Barry Clifford: The Illusion Of Control

                                               

In life we have no control only the illusion of it for it seems that death happens to someone else. The illusion is further propagated by the myth that others are destined to live while masses die under the extraordinary circumstance within the theatre of war; that these men, mostly, are somehow touched by the hand of destiny with a little help from God. Yet death, like life, is a very natural order in nature with no favourites driven only by the collection points of atoms. Here are a just a few of those points.  

T E Lawrence of Lawrence Of Arabia fame did not die, though many times wounded, in war as he fought in Arabia; he died when he fell of a motorbike doing less than 40 miles an hour on a country road.

Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier during the Second World War for bravery, did not die on the battlefield but as a passenger on a private plane in 1971.

George S Patton did not die in the theatre of battle during the Second World War war, but in the closing months of it, on his way to a pheasant shoot. The car he was driving was hit by a truck doing low speed. Patton was paralyzed from the neck down, and had said just before he was hit: “How awful war is. Think of the waste.”

Julius Caesar, arguably the best general in history, then and now, did not die in the many campaigns of war, he died at the hands of his friends who were now his enemies, pulling his toga over his head as the knifes plunged into his flesh over and over again, crying as he lay dying: “ Et tu, Brute” or ‘you too Brutus’

Barry Clifford