Corporal Stuart Pearson (Scott Kyle) has to deal with his own leg being blown off (everyone in 3 Para had basic medical training, as you might glean from the film). Though they take precautions in trying to reach Hale, there is soon another explosion and more are wounded. Medic Lance Corporal Paul “Tug” Hartley (Mark Stanley) hurries down with other soldiers. “It was as if I’d stood on a banana skin.” The bottom half of his leg is gone. “I didn’t see a flash or feel a blast or heat,” the real Hale said later. Then, all of a sudden, Lance-Corporal Stuart Hale (Benjamin O’Mahony) finds one of those Soviet mines. Three soldiers walk down a goat track towards the checkpoint. God knows what we’re going to leave behind.” Good question. “This country’s full of shit left behind when armies fucked off,” says one. It’s too far away for a sniper to take out the suspects, so they decide to go down to investigate. The soldiers spot what appears to be an illegal Taliban checkpoint set up on the road below their observation post. There and here, it makes an important point: that the most recent Afghanistan campaign has historical echoes in the Anglo-Afghan wars of the 19th century. It is quoted in Patrick Bishop’s 3 Para, a gripping history of the battle group in Afghanistan. One of the soldiers, armed with a Penguin classics edition, reads out a few lines of a poem: “When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains/ And the women come out to cut up what remains/ Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains/ An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.” This is from Rudyard Kipling’s The Young British Soldier, published in his 1892 volume Barrack-Room Ballads. The film neatly underlines this when the men return to Observation Post Normandy, a tiny camp at which members of 3 Para Mortar Platoon and 3 Para Support Company are bivouacked. The unspoken question behind the film is set up: what are British soldiers doing in Afghanistan, anyway? Some critics have felt this film lacks engagement with the local population or the wider scope of the war, but surely that’s exactly the point: these soldiers are just ordinary blokes (they’re all blokes), a long way from home, doing an incredibly dangerous job without much sense of why. “Don’t pick a fight with an armed midget,” his buddy warns him. “I’m here trying to bring peace and love to your fucking stone-age country,” he explains. One of the men of 3 Para is addressing two Afghan boys who have just nearly killed him while indulging in the adorable childhood pastime of grenade-fishing. The film begins on 5 September 2006 near the Kajaki dam in Helmand province. The 3 Para Battle Group was deployed in Afghanistan in 2006. The 3rd Battalion, Parachute Regiment (known as 3 Para) of the British army originated in the second world war.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |