Military Migrants: Fighting for Your Country by Vron Ware – review

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/nov/25/military-migrants-vron-ware-review

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About halfway into this extraordinary journey through the British army, a funeral occurs. And why not? Soldiers are nowadays horribly accustomed to the last bugle salute to that latest victim of our unwinnable wars. But this one is different.

It involves the burial of the wife of a Fijian soldier, herself a sergeant in the Adjutant General's Corps. The widower, Will, also a soldier, but, more importantly, a member of a ruling family in Fiji, decided that rather than repatriate her body, he would blend customs of home with the couple's married life in the army. According to Fijian practice, the body is handed over by the dead woman's family (who have flown from Fiji) to the officiating party – the army in this case – and left in state overnight before funeral rites.

These are administered in the presence of regimental colonels and, says Will, "brigadiers, commandants came down there. Beautiful I would say. Not a pleasant thing for me, but the army's seen how we work as a culture … this was the living example".

It is a vivid and deeply moving scene and one that cuts to the core of what is happening within Britain's armed forces.

The issue of what constitutes the British military as defender of – or, more often, overseas fighting machine for – our contemporary, multiracial society is a burning issue, "a supremely social issue, as well as an intensely political one", says Ware.

But it is largely hidden from public discourse by a mix of secrecy, fantasy versions of military life emblazoned across the tabloids and Ministry of Defence "spin" about how harmoniously diverse our armed forces have become.

The reality is far more complex, and occasionally brutal, than any of these and hard to determine. Ware charts two convergences, of themes that occurred in what feels like reverse order. In 1998, the New Labour government faced a chronic shortage of troops. They were also determined to rectify a situation whereby only 1% of those serving in the armed forces were from an ethnic minority background, due in part to tradition and racist quota systems.

A decade on from 1998, that figure of 1% had become a respectable 9%. Two-thirds of these joined as Commonwealth citizens, leaving the level of UK-born soldiers barely rising above earlier levels.

Ware is a veteran of campaigning and research on race and racism. This book is the fruit of several years intimate access to garrisons, military recruitment procedures and ethnic minority soldiers specifically, at a depth never achieved before. The result is riveting and nuanced, so that claims of "zero tolerance" by the MoD are as spurious as any blanket assertion that "the army is racist".

At the outset, Ware makes one crucial distinction – between the cultures of martial institutions and civilian ones – and one crucial connection: what the military is doing now in terms of workforce recruitment is little different from what the civilian economy did during the Windrush years of the 50s – importing black labour to do jobs that whites are decreasingly inclined to do. She makes a barbed point about the need to scour the remnants of empire to find the "labour force" that enables Britain to act as military valet (at best, lapdog at worst) to the United States.

But her story is made of the vernacular details of how recruits from Fiji, Nepal, Africa and the Caribbean cope with the army – and how the imperial and regimental ethos of the army copes with having enticed them to serve.

Tensions are usually subtle, arising because Commonwealth recruits are older, surprised by "swearing, disrespect for elders boasting about sex, drink and drugs" – and torn between their inevitable sticking together and the need to assimilate into the army's ethos.

There's touching camaraderie among those at a literacy class that includes Andy from Sunderland, Saul from Ghana, Jimmy from Dewsbury and Chris from Gambia, before heading out to "Afghan", as Andy calls it, where illiteracy and innumeracy "would endanger their own lives, let alone the safety of others".

Most senior officers want this to work – Ware reminds us that of Wellington's 75,000 troops at Waterloo, 26,000 were Portuguese and 5,000 German. However, a colonel confides: "I still get people who say give me 50 white South Africans and you can have all my west Africans", while at the political level Nick Harvey, then Lib-Dem defence spokesman, obnoxiously urges "some sort of natural limit to quite how far it's desirable for this to go".

But then, after the moving moment of the Fijian funeral, the army's efforts and Ware's collateral established, the book turns a hinge. Part III – Racism – begins with Prince Harry's "Paki" moment and its echoes back at barracks.

Kwaku, from Ghana, is bent on promotion in the Royal Logistics Corps, convinced that he works enough to earn it, but is passed over in favour of white soldiers who "stay in the rest rooms, chill out, have brew... people don't want us to progress," he concludes.

Then there is the misery of the wives and families, such as Gurinder who, after marriage to Sukhdev – enlisted during a recruiting drive of Sikhs, despite his drunk-driving conviction – "spent the first months of her new life in tears".

The bittersweet readability of this book lies in the soldiers' stories. Ware's descriptions and citations of the migrant soldiers have a compassionate light touch, not without droll humour.

There's a Gambian, amazed that English lads swear at their mothers. Cherry from Kenya is heading for the air corps having worked for KLM, while the famed Gurkhas "generally speaking join for the money – Nepal is a poor place," says one of their ranks.

Then of course there is the small matter of English weather, which comes as quite a shock for four lads from Belize, marshalled for a strenuous run within 24 hours of arrival from the Gulf of Mexico. They tell Ware how they suffered excruciating pain "breathing in cold air for the first time in their lives".

More enlightened military officers and ranks, as well as defence experts, will respect this book for its uncompromisingly rigorous research; this is the definitive work on its subject. And the country at large needs to address Ware's questioning of "whether military labour is intrinsically different from any other sector, and therefore whether migrant soldiers are due special rewards or exemptions".

Ware points out with quiet rage that even after a decade of heavy recruiting in Fiji, the death of Petero Suesue, cousin to one of Ware's characters, in Afghanistan is seen by the <em>Daily Mail</em> as that of "a Fijian serving with British forces", rather than "in" them. In this regard, her book is a stark indictment of how Britain refuses to accept those it calls to fight for the realm.

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