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Wars begin with public stories. Broad narratives of politics, history and strategy; a blunting of language and experience through euphemism and technical vocabulary. As they progress, moments of human detail puncture this public discourse through the best of reportage and journalism, in helmet-cam videos on YouTube or via leaked footage and photographs.

But on the whole, for most of us, conflict is an anonymising force. Individuals become soldiers, insurgents, refugees, casualties. People become figures, regiments, victims. It is only at wars end, when the emotional as well as the statistical tally is taken, that the more intimate truths of modern conflict rise to the surface. This is when the long shadows that war casts begin to emerge in their varying shades from the black and the white. When the personal stories of those who have died and those who grieve offer, through prisms of retrospection, memory and loss, a more human testament of what war means.

For the British Armed Services, here is that testament: tributes to the 453 men and women who lost their lives over 13 years of conflict in Afghanistan. In the pages that follow and in even greater detail online, you will find a full spectrum of response to that fact, and those figures. From the family who would have preferred their sons name wasnt included, to others who memorialise through annual commemoration and the founding of charities in their childs or siblings name.

Regardless of the nature of the responses, however, or the broader aftermath of Britains most recent engagement in Afghanistan, it is impossible to read these tributes and not feel them cut through any political or strategic viewpoint. They are the words of parents, children, wives, friends and comrades, who in their remembering share with us just a taste, a painful suggestion, of what it might be like to love someone who joins the military, serves overseas and dies there.

Over the past three years, I have worked with many young men and women who, though psychologically or physically wounded, were fortunate enough to return from Afghanistan alive. In two projects, a stage play The Two Worlds of Charlie F and then a radio verse drama Pink Mist, I drew upon the experiences of recently wounded personnel. In the case of Charlie F, the wounded soldiers and Marines I interviewed also formed the majority of the cast.

Although Charlie Fs subject was the aftermath of wounding, the idea of death was ever present among us as we rehearsed. Some bore vivid memories of their friends being killed. Others held equally sharp recollections of those they had killed themselves. A few weeks before the opening night, one of our company, Major Stewart Hill, lost yet another friend, this time through suicide after he had left the Army. When the play went on tour in 2013 it did so in memory of Jack Davies, a single amputee and cast member who died following an operation on his injuries just a few months before.

Reading these tributes here, Ive been reminded of those weeks in that death-haunted rehearsal room, filled with young people in their twenties and thirties. But they have also reminded me of some of the qualities, and the stories of recovery, the cast and their families shared with me. Though born of the worst of human experience, they display the very best of what it means to be human: care, attachment, perseverance and bravery in the face of horror and trauma.

These tributes are veined with similar attributes, and as such are a powerful reminder of how grief is the rougher side of love, and how neither can exist without the other. How, too, in the wake of loss and damage we witness, with a painful clarity, the fundamental human need of connection. It is surprising, perhaps, that as victims of wars discord, the voices of the families and friends in these tributes should create such a harmonious music of humanity. But they do, returning again and again to memories of care and love, to treasured moments and cherished traits.

At times, the poignancy of a love cut adrift from its subject is made manifest in a physical symbol: the tandem bike now covered in cobwebs, the home renamed after the swallows that sang on the day a husbands body was repatriated, the conservatory that was once a place of peaceful refuge become, in the cold days of a fathers grief, just another part of an empty world.

Some memories are more explicitly peppered with regret. In a moving inversion of the more common father/son equation, Rob Loughran-Dickson, writing of his late father, confesses his regret at never telling him he was gay. Tony Woodgate, in recalling his son, Jonathan, writes that his greatest regret was that I didnt actually know him. In the very first tribute, Beccy, remembering her brother Darren, admits: After Darren died, all the family fell apart, never to be fixed again.

Read the rest here:
Afghanistan 2001-2014 tribute: Love cut adrift