"Three or four of us were Brits. There were some Irish as well. Most were Indian.Like a scene in an old-fashioned movie.
"We’d never met each other but I have to say, it was a true British stiff upper-lip situation. Together, the Brits helped to keep up morale. ...
"We all decided that even though we had alcohol within reach we wouldn’t touch it because it seemed like a bad idea to get drunk.
"But come 5am, we were fairly confident the police were going to get us out, so I marched over to the bar and found a bottle of vintage Cristal champagne and opened it and began pouring it into glasses.
"Then the head waiter came rushing across to me and said, 'No, no, you can’t do that!' and I said, 'Well we’re going to' and he said, 'No sir, those are the wrong type of glasses. I shall find you champagne flutes.'
"And he did. The service was immaculate."
Via Blackberry, Hayward got news and encouragement, including, from his boss, some lines from the poem "The Private Of The Buffs," which is about a young British soldier dying rather than kowtowing to the Chinese. What lines? Perhaps:
Yes, honor calls!—with strength like steel"The vision" is the vision of home.
He put the vision by.
Let dusky Indians whine and kneel;
An English lad must die.
And thus, with eyes that would not shrink,
With knee to man unbent,
Unfaltering on its dreadful brink,
To his red grave he went.
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4 comments:
People are going to spend money to see the current murk that purports to call itself James Bond, A Quorum of Lozenges, or whatever the hell they call it...hell, just film this!
Must remember to bring my champaigne flutes into combat next time...
As with the nearby post about jurors seeing movies, I sometimes think we all think we're living in a movie, because we've seen so many thousands of them.
For days to come, we're going to be reading these noble tales of individual heroism and imagining how they will look on the silver screen.
In reality, however, what we should be considering is how to utterly end this terrorist scourge on humanity.
Consider this:
"The supporting [Pakistani terrorist organizational] structures for the proxy war in J&K [Jammu and Kashmir] are much more complex and go beyond Pakistan's unstated policies or strategic objectives. Some of these structures have developed their own dynamics… Since the end of the Cold War, these structures have embedded themselves deeply in the political economy of the region. The Pakistani state does not control them but merely exercises influence over them and is able to exploit them to serve its own strategic designs. It is due to the advantages accruing from these structures that Pakistan has been able to engage India militarily for more than a decade through a proxy war, with little cost to itself."
[From counterterrorismblog.org, quoting a scholarly article]
Basically, Pakistan has plausible deniability over what just happened. It was an act of war. If, however, India responds with conventional military tactics, such as a land invasion to overthrow the Pakistani regime, it knows that Pakistan has a first-strike nuclear doctrine. (In 1999 India and Pakistan came pretty darn close to nuclear war, because of the byzantine, incompetent, and ruthless behavior of Pakistan's government. Here's an NSC report on the war.)
So, if India tries to conquer Pakistan it inherits that country's absymal problems and it gets nuked. If it launches a massive pre-emptive nuclear strike against Pakistan, in violation of its own stated nuclear doctrine, it becomes the villain. Should India start launching its own plausibly deniable terrorist attacks against Pakistan to ratchet up the urban violence so that both sides find it intolerable and thus come to the table? Many Pakistanis already believe that there's a multinational plot to dismember Pakistan, giving part of it to India and creating new mini-nations from the present one. If that's the right goal, how would it be achieved?
Britain is not dead yet! Another story that really moved me is how the staff put themselves between the guests and the terrorists. True heroes.
sort of puts the British Navy is a sad light. Their Iranian hostages come to mind.
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