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12 April 2007 Edition

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Fifth Column

Myers blasts Britannia’s surrender monkeys

Kevin Myers, still occupying “some corner of a foreign field that is forever England” (i.e. the Irish Independent in Talbot Street), is disgusted by the ease with which a sea patrol of Britain’s reputedly super elite Royal Marine Commandos were captured by Iranian Revolutionary Guards in disputed waters off Iraq.
In his Indo column last Friday, Myers all but insisted that the ‘Fish-head 15’ should have done a water version of Rorke’s Drift and gone down with all guns blazing, if necessary, to protect the honour of the Royal Navy and queen and country.
“The Royal Navy might just as well have deployed a boating party from the Much-Swiving-on-Thames branch of the Women’s Institute,” Myers scoffed. “They would have been equally effective in policing the waterways – and you can be sure that the Beryls and the Violets of much-derided Middle England would rather go skinny dipping in public than denounce their government on hostile TV.”
But why is Myers’s blood boiling? Because he’s a kick-ass US Marine!!! He is. Oooooh.
 “I am proud to declare that I am an honorary member of the US Marine Corps,” Myers harrumphs before blood-thirstily screaming about “the warrior spirit”.
Given that Marine Myers knows how to really kick the Shi-ite out of those pesky Persian pirates, one might wonder what’s taking the Talbot Street grunt so long to grab a gun and buy a one-way ticket to the war zone. John Wayne wouldn’t wait.

The woman sunk the Marines

It was the woman’s fault, insists Myers, launching a barrage of mysoginist missiles at females who aren’t in their proper place. And the only female among the stray Brits, Leading Seaman Faye Turney, is one of them.
“Yet despite the debacle, the utter debacle, of the group solidarity of the British captives after just a day when the sole woman member did a deal with her captors,” Myers fumed, “do you think the imbecilic feminisation of the armed forces of Western countries is going to be halted? Of course not.”
Oh, yes, offer a woman captive a fag and a cup of tea and all those beefy, butch blokes’ tough commando training disappears in a puff of Benson & Hedges and they degenerate into tea-drinking surrender monkeys. But Whitehall also comes under fire from the Talbot Street grunt.
“The only probable change in Britain is that one of those ghastly, simpering viragoes in Blair’s gang is going to suggest that, henceforth, the term ‘seaman’ be dropped as sexist and replaced by ‘seaperson’. No, I’m not joking. Just watch.”
Just watch your blood pressure, Kevin. You might have to be treated by a woman. Then again, you think that’s one of the few things they are good for.

No surrender

Myers snarls defiantly from his well-upholstered bunker in Ballymore Eustace (well out of range of the bad boys in Baghdad or Basra):
“No US Marine would have been captured so easily,” Not even an honorary US Marine, no doubt.
Let’s hope there are no Iranian Revolutionary Guards taking a boating holiday in Ireland who stumble across him on the River Liffey. They won’t know what’s hit them.

Sailors’ sale for bounty

No doubt, Myers will be equally aghast that not only have the lily-livered Fish-head 15 not gone down in a blaze of glory but they were given permission by the Ministry of Defence to sell their the story of their ‘ordeal’ to the Fleet Street tabloids.
May I join the chorus of condemnation?
If the MoD had allowed soldiers to cash in on their capture when they were slugging it out with the IRA in the fields of South Armagh, East Tyrone and Derry, then there would have been shed-loads of Brits surrendering by the Saracen-load to the Chucks to sell their stories to the tabloids and the war would have been over a lot sooner.

Face value

Isn’t it interesting how Fleet Street has taken the word of their tea-drinking surrender monkeys at face value when it rubbished claims that internees and prisoners held in Castlereagh in the 1970s and 1980s – who had suffered sensory deprivation abuse even harsher than the poor Royal Marines – had lied or even beat themselves up?
A trip down
Memory Sea Lane
The British sailors’ ‘ordeal’ takes me back to two other famous boarding incidents of British vessels in disputed international waters by revolutionary guards – the seizure and sinking of two British coal ships – the Nellie M and the St Bedan – in the space of a year in Lough Foyle in 1981 and 1982.
In both incidents, up to a dozen armed IRA Volunteers commandeered the ships. During the sinking of the Nellie M, the IRA unit, after placing explosive charges around the vessel, put the crew in a lifeboat with the intention of letting them make their own way safely to shore. When the crew said they feared the tide would sweep them out to sea, the IRA Volunteers towed them most of the way to land before the £3 million ship was sunk with its £1 million cargo.
The skipper later spoke of the IRA Volunteers’ professionalism and understanding. The Sun didn’t buy that story.


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