Feature Article

The stuff of courage

The rising death toll of British troops in Afghanistan has fuelled public disillusionment with the war but also admiration for the soldiers’ heroism. This weekend, as we commemorate those fallen in conflict, a war correspondent explores the meaning of bravery

Recent news pages have featured two images that epitomise courage in our time. The first is of Chesley B. Sullenberger III at the launch of his book Highest Duty, recalling the January day when he ditched his airliner, US Airways Flight 1549, onto the Hudson River in New York and guided all 155 aboard to safety. The second is the picture of the wounded young soldiers of the 2nd Battalion the Rifles in their wheelchairs before a memorial service in Liverpool Cathedral. This summer 13 members of the battalion were killed in action. The number is doubled if you include members of other regiments who died while serving with the 2nd Rifles in Helmand province.

Of the battalion group, some 80 in all were wounded, and 13 of these have been maimed for life, losing limbs and eyes. Last week The Daily Telegraph reported that British troops serving in southern Afghanistan this year stand a one in 45 chance of being killed. Two years ago, when Lieutenant Colonel Joe O’Sullivan commanded the 2nd Battalion the Parachute Regiment in the Sangin pocket, where the Rifles sustained their heaviest losses, the odds were that one soldier in 58 would be killed or seriously injured.

The Rifles are the descendants of the Rifle Brigade, famous for their green jackets and heroic and innovative tactics in the Peninsular War under Wellington from 1809 to 1814. First up the scaling ladders in the attacks on the great fortress towns was the “Forlorn Hope”, a term now synonymous with blind physical bravery. (The term, intriguingly, is borrowed from the Dutch veloren hoop, literally the “forgotten heap”).

How do we look on the “forlorn hopes” of today? Are they truly valued by the politicians who send them to war in a dusty land that they could barely mark in their atlases four or five years ago? And what does their valour mean to a nation whose politicians sent them to do a job but, according to many, without the tools to see it through successfully?
Chesley Sullenberger has tried to draw lessons for our times from his experience. A former test pilot, with more than 19,000 flying hours to his credit, he took off at the helm of his A320 aircraft out of New York on 15 January this year on a routine internal flight. In a matter of minutes both engines had stalled, put out of action by a flock of Canada geese. Grasping the situation Sullenberger warned the crew and passengers that he would try to land in the river: his most famous remark that day was “Brace for impact”.

After landing the plane, calling in rescue boats and getting all 155 passengers off, he walked the empty plane twice to ensure that no one was left. He later explained that all his training had prepared him for this moment. It is the same remark I heard from at least two commanders in the Falklands. One was Lieutenant Colonel H. Jones, who won a posthumous VC at Goose Green.

Another more recent recipient of the Victoria Cross, Lance Corporal Johnson Beharry, who twice rescued colleagues from exploding vehicles under fire in Iraq, demonstrated instinctive courage of a very high order. Asked what was going through his head when he carried out the rescue, he replied, “I don’t know, an RPG round I think.”

The experiences of men like H. Jones and Johnson Beharry raise the question of whether courage can be taught or whether it is innate; whether some people have it and others don’t.

In the great funeral oration celebrating the Athenian dead in the Peloponnesian War, Pericles described the Athenians’ “innate spirit for courageous action”. In contrast to the harsh training regime of the Spartans, the Athenians met dangers “with the courage that is born of character rather than compulsion”.

Today an act of physical bravery is written down as “foolhardy” or “rash” and “not the sort of thing a normal person would do, or should be expected to do”. Courage and heroism are not the antonyms or opposites, necessarily, of cowardice. They do contain an element of defying fear, however. Definitions are slippery. The Paperback Oxford English Dictionary, rather bizarrely defines courage as “1. The ability to do something frightening. 2. Strength in the face of pain or grief.” These are definitions very much for our age, and certainly courage and attitudes to courage and heroism are shaped by the culture of the times and by a person’s upbringing. This is a central proposition of The Anatomy of Courage, written by Churchill’s doctor and friend Lord Moran, based on his diaries as a doctor in the trenches of the First World War.

In that war, says Moran, the nature of courage began to be questioned in a new way. He himself was on the side of the Spartans, believing that someone could be trained in courage, almost like a “skill at arms” in infantry training. For this reason some regiments fought more fiercely than others. Moran also believed that courage is not an infinite resource; that it can be burned up by exhaustion, too much danger, and exposure to battle and the imminence of battle. (It should be noted that British troops in the Sangin pocket of Afghanistan have been exposed to the exchange of fire daily for well over a month – far longer than infantry battalions on the Western Front in the First World War.)

First World War attitudes to fighting, training and tactics, and courage lingered in the British Army into the Second World War. After witnessing the slog up Sicily to Messina, Lieutenant Colonel Lionel Wigram famously wrote to Field Marshal Montgomery to explain why his men would or would not fight. In a standard platoon attack “five or six men immediately start making tracks for home” while “the gutful men” led by the platoon commander dash on to the enemy position without any covering fire. “Battalion commanders will confirm that it is always the same group of nine or 10 men who are there first, on whom the battle depends.” For these home truths Montgomery had Wigram demoted. Wigram was later killed on the Sangro River in Italy.

The conflicts of the twentieth century have undoubtedly shaped our collective memory and attitudes to physical courage, service and sacrifice. But they have also no doubt been affected by the gratuitous violence in entertainment and the arts, and the risk aversion that affects so many people’s experiences. My colleague and friend John Simpson, one of the most physically brave reporters I have ever known, was lamenting last week the fact that he now has to fill out a “risk appraisal” document the size of a telephone directory to fulfil the BBC’s “compliance” regulations before going on assignment.

In 42 years of reporting, sometimes covering wars wearing no body armour and only a cork helmet with a morphine vial buried in it, I have undergone episodes of extraordinary fear and danger, some for a few seconds, others lasting hours and minutes. I have felt braver some days than others. Some brave men and women I know have appeared at times rash to the point of barminess. Some in the sheer stamina of their courage, of a mental rather than physical kind, can appear pigheaded.

Innate and instinctive or trained and educated: whatever courage is, people still recognise it. People disillusioned with political decisions about involvement in conflicts will still turn out to see soldiers return from the front line, as they turned out last week to welcome the 2nd Battalion the Rifles and acknowledge, as Lieutenant Colonel Rob Thomson said, that people as young as 18 “have taken the fight to the enemy in some of the most arduous and demanding situations faced by British soldiers for a generation”.

In the truest ancient sense, courage is a virtue. More than ever in this risk-averse age, it is not a luxury, but a necessity.