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This is one of the stories collected on the 25th October 2003 at the CSV's Make a Difference Day held at ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Manchester. The story was typed and entered on to the site by a CSV volunteer with kind permission.

Alan’s Story.

My training was done in the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Guard. I can remember being trained by a real hardened soldier. We were stood in a trench one time and this sergeant told us to pull out our grenade pins and hold onto the lever, we were going to throw them out. With this we all pulled the pins from our grenades ready to throw. He then told us to put our pins back in. We stood and looked at each other, then on the floor. On of the main things to remember is to hold onto the pin of a grenade just in case! We would have got out of that trench pretty quickly I can tell you if anyone had let go of their lever! I think it taught everyone a lesson pretty quickly.
There was a lot of 1st World War equipment knocking about, it was still usable but killing took a little longer with it but we just had to struggle by with it.

It’s very hard to get anybody to admit that they have killed, but you had to out of necessity. One of the problems is that the people who have done it have to try to dismiss it from their mind. It’s so horrible to have to kill somebody, but often it’s in self defence it’s one on one. Nobody likes to admit when they come home that they have been I that position, it’s unpalatable to say the least.

I always remember a friend of mine who was in the SAS, commando unit, said that the first time he stuck a bayonet on somebody he looked into his eyes and he knew he had to get him, it was either kill or be killed. It’s sad, it must live with you. The first time I stuck a bayonet into a sack it made me sick, thinking I may have to do it for real at some time, but that’s war isn’t it? The boys in Iraq don’t have to do that do they? They are remote. You see when you have done it with a bayonet you have to go and look what you have done, that’s the dirty bit of the war. You see it on the television, you hear rat tat a tat and someone falls dead, you don’t know if they have a family children or whatever, that’s the sad dirty bit of the war. It is always difficult to say if it can be justified, society has changed but the first and second world wars were very much like that.

Today the discipline of killing is very complex, it’s diabolical, it’s annihilation really if you think about it! If you think about the weapons in the 1st and 2nd World War compared to the modern weapons it’s horrific. It’s just a shame that all this marvellous technology that we have is devoted to killing, you find that lots of technology that is being developed is a product of weapons technology. I can’t understand where they find all these millions from.

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