A Bit About the Brits

If memory serves, it was a year ago today – March 7 as I write this – that I left Afghanistan last time around. Now don’t get me wrong, I wanted this current deployment and I’m glad to be here. But if I try to imagine what it would have felt like to know on that day that I’d be back here on this one, my mind sputters and steams a little, then just gives me the finger and shuts down.

Or maybe it’s two fingers. One of the many things I’ve learned about the British is that our peace sign is their bird. This is a revelation, and one I plan to put to good use when I get back to the states.

Other things I’ve learned about/from the Brits:

• They butcher the English language as badly as we do
• They invented the Internet (but honestly, who didn’t invent the Internet these days) and the Queen sent the first e-mail
• “Cheers” is an appropriate response in absolutely any context, e.g. “Your hair is on fire.” “Cheers!” or “Who invented the Internet?” “Cheers!”
• Mate basically means dude. Bloke means guy.
• Brits, of course, drive on the left. Turns out they walk there, too. I’ve gotten stuck doing the mirror dance with a bloke on basically an eight-lane highway.
• Google-challenge results are inherently suspect: Google is an American stooge
• Calling a bowler a pitcher is sort of like calling a pitcher a thrower
• America is either omnipotent or inept, depending on which is more convenient at the moment
• And of course, we only won the Revolutionary War because the French helped us out, which frankly doesn’t say much for the Brits anyway.

Of course, I’ve also learned a little about how the Brits do airspace and COIN and war in general, and I think they’ve learned from us and our predecessors as well. I mention that because their senior guy in the JOC just stopped me as I was coming out of the chow hall to say that he was grateful for our close cooperation over the last 24 hours. Here’s what he was referring to:

Late yesterday evening, a British Warrior – a heavily armored APC – was blown up. Five members of the 3rd Yorkshire Batallion and one from the 1st Lancaster Batallion were killed, according to news reports. It was one of the most serious incidents in the history of the British participation in Operation Enduring Freedom, with even Members of Parliament speaking out about it today.

A Warrior 

The Marine-led Regional Command Southwest, under which the British Task Force Helmand falls, has been providing continual armed aerial over watch of the incident as the remains and the vehicle are recovered. This process is still ongoing as I write, nearly 24 hours later.

That kind of air support takes a tremendous amount of coordination – even more so given the location of the incident, which I won’t go into in detail. British and American pilots have flown more sorties in support of a single mission than I have ever seen before, by far. Aircraft maintainers, refuelers and others have been working overtime to keep the air frames flying – don’t forget that the rest of the war goes on.

And our little part of it was simply to coordinate who was flying where, and when, to make sure that not for one second were the ground forces providing site security left without a strike-capable platform (or platforms) overhead. As of now there has been no follow-on attack, and I believe this is due in part to the intentionally visible (and audible) presence of those air assets. By the time you read this the mission should be complete, hopefully without further incident.

In more ways than one I never would have imagined a day like today, either a year ago or a week ago. One thing I’ll take away from it is another layer of appreciation for the special U.S.-U.K. relationship. Many Americans tend to think that we beat the Brits in the Revolutionary War and bailed them out in WWII and that’s about the extent of it. We forget that in WWII there would have been nothing left to bail out – British or otherwise – had they not held on for so long first. We definitely forget that the Brits were with us in Korea, in Kosovo, in the Persian Gulf War, and I think we sometimes forget that they have bled alongside us throughout OEF and OIF. The Brits who gave their lives last night deserve to be remembered not only by their countrymen but by ours.