MSP: 51st parade emotional

Jun 10 2008 by Roseanna Cunningham MSP

WE have had some beautiful weather for a change and none more beautiful than Sunday, when many of us gathered to take part in the final parade of the veterans of the 51st Highland Division.

These events can be quite emotional and this one for me specially so because my father was in the 51st. He wasn't much of a one for parades of any kind and certainly he never took part in any veteran events.

Truth be told, he didn't like to talk about his wartime experiences and on the rare occasions when he did speak about what happened it was always some funny story that he had to tell. A joke. A daft event. Never anything serious.

If it wasn't for the pictures of him standing next to big artillery pieces or wearing a parachute you might have gotten the impression that for him the six years from 1939-45 were all about parade ground antics and mucking about in the mess hall.

We didn't even know he'd been injured three times until after he died in the early 90s. But we knew he’d had a long, hard war and on Sunday we were honouring others who also had a long, hard war.

Sometimes World War II can seem immeasurably distant in time, yet it’s as close as my dad and as close as the men and women who are still here and able to tell us about it.

No dubiety about that war. No mistaking the rights and wrongs of it. No wondering why we had to fight. Even if you had any doubts, they were swept away once the horror of the concentration camps became known to the world, but few would have had any doubts in the face of Hitler's Germany. That war really was one fought for our freedom.

Would that all wars were so justified.

I had a relative killed in World War I. Some of you may know that many Scottish schools are taking pupils over to France and Belgium, to the battlefields and the war graves. My 16-year-old niece is about to go and remembering that someone on my mother's side of the family died there, my brother and I have been doing a bit of digging. There he is, in the KOSB, dead at 22 at Ypres. No grave by the looks of it but his name is on the memorial at the Menin Gate.

If WWII seems long gone in time, how much further does WWI seem? Yet, knowing the name of a great, great uncle who died in that carnage brings it closer for a 16-year-old who has never had to endure the loss of a loved one in such circumstances.

Yet even now there will be 16-year-olds whose brothers or uncles or fathers are running the same risks in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The more dubious morality of these wars doesn't take away from the sacrifice of the individual soldiers and their families.

Here's hoping they will soon all be home.