Last week, I discussed monsters.
It wasn’t a way to look at those evil creatures that are out there coming to eat us in the night while they breathe fire and destroy cities, I was more interested in how the monster exists on both sides of the fighting in stories, and that ‘our’ monsters are the ones who do the most brutal things but do it by way of protection of society. I used the SAS as an example.
This week I want to consider those monsters again but this time, how they’re all too often seen as a necessary evil but nothing that ‘polite society’ wants to admit to or acknowledge.
We can accept that there are dirty jobs that need to be completed for the good of the whole and that those jobs are going to make the people who do them dirty as well, but are we willing to help clean them when their work is done?
There are stories out there which deal with the idea of very often military people being conveniently forgotten when the dirty job they were performing was no longer well viewed and this turns into a revenge motive for the antagonist or the like. If you’ve seen the film The Rock you’ll be familiar with the idea. Awful deeds needed to be done for the good of the whole and then the people who did what had to be done were forgotten about.
A real life example comes from the members of Bomber Command during the Second World War.
This was dirty work which got everyone involved very, very, dirty.
Come the end of the war, Bomber Command was missing from speeches by Churchill et al as there became the feeling that the Allies had done terrible things via Bomber Command so maybe they shouldn’t be celebrated in the same way. The leaders had been happy to send the monsters out, but admitting to them became a step too far.
We hear stories today of veterans being denied the support they need after they’ve left service, of struggles due to massive injuries, of the mental suffering of those who may have seen some of the most shattering things imaginable because they were doing the dirty work, they were our monsters because we needed them to be.
Now I’m not aiming for a ‘bang the drum, yay the military’ kind of post but it’s important to remember that, much like the swan’s legs, there are things happening all the time that we don’t have any knowledge of that keep everything above the surface looking serene. There are people out there in the dark who make sure that the dirty work gets completed so no-one else has to do it and I think that recognition needs to be spread about.
I’m writing a series of books which has mansions filled with staff members who have to do everything to keep the place going and it’s all too easy to see them as faceless nobodies. I made sure to address this very point and show a change to accept everyone rather than just those at the top.
We’re all in this together you know so we need to look after everyone we can.
Stay safe all.
Owen Elgie 
You may be interested to know, if you don’t already, that there is, in Lincoln, England , a museum dedicated to Bomber Command. They describe themselves on their website as ‘Memorial with interactive displays, gardens, spire & a wall of names dedicated to Bomber Command.’
Mind you, most of us are now different than in WW2. We find any attack on civilians and civilian structures appalling, but we didn’t then.
Yet we still laud Barnes Wallace for his bouncing bomb which killed around 1,300 people. Civilians!
As a race, we are ambivalent about these monsters. If no one had them, would we need them? If no country had armed forces, would we need them? And finally, if borders had been drawn with some thought to the people who live there, would we need them?