Monday 15 February 2010

Fallen.

'And ye shall know them by their words'.

And here is one great word. 'Fallen.'

Instead of describing the process of taking (mostly) underprivileged young men from low-income under-educated backgrounds and using the bait of three meals a day, free clothing and the opportunity for playing with guns as a device for maintaining an optimal defense budget before putting them in 'harms way' which might involve having a piece of searing hot shrapnel penetrating the left side of the head before turning the brain into a mushy by-product of traumatic impact, or even experiencing the blast of a landmine underfoot as the explosive rips away the bottom half of the body, or indeed any in the number of ways that young men sent to fight wars they don't understand based entirely on words they are fed by unscrupulous agenda driven recruiters serving the purposes of budget driven government ministers on an upward career curve, might find themselves being brutally separated from body parts, if not from life itself, for what it is. Gruesome bloody death, what these young men get in exchange for this 'sacrifice' is the word 'fallen.'

They are not victims of a system that empowers a rich minority by using the lower class as cannon fodder for their various empowerment agendas, but instead they are 'fallen heroes'.

For 'fallen' read 'another victim of the business of war.' They are not fallen. They are brutally killed almost entirely because they come from low income backgrounds.

The implication with this word is that the worst that can happen to a soldier is to become 'fallen.' That doesn't sound so bad now. Does it. And the immediate word association is 'hero. So if perchance you do become 'fallen', you will also become a hero. Another good reason not to worry at all. 

Current lists of our 'Fallen Heroes' show they are almost all of low rank and young.

Beware those who rely on the word 'fallen' to describe KIA.