I read that the Government is preparing to mobilise veterans if this country goes to war.
You can’t imagine my anger—and it’s justified. Because what the government is planning isn’t some noble “call to duty”; it’s a system that assumes veterans are disposable assets who can be yanked back into danger whenever the state feels like it.
The Ministry of Defence is preparing to test the mobilisation of 95,000 former military personnel — the Strategic Reserve — to see how fast they can be recalled, equipped, and sent back into service if the UK faces a major conflict.
They gave their youth, their health, their peace — and now the state wants a second pound of flesh.
They gave their youth, their strength, their sanity, and pieces of their soul to this country — and they’re still carrying the ghosts of what it cost.
Coming home doesn’t mean they come home whole; it just means their bodies made it back.
They go from being trusted with life‑and‑death decisions to being treated like a number the moment the uniform comes off.
Where was the Government when veterans were breaking down in silence, when their bodies were failing, when their families were hanging on by threads, when their jobs slipped away, and when their lives were unravelling?
Some came home to nothing, some came home shattered, some couldn’t find their way back to the world, and some never made it out of the dark at all.
While veterans were fighting to rebuild their lives, some were dragged back into courtrooms and interrogations decades later — as if their service wasn’t sacrifice but a debt the state could keep collecting.
Not just injustice — ingratitude weaponised.
People who’ve never felt the blast wave, never tasted fear in the back of their throat, never watched a friend bleed out, and never had seconds to choose between acting or dying — those same people get to sit somewhere safe with paperwork and coffee and decide what a soldier should’ve done differently.
You don’t know. You weren’t there.
That’s the whole point. That’s the whole wound. That’s the whole injustice.
Because the people making judgments from safe rooms and tidy desks have never felt the world go white with shock, never smelled cordite in the air, never heard the scream of incoming, never watched a friend fall, never had seconds to choose between action and death.
They weren’t there — and yet they get to decide.
I’m not saying soldiers should be above the law — but don’t send young people into hell you’d never walk into yourself and then spend decades judging the split‑second choices they made to stay alive.
No veteran is lining up to cheer for people who ignored them in peacetime and now want to drag them back in when it suits them.
Veterans remember who stood by them in the dark, who vanished when it got hard, who listened when the noise in their heads was too loud, and who never showed up at all.
The only place that needs shaking up is Parliament — because that’s where the decisions are made, and that’s where veterans have been ignored for far too long.
We need to call out the people in power, call out the failures, call out the hypocrisy — because silence is how they get away with it.
Not violence. Not chaos. Just accountability — loud, public, relentless.
It’s pressure, not harm. It’s scrutiny, not destruction. It’s citizens refusing to stay quiet when the people meant to serve them fall short.
Pressure is what forces institutions to look up. Scrutiny is what keeps power honest. Refusing to stay quiet is how democracy corrects itself.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 