War and words

‘Aggressive camping’ is how one of the characters in Andy McNab’s first play for radio describes his activities in Helmand province in Aghanistan.

‘Aggressive camping’ is how one of the characters in Andy McNab’s first play for radio describes his activities in Helmand province in Aghanistan. Last Night, Another Soldier... (Radio Four, Saturday) received a lot of advance publicity because of McNab’s reputation as a former SAS soldier whose books about his experiences at war have zoomed off the shelves faster than he can write them. His play focuses on a platoon of riflemen engaged in hand-to-hand fighting with the Taleban, mostly young, sometimes brave, and always doomed, either to die in battle, be maimed for life, or suffer from the psychological ravages of PTSD.

The language of war has acquired a lexicon that would have horrified Orwell. In his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, which he wrote just after the second world war had ended, he campaigned against the way that the English language was being used even then to obfuscate meaning, distort reality, encourage the advance of ‘foolish thoughts’. Prose, Orwell writes, ‘consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house’. McNab’s script veered from the south London lingo of squaddies from Peckham to the euphemisms which anaesthetise us from war’s realities.

‘Take him down’, ‘Body bag’, ‘Poppy field’ — the words being used by the characters were at odds with their blood-curdling shrieks as they fought for their survival. This was not a play for the faint-hearted. Nor was it a play that sought to explain why our men and women have been sent out to do battle once more on the ravaged plains of Afghanistan. Last Night, Another Soldier... tried instead to take us to that battlefield and recreate the feelings of a terrified 18-year-old hiding in a maize field from the mob of ‘Tallies’ who have surrounded him and his comrades. What does it feel like to shoot a man in the mouth as he clutches hold of you? How do you push a bayonet into a man’s stomach hard enough to ensure you kill him before he kills you?

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