Those who back military action must take responsibility for its victims, says matthew carr |
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The risible compensation offered to the wounded British paratrooper Ben Parkinson - just £152,150 for losing both legs and suffering brain damage - reflects an age-old contradiction at the heart of militarism, which the poet Wilfred Owen recognised in his tragic poem Disabled.
In the poem, a disabled veteran sits alone in a park 'legless, sewn short at elbow', observing a civilian society that once cheered him off to war and now regards him with pity, indifference and disgust.
Today, in the battlefields of the 'war on terror', improvements in medical science have made it possible for even the most grievously wounded soldiers to survive injuries that would have killed them in Owen's time. But those who do survive often arouse similar attitudes among the societies that sent them.
This autumn the British Legion will undertake an unprecedented 'Broken Covenant' campaign, which claims that the |
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The case of Ben Parkinson highlights our ambivalent attitude to the inevitable results of military action
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British Government is failing in its duty by the Military Covenant to provide fair treatment to the soldiers who fight on its behalf.
Both the Legion and other ex-servicemen's associations have complained of inadequate medical treatment for wounded soldiers, poor equipment and long delays in the disability compensation process.
The furore surrounding the Parkinson case is one more indication of the simmering discontent within the armed forces regarding the Government's treatment of British soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Similar complaints have come from the United States. Earlier this year, revelations of cockroach-infested wards in the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre cast a grim light on the shoddy treatment of wounded US soldiers.
Veterans' associations have accused the Bush administration of inadequate health care funding for the estimated 35,000 to 53,000 wounded in Iraq. Critics have also accused the US military of cost-cutting in its calculation of disability benefits, of bureaucratic delays in awarding compensation and evading compensation  |
Attitude that adds insult to injury
US soldiers speak out
