The Tin Soldiers

Anthropology or ethnology are not my specialist areas, but would like to share an observation. Please correct me if I am wrong.

It was one of those rarely sun-lit mornings in Manchester, a United Kingdom city, I took one of my regular buses - available in plenty – to the Oxford Road train station which would further take me to my workplace. It is usually a nice journey with lots of college students in their prime jogging and bouncing around. For office goers like me perhaps it is a regular one. To break or maybe spice this transit, for momentary population like us, there are a few morning newspapers, mostly available for free. They would run on either subsidies or sponsorships, or both. It was another regular day and I bought a rather more expensive newspaper for a change - don’t remember whether it was ‘The Guardian’ or ‘The Times’.

It was year 2006 then, and the Iraq war issue was at its peak, and requests and noises, one may also say ‘hopes’, to bring their troops back home pretty high in the whole Island nation that time. Reading gives you more clarity, and this article hidden somewhere amongst many did so, for it gave some numbers in form of statistics. That about 1K of the soldiers deputed are in Iraq. About 10K sporadically distributed for the UN all over the world, and 60K still in Germany after the world war two.

The sun's shine had brightened; unusual for that day.

A german friend, later, in my office tells me, “Yes, I have heardh so tuh, zey are stationed close to my villaze” “and now with, some time haz passe by, zey are up line to be cithizen. One of zem officer told me he juszent feelz brizish anymore afzer living for zo long in the zerman zoil."