{"id":289244,"date":"2017-01-09T12:58:01","date_gmt":"2017-01-09T11:58:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/military-training-more-traumatizing-than-war-say-british-army-veterans\/"},"modified":"2017-01-09T12:58:01","modified_gmt":"2017-01-09T11:58:01","slug":"military-training-more-traumatizing-than-war-say-british-army-veterans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/military-training-more-traumatizing-than-war-say-british-army-veterans\/","title":{"rendered":"Military training more traumatizing than war, say British Army veterans"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>        Military training may do more psychological damage than war itself, particularly to the British Army\u2019s child recruits, a veterans\u2019 group claims.<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>A group of former military personnel will hand\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/vfpuk.org\/2017\/end-the-brutalisation-of-children\/\">a letter<\/a> to the Ministry of Defense (MoD) on Monday, calling for an end to what it sees as the brutalizing recruitment and training of 16 and 17-year-olds. The delivery of the letter coincides with the release of a video testimony by soldiers themselves.<\/p>\n<p>The group claims in its letter that as \u201c<em>veterans of every conflict in which this country has been involved since the Second World War<\/em>\u201d they have seen that \u201c<em>16 and 17-year-olds are too young to be recruited and trained for war.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"900\" height=\"506\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/XCleQcH8pho?list=PLIzn4bJUcYbEYtIl4W3sT7WbnXTPoxn2P\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>We have been through military training; it is a brutal form of psychological conditioning designed to fundamentally alter the way your mind works, leaving the army in control of what you value and how you react,<\/em>\u201d the group said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>These values and reactions are very difficult to switch off and cause all sorts of problems later on in civilian life. No other country in Europe subjects 16-year-olds to this process, it\u2019s time this country caught up.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The campaign is being fronted by Veterans for Peace UK (VFPUK) in conjunction with the human rights NGO <a href=\"https:\/\/www.child-soldiers.org\/news\/army-training-harmful\">Child Soldiers International<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The testimony comes in the form of short video interviews, including former child recruit Wayne Sharrocks, who joined the army at 17 before serving in Afghanistan as part of the Rifles infantry unit and the Special Forces Support Group (SFSG).<\/p>\n<p>He witnessed his colleagues being maimed by hidden bombs and was himself badly wounded by an improvised explosive device (IED).<\/p>\n<p>He and others cover topics like recruiting, training and the reality of killing in war.<\/p>\n<p>However, despite his wartime trials, Sharrocks said that training itself can cause lasting mental damage by creating \u201c<em>an insane amount of aggression<\/em>\u201d which cannot simply be \u201c<em>switched off.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n<div class=\"arcticle__read-more read-more\">\n<p>Read more<\/p>\n<p>    <a class=\"read-more__link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.rt.com\/uk\/363157-army-child-soldiers-recruitment\/\" target=\"_blank\"><br \/>\n                    <img decoding=\"async\" class=\"read-more__cover\" src=\"https:\/\/img.rt.com\/files\/2016.10\/thumbnail\/5805e6ccc46188d0568b4567.jpg\" alt=\"\u00a9 Eddie Keogh \"\/><br \/>\n    <\/a>\n<\/div>\n<p>\u201c<em>You\u2019re crawling through mud and [are] screamed at, kicked, punched while you\u2019re on the floor, anything to get you angry&#8230; enough to stab another man on the flick of a switch. For a young person at 16 that\u2019s pretty traumatic.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Sharrocks also said that rather than the advertised sense of camaraderie, it is a \u201c<em>gang mentality<\/em>\u201d that the military aims to instill \u2013 which can have serious negative effects on internal culture.<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>You either conform, or you don\u2019t and you\u2019re separated from the pack and you\u2019re going to be preyed on. So you can either be the person that\u2019s preying on people or the person that\u2019s preyed on, it\u2019s like survival of the fittest, basically,<\/em>\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>So these people that aren\u2019t the fittest or mentally the fittest, they\u2019re going to get preyed on and people are going to take advantage of that.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The military has long maintained that recruiting under-18s is a good way to provide skills and training which benefit the majority of recruits in the long term.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Via <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rt.com\/uk\/373046-army-basic-training-trauma\/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=RSS\">RT<\/a>. This piece was reprinted by <a href=\"http:\/\/rinf.com\">RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission or license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Military training may do more psychological damage than war itself, particularly to the British Army\u2019s child recruits, a veterans\u2019 group claims. A group of former military personnel will hand\u00a0a letter to the Ministry of Defense (MoD) on Monday, calling for an end to what it sees as the brutalizing recruitment and training of 16 and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":289245,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-289244","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=289244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289244\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/289245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=289244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=289244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=289244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}