The sun is out and the boys and girls of Waterloo Company are sitting on the grass, cracking jokes and singing Westlife hits. Were it not for the guns and cammo fatigues, the scene would look like a scout jamboree. Can this really be the same group of people that the anti-war movement is trying to ban from campus?
The students in the Glasgow branch of the Officer Training Corps (OTC) are shocked to think that anyone could be opposed to their activities on campus. As a non-operational unit they have no chance of seeing combat, and only around ten percent of officer cadets will choose to join the forces when they graduate. The students here at the Easter training camp, held at an army base a few miles outside Inverness, represent a wide range of opinion, and some of them vocally oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But just two weeks before I travelled to meet the Glasgow branch of the Training Corps, student leaders in London attacked them for “giving moral and political support” to what they called “an aggressive war overseas”. The student association at UCL joined several other universities in London in calling for an end to military presence at campus events. The Stop the War Coalition has confirmed that this is part of a national strategy to oppose the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and similar action is being considered by student groups at a number of universities – including Glasgow.
A spokesman for Stop the War (StW) told me that hosting OTCs on university campuses was legitimising the conflict in Iraq, and that students should oppose the organisation in principle. He said: “It’s about striking a blow against the war machine in Britain. It’ll be a priority for StW next term and at the beginning of next year to begin to push the UCL motion, or something similar, in every student union we think we can pass it in. It’s very important to students that we oppose the war in numerous different ways – not just to demonstrate, but to show that where the army are lying about their intentions they’re not welcome.”
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At the centre of the campaign is the belief that military recruiters are misleading students by glamorising careers in the forces, and glossing over the uglier side of the war – charges that the students and officers in the Glasgow OTC dismiss as ridiculous.
“They don’t glamorise it at all,” says Sean Innes, who with around four years of experience has risen to be the highest-ranking student in the Glasgow OTC. “Nobody’s doing anything unaware; we know it’s not like you can just go to Afghanistan, get a suntan and come home. The staff here have obviously been in the army for a long time, they’ve been to Iraq or wherever, and they do speak to us about their experiences.
“They’ll tell us what they’ve done, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, this was quite funny’, or ‘this was bad,’ but they always point out that if you’re going to join the army there are certain things you’ll have to do, and if that’s not your brand of coffee then you might want to consider another job.”
By Chris Watt
Photo: James Porteous