They're in the army now

Public reaction to the army's chosen method of quelling a peaceful protest at Safi's detention camp can be divided into roughly three categories: outright condemnation of the army, outright condemnation of the detainees and the inevitable fence-sitters ("it's true that the soldiers were aggressive but the immigrants spit at them and insult them").

Among the welter of platitudes, the accusations of racism and the "Malta for the Maltese" sentiments, no one has seen fit to point out something that is as fundamental as it is obvious. So let me be the first to do so.

If these soldiers cannot take the heat of even the most basic soldiering then they should leave the army and get a job with a private security firm, where nobody will spit at them, or become scout leaders and play at the fun side of soldiering with a crowd of juvenile admirers. They have it easy enough as it is. They have never known any war and probably never will. They will never have to fight in desert or jungle conditions. Or for that matter, any conditions whatsoever.

They never move more than 10 miles from their mothers. They are not obliged to live in barracks. They will never be taken prisoner or sit for months and perhaps years in a PoW camp. They will never look any enemy in the eye or have to kill before they are killed. They will never know hunger, privation or the abysmal conditions of trench warfare. They will never have to hold their friends and colleagues as they die, out in some frozen wasteland. They will never lose limbs, sight or sanity. They will never be tortured. They will never have their legs amputated without anaesthetic in a field hospital, only to die of gangrene or blood poisoning later.

They will never march for days in temperatures of 20 degrees below zero, on minimal food rations. They will never wake up, after sleeping for two hours in the mud, wondering whether this will be their last day on earth. Their bodies will never be placed in a grave among many thousands of others, all of them marked with crosses without a name and a single monument To the Unknown Soldier.

Their wives and mothers will never receive a terse message that regrets to inform them that their husband or son is missing in action, feared dead. They will never have to roll their tanks into Auschwitz and see the full-on horror of the living skeletons they have just liberated. They will never have to wash those living skeletons or try to feed them. They will never go into Bergen Belsen and open the ovens to find people still smouldering inside.

They will never be blown apart, aged 19, in Vietnam. The 2005 equivalent of Wilfred Owen will never write poems about their endurance and their suffering, which future generations will study for their examinations.

Our soldiers simply haven't a clue what it means to be a soldier. They are thoroughly spoilt and, far from feeling any sympathy for them or empathy with their plight, I feel disgust that they see soldiering as just another government job that will give them early retirement and a pension, while allowing them to moonlight here and there. It is too bad that because of the actions and attitude of the few, the many come under scrutiny. If they cannot cope with the kind of pressure that comes from guarding irregular immigrants in a detention camp, then they are not fit to be soldiers.

Sadly, too many of the correspondents seem eager to encourage them in the belief that they are little more than over-grown boy scouts who shouldn't be inconvenienced or put out in any way. I'd like to see these specimens cope with the D-Day Landings but then they probably don't know what the D-Day Landings were. They would probably write to the Ombudsman to complain about the fact that they were forced to land on a frozen deserted beach before dawn, with no access to medical care and people lined up ready to kill them.

Grow up, boys! You're soldiers, not girl guides!