I have served, I will be of service

Armistice Day is a time for remembering the sacrifices made by our Armed Forces, those who made the ultimate sacrifice.? For me I remember the friends and colleagues who lost their lives during my service. ? I lost approximately one friend for every year of my sixteen years of service, and not one of them was to enemy action.? Only two of those were shot down, by friendly fire, which in case you didn’t realise is not particularly friendly.? Just training to be a fighter pilot is a dangerous business.??

I was an air defender, a fighter pilot.? The conflicts that the UK was involved in during my service had little Air to Air involvement.? My job was to be ready to shoot down hijacked airliners, and all that that entailed.? The implications of that scenario are more wide-ranging than the average person would appreciate.? Should I have been authorised to fire, the decision then rests solely with me as to whether to pull the trigger or not.? What is certain is that I will have to account for my actions in a court of law afterwards and rightly so.? I was lucky, in the scenario I faced, firstly I never had to do it for real and secondly in the case of aviation counter terrorism authority to fire is given by the Prime Minister or their nominated deputy.? When I compare that to the role of an armed police officer on counter terrorism duties, I had an easy life.? However, the scale of the destruction and the public nature of it meant that should it have happened, armed police would have collected my children from school and taken into protective custody and I would very likely have entered witness protection after the event with all that that entailed for my whole family.? Remember George Orwell's almost certainly paraphrased words: We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

When I reflect on the exhortation to ‘be in the moment’ from the Health and Wellbeing team, I think of practicing air combat with multiple aircraft flashing past each other at close range and high speed or flying low level, both activities which focus the mind.? When I think about how many life and death decisions that I have made based on incomplete information under extreme time pressure and compare that to the decisions that clients or colleagues make or often do not make, there are several orders of magnitude of difference.? When we talk about diversity of thought stemming from a diversity of life experience, I fear we may be glossing over the skills and capabilities of veterans because we don’t understand them.??

So, when I say, I have served, I will be of service, I don’t mean that I am imminently going to cut off my finger in John Wick manner, but don’t mess with my dog.? What I mean is that as military veterans, we can bring a huge range of skills and experience that unless you take the time to find out about them, you’ll never know.

I might add, I am always humbled by being thanked for my service by American colleagues; but being British, I am not quite sure how to respond.? I have however seen a rather nice meme “If you want to thank someone for their service, be the kind of person worth fighting for.”