After a long and rather intense morning of interviewing it was a relief to head out with Monty. Since he'd been on his own quite a long time I treated him to a walk to Jesus Green and some ball throwing. We hadn't been there long when rather unnervingly I found myself flanked by two young men. One of then was saying, 'Can take photo?' and 'What's name?' I was holding a blooming great SLR with a zoom lens on it so I was a bit confused about what he was getting at but eventually I worked out that he wanted to take a photo of the dog. Monty had just started his ball game so he wasn't in the mood for the paparazzi especially as they wanted to be in the photo with him but with a few liver chunks (they obviously don't know much about dogs as they immediately fed him the big piece I gave them and I had to search for another and tell them to wait till they'd got their photo) they were happy. It turned out that they are Libyan soldiers based in Bassingbourn - they are part of 300 cadets being trained up for 6 months (I Googled that bit - there will be 2000 altogether) and I tried hard with no Libyan and their small amount of English to ask them about the situation at home. They didn't understand 'ISIS' but they said it is very dangerous and there are fights with militia every day. Further Googling tells me that the militia are part of ISIS and that the government is failing. So I ended up feeling sad that they will be doing something so dangerous in a month's time and knowing that they are going to need a lot more soldiers.
Brings it home to you when you actually meet proper live fighting men...I expect they all looked very young too.....some poor mothers sons! All this fighting gets you down, never ending reports from war zones dominate the news every day.
Sounds a gruelling morning Judith.......I bet you were quite frisky when you & Monty managed to escape outside! Lovely warm brick with some very subtle carvings.
@happypat They were mid 20s or so I would think - I think they were perhaps officer material as apparently most are confined to barracks. Very fit and healthy looking as you'd expect - found myself with terrible visions of them being 'broken' :0(. The whole situation in Syria is so terribly depressing I just hope in a small way we are helping to prevent the same happening in Libya.
I think Libya has battles of its own to fight and Syrian conflict would be further away. Interested to hear they are training in Britain. I thought at first you were going to say they were Asian as thats what they always want to do - be in the photo!
Sounds a gruelling morning Judith.......I bet you were quite frisky when you & Monty managed to escape outside! Lovely warm brick with some very subtle carvings.