10/09/2026
I read last night that the Government is preparing to mobilise veterans in the event of war and I have to say, it made me angry.
We already served our country. We already signed our lives away once and for some that became very literal.
They never came home.
The majority of veterans like myself watched others pay the ultimate sacrifice. Some of us came home, but parts of us were ripped apart in serving our country too. Some physically, some mentally and some in ways that are probably impossible to explain unless you’ve lived it.
Coming home didn’t necessarily mean coming home whole.
And what happened when we did?
One day you had a purpose. You were trusted with a weapon, trusted with other people’s lives, trusted to make decisions in circumstances most people couldn’t begin to imagine. You had friends and colleagues beside you who you knew would protect your life and you would protect theirs.
Then suddenly the uniform comes off and you’re nobody.
A number.
Literally.
The mental health support wasn’t there. The physical support wasn’t there. Veterans struggled with injuries, employment, relationships, housing and trying to work out where they fitted into a civilian world that had carried on while they were serving.
Some ended up homeless. Some never properly adjusted at all.
We were useful when we wore the uniform. Far too many of us discovered how quickly you became somebody else’s problem when you took it off.
Yet apparently they know where to find us now.
Funny that.
Because while veterans were dealing with all of that, we have watched consecutive governments allow those who served in Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan to be trailed through investigations and courts. Some of those veterans are old men now being hounded to death.
Decisions made in a split second, when the choice could be as simple and as brutal as defend yourself or be killed, have been picked apart years and sometimes decades later by people who have never been there.
People who have never picked up a weapon to defend themselves, their friends or their colleagues. People who have never experienced an attack by gun, mortar or bomb. Never heard incoming fire. Never felt the ground shake below their feet, or see first hand the destruction and death caused by an enemy determined to kill you. They have never known what it is to have seconds, sometimes less, to react.
There was no luxury of hindsight. You made the decision in front of you because your life, or the life of the person beside you, could depend on it.
Yet years later, others have had all the time in the world to scrutinise those few seconds.
Nobody wearing a uniform should be above the law. Of course not.
But don’t send young men and women into those circumstances on behalf of their country and then have people sitting in safety, with years of hindsight, judging decisions they have never had to make and never will.
And after all of that, look at the country now.
We are an island nation and we cannot even control our own borders.
Just think about that.
We apparently need to prepare veterans to defend the United Kingdom from an external threat while our own governments cannot even control who is entering the country.
So what exactly would we be fighting for?
Because despite everything, I am still fiercely patriotic. I love my country. I was proud to serve it and I will always be proud that I wore the uniform.
But there is a massive difference between patriotism towards your country and loyalty towards the people governing it.
My loyalty was earned by the people I served beside. People who would have put themselves between me and a bullet and knew I would have done exactly the same for them.
It isn’t automatically owed to politicians.
We gave our youth to this country. We gave our service. We gave parts of our bodies and minds that some of us never got back.
And some gave absolutely everything.
There are families who gave a son, a daughter, a husband, a wife, a father or a mother to this country and they never got them back at all.
So don’t forget veterans when they’re struggling. Don’t fail them mentally and physically. Don’t allow them to fall through every crack there is. Don’t spend decades dragging others back through investigations and courts. Don’t preside over a country that many of us barely recognise anymore…
and then suddenly remember our service numbers because you might need us again.
We are not equipment sitting in storage waiting to be taken back out when required.
We are people.
We already served. We already sacrificed. A lot have already died.
And some of us who came home have carried the cost of that service ever since.
So before anybody in Westminster starts making plans about mobilising the UK’s veterans, perhaps they should ask themselves a much more uncomfortable question.
Why on earth would we pick up a weapon for you now?
I am a patriot. Always have been and always will be.
But I am a patriot to my country, not to those who are destroying it and certainly not to those who seek to destroy those who went before us.
And perhaps that is what Westminster has forgotten.
