Gunning for it: attack on Syria will kill and will achieve nothing else

I AM conscious of the rush to action in Syria. I served in the FCA in the 1980s. It was brief and a debacle. I loathed firing guns. Our Lee-Enfield rifles kicked like mules. Embarrassingly, I was unable to ever hit my targets. No matter how wide or near the target, I could never perforate it with a bullet. Thankfully, I never hit anything by accident, either.

It was all guns misfired and ricocheting expletives. My surname was prefaced and succeeded by “eejit”, and the “eejit” prefaced by other adjectives of abuse that need not be printed. The abuse was not unfair; it was merely unkind.

The strategic objective, and there was one, was to go on summer camp and get paid for two weeks as a regular solider. It was Kilworth Camp the first year, and Monaghan Barracks the next. My most dangerous mission, chiefly to myself, was overnight guard duty at Monaghan. A small detachment of ‘men’, though we teenagers hardly qualified for that appellation, we were kitted out with boots, helmet, combats, rifle and live ammunition.