says. "What we provide here is a national centre. The fact that this is an attractive site, a growing place and not a depressing place, has huge appeal." He believes people take great comfort in naming and recording their dead. "I think recognition is a huge part of this."
Even a simple roster of the dead, though, can remain hugely provocative. Cindy Sheehan, the American whose son Casey died in Iraq in 2004 and who went on to become one of Bush's most effective irritants, gathered a group of supporters outside the White House on Wednesday with the intention of delivering a petition and reading out the names, once again, of the 2,385 American military personnel who have died in Iraq. She was arrested.
And of course any discussion of the names of the dead inevitably brings us to what, amid today's circumscribed, ceremonial silence, is the terrible yawning unspoken: the dead of Iraq and of Afghanistan. The head of the Imperial War Graves Commission, Fabian Ware, pointed out after the first world war that if the British Empire's dead were to march four abreast down Whitehall, it would take them three days to pass the Cenotaph. We cannot conceive of the horrifying march of Iraq's dead - perhaps 600,000 since 2003. It is admirable and right that each British military death should be meticulously recorded by the armed forces. We even know the names of every single soldier whose body was lost without trace at the Somme: all 73,077 are inscribed onto a massive monument at Thiepval. But when it comes to the missing of Iraq, we cannot even agree on a method to count them. We will remember them? Maybe.
If Iraq this week did for Bush, Gentle and others are hoping it can do for the present British government too. She and Reg Keys, whose son Thomas was killed in Iraq in 2003, stood in the last election, she against Adam Ingram, the armed forces minister, Keys against the prime minister in his home constituency of Sedgefield. Next time they want to run a candidate against every MP who voted in favour of the war. The name of their fledgling party - Spectre - explicitly invokes the memory of the dead, and co-opts its power to menace.
But for today, along with the 10.5 million British ex-service personnel, their families and dependents, and the many others remembering dead of wars long past, it is doubtless the small human details that will come to mind. Buried in the official Ministry of Defence eulogy to Kingsman Jamie Hancock is an anecdote is an anecdote recalling a normal 19-year-old who loved life that manages, at the same time, to be devastating. "We will best remember him for creating, while going through pre-deployment training, his recent 'hammer time' dance where he cajoled his mates to dance with only a field helmet covering their pride.
"Our sympathy and thoughts go out to his family at this awful time; we are all deeply saddened by this tragic loss."
UK toll in Iraq
7,200: Total number of British troops currently stationed in Iraq
121: Total number of British soldiers killed
273: Wounded in action, to September 2006
9: Number of teenagers among the casualties
28: Average age of British service people killed
21: Possible suicides among the casualties
44: Number of British women widowed by the conflict
2: Number of British women soldiers killed
74: Number of British children who have lost parents