Fighting

I’ll make a bit of a generalisation and say that general standard of reporting of warfare is poor. Journalists speak of “military officials” when they mean officers, describe every armoured vehicle they see as a tank and every burst of shots they hear as machine gun fire.

Just ocassionally though you come across something absolutely brilliant, like Audrey Gillan’s report of an intense engagement between soldiers of the 2nd Batallion, the Merican Regiment and the Taliban in southern Afghanistan last September. It’s accompanied by an interactive presentation where the soldiers give their own account of events accompanied a graphic representaion of the engagement.

The main thing that strikes me about it is that it shows how little land warfare has changed, in spite of all the technological advances. So much still hangs on the private soldier, the NCO and the junior officer and their willingness to stick together.

Tags: Afghanistan, The British Army, the Mercian Regiment, the Taliban