Respect and gratitude for the military

[22/7 Master]

Apologies to Rudyard

I grew up in the Falklands,
My name is the Sea King Four,
The forgotten Fleet Air Arm Cousin I,
Not quite Dark Blue, Green or Crab Velour.

Used thru the eighties in my main role,
Collecting mail for the master race,
Daylight SAR on a carrier,
Leaving Egg on Pinger’s Face.

Then in the early Nineties,
Came the big Gulf War,
I hung around on a love boat,
With Nurses by the Score.

They Said ‘No troops who went to Iraq’,
Will be Kurdistan bound,
It applied not to the Junglies,
And in Kurdistan I could be found.

At the same time I was in Ulster,
Which you could still call it back then,
By the time they finally let me go,
The years that past were ten.

And at the time (again),
In Bosnia I could be found,
And it was another 6 years
Before I was Blighty bound.

But before I even left there,
On OCEAN I was parked
I was Tony Blair’s ‘force for good’.
For I ran each time he barked.

In OCEAN we toured the Cesspits*
No budget for a run ashore,
No one wants 2000 marines about,
So we just hit Freetown’s barren shore.

* Insert Nicagagura/Honduras/Turkey/Sierra Leone/Sierra Leone (again) as required.

Then Saddam ‘dissed’ Barbara Bush again,
By God, or Allah, a mistake,
It was off to hit the Gulf again,
But the WMD they all proved fake.

It must be said I’ve been under the knife,
Almost every single year,
But my gearbox is still the same,
And so is my lifting gear.

So I’ll have to give up woodbines,
Before I join the ‘Stan.
But thank you Mr Carson,
I am your greatest fan.

So as you remember the Falklands,
Remember also this,
I still scramble on orders,
Even when Tony Blair, or Gordon now, still extract the pi$$.

Hollow praise is not for I,
‘Or Tommy and Jack did good’,
Just the funds to do my job,
And, oh, some decent pay for my boys, if you could.

So in another ten years,
When I'm on (my last) death bed,
If you just say I did my job,
I'll be happy, enough said.