Rose Gentle’s Rage

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http://www.sundayherald.com/44361

In her first major interview, the mother of a 19-year-old soldier blown up in Basra explains why she believes he was murdered by the British government
By Susan Flockhart

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MURDER is an ugly word. But Rose Gentle hates euphemisms about falling on battlefields or being “killed in action”. Two months ago in Basra, her 19-year-old son, Gordon, died when a roadside bomb exploded, and as far as Gentle is concerned, he was murdered. “If somebody puts a bomb under John Prescott’s feet and he stands on it, that’s murder,” she reasons. “It’s like getting stabbed in the street.” So who is the murderer? Gentle isn’t saying the Iraqis are blameless and she’d like to get her hands on whoever planted that bomb. But the bulk of her ire is directed towards the British government, who she thinks used her son as “a bit of meat” in a conflict she describes as “a war over oil”.

Gentle, from Pollok in Glasgow, is not an experienced polemicist. And there are those who clearly think people like her should keep out of a debate that has the potential to bring down governments on both sides of the Atlantic. Since Gentle and her 14-year-old daughter, Maxine, travelled to Downing Street to hand-deliver an angry letter, there have been mutterings about damage to military morale and suggestions that grieving relatives like the Gentles are being exploited by anti-war campaigners. Soldiers, say critics, sign up in the knowledge that they just might get killed.

But Rose Gentle is smart enough to know that things aren’t that simple. “Look out there,” she says, pointing through the window of her impeccably neat front room, “and tell me 18-year-olds around here are aware of what’s happening in wars.” In this street she reckons only three or four lads have work – as part-time school cleaners. “That’s no job for a young boy.” Before he signed up, her son was on £42 weekly benefit. After dropping into his local JobCentre last November, Gordon got talking to the chaps on the army recruitment stall. Next thing his parents knew, officers were calling at their house and driving him to the recruitment office to watch videos. Sure, Gentle and her husband, George, tried to talk him out of it. “But he turned round and said, ‘There’s nothing much happening here’. All Gordon wanted was his driving licence and a trade as a mechanic. He thought, ‘If I join the army, I’ll get my trade, a driving licence.’ He always said after he came back from Iraq, he’d have his driving licence, get a car. But he never got a chance to do any of that.”

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She’s mad at John Prescott, the “arrogant man” who invited the Gentles into the Downing Street office during Tony Blair’s absence, then talked so much “rubbish” she and Maxine stormed out. She’s outraged at “con man” George Bush, and incensed by our “halfwit” Prime Minister who was so busy “sunshining himself” on holiday, his letter of condolence didn’t arrive until seven weeks after Gordon’s death. If Tony Blair really believed in this war, why didn’t he encourage his own sons to get out there and fight?

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