Current light reading includes Alastair Leithead’s reporter’s diary (blog perhaps?). He’s the BBC man embedded with Royal Marines in Afghanistan’s south Helmand province.
There’s nothing like sweating blood in the field to have some nit picked by a reader, but Leithead’s evidently got shoulders as broad as, well the rest of him (see The Guardian‘s Ben Hammersley‘s pic left) …he’s already confessed to setting fire to a Marine’s rucksack. So here goes. Here is Leithead describing a night skirmish:
…there was a pause and a crack as a rocket roared from the roof – three men had moved into the open, again the Marines said they had been identified as Taleban through high-tech viewing equipment.
The rocket was guided at them – one Marine said he saw it “charging towards them, they looked up and then they disappeared.”
The radio again confirmed all three men had been killed – there was a strong reaction from the Marines behind the sandbags.
The italics are my annoying quibble. I have a problem with ‘strong reaction.’ It’s a euphemism. Were the Marines touched by the tragic necessity that ended three lives? Or chuffed at killing men who were probably intent on killing them?
Shouldn’t we set the euphemisms aside, and let readers judge the appropriateness of their reaction? If the Marines and the public can be trusted to forgive Alastair his accidental pyromania, they might also be trusted to exercise mature judgment on this.