Al R
I don't think anyone is telling you how to grieve. Thank goodness you have the balls to say what you feel...it does help. The bitch is more about the "hangers on" whose public display of grief to somebody they did not know and have never met is not always welcomed and often inappropriate.
However I would never wish to stop them, simply ask that what they say and do is rational.
But are we not cut from the same cloth.. have we not got onboard the same sweaty and smelly C130's.. have we not grumbled in gunsheds about the same things as these people, have we not drunk enough of the same ****ty mess beer? What more do we have to do to care for them, as we do our own?
Grief isn't rational, I feel for these guys a damned site more than I do the victims of Potters Bar, even though.. yes, I've travelled on trains and yes, I've grumbled about British Rail. We have an intangible link, and for someone to tell me HERE of all places that I should show grief iaw QR xyz is crap. Again, have they nothing better to do?? I'm stumped. I am almost effervescent with anger at their stupidity and insensitivity.
I may have been imbued with a different doctrine, but I know that you die for your mates and they die for you.. none of this Queen and Country stuff. With Chris, although I never knew him, I wore the same flash as him, with
intense pride and loyalty, and I know what he will have gone through before the event. He could have been me, or anyone of those of us who joined up 25 years before. He was dealt a bum hand, but he has done more than ANYTHING anyone from Torpy downwards has done here (who can't even be arsed to say something on the MoD website by the way).. he has lost his life in the service of the Royal f#cking Air Force. And if the small minded amongst us can't even allow that to pass without inferring some kind of rules about how we personally express ourselves, then its a sad day indeed, and you're certainly not part of what I emotionally and mentally hitched aboard.
This has nothing to do with casual observers.. I have that link with him, and at least in the RAF Regiment, we are the same band of brothers, end of story. If someone else can't relate to that, its not my problem, and I certainly don't think that there are any grounds for sniping because of it. And the fact that I have to articulate that, or defend it, is almost obscene.