Societies often have trouble assimilating those who return from war. Half a century before Vietnam, Wilfred Owen wrote of the survivors of World War One: “A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,May creep back, silent, to still village wellsUp half-known roads.”
But there is something distinctively modern and distinctively shameful about the story which has just reached a conclusion in Surrey over the Headley Court rehabilitation centre for servicemen near Epsom. Mole Valley District Council has finally rejected a petition from local residents to stop a house in nearby Ashtead being used by relatives of injured service personnel. Amazingly, 86 residents signed a petition objecting to the conversion of the house – which will now, thank goodness, go ahead, enabling our wounded soldiers to see their families much more often. Having just returned from America, where servicemen are cherished and honoured, I find this incident all the more disgraceful and baffling. To object to a particular war or even all wars is a core democratic right, and, as Tony Blair knows all too well, the politicians who make the decisions are there to be punished when the public believes that a military action was wrong. But no civilised community takes out its feelings on its servicemen. What was going on in the Surrey case? Not left-wing fury at Iraq, clearly. More likely the worst form of NIMBY-ism, symptomatic of a more general turning away from and boredom with the problems of the world. Truly sickening.
Matthew Dancona
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