But those who choose NOT to wear one when the rest of the team are adorning them are villified and pilloried. I am thinking of James McClean of WBA.

My grandad got blown up at Vimy Ridge, they patched him up and sent him back to war. Afterwards he said it was an awful waste and deeply resented having been sent to war and losing the use of his leg.

My father got shrapnel wounds at Monte Casino.

It was important to them to remember lost comrades. And they respected the 'enemy's' right to do the same.

To me this is not political, it is remembrance without critique. Decrying the concept is like saying you can't do anything special for the Day of the Dead in Mexico.

It's what we do, it isn't advertising, it isn't political and it's important.

Edited by Mapletree (03 Nov 2016 4.33pm)

55,000 is still a lot of men. As I said, the public tolerance for war casualties is low. If the US or Britain lost 55,000 troops now there would be outrage.

Never the less, President Putin is watching so we cannot become soft in the way that Corbynistas would like.

In terms of a war its not. That said most of those casualties occurred over a five or six year period. Not compared to between 450-1m VC and NVA deaths. Given the scale of the conflict, the US fatalities are surprisingly low (Of course any single year of that six year period would probably be unacceptable in post-Vietnam US military deployments).

Probably more significant though is the 153,303 Wounded in Action of around 300,000 wounded that required hospital care (Probably the advances in battlefield medicine as a result of WWII and the Korean War meant US fatalities were lower, but serious and significant injuries were higher) and these of course returned home as a permanent testament to the war.

The much shorter, Korean war claimed around 35,000 US servicemen.

Edited by jamiemartin721 (04 Nov 2016 2.26pm)

I think that's probably true, that the reality of war in an increasingly media aware society, is much more pronounced. I think society can be quite 'blood thirsty' in its demands, but quickly shocked into apathy when the bodies start coming home, and the conflict draws out.

Also though I think the Falklands is an oddity in British Deployments, as it was to 'liberate British Territories', even if on hearing of the invasion most people thought the Falklands were off the coast of Scotland somewhere

Conflicts like Afghanistan and Iraq, have a much more abstracted meaning in terms of sacrifice of British Soldiers. We tend to see them as lives lost to pursue political agendas, rather than national security.