Yes, I'll remember my fallen son next Sunday. But for the man who sent him to his death, I feel only COLD FURY, writes Reg Keys
My 20-year-old son, Lance Corporal Tom Keys (pictured), was murdered in Iraq on June 24, 2003, the month after the war had supposedly ended
People sometimes ask what Remembrance Sunday means to me, how it makes me feel. My answer is simple: I feel cold fury. The same as I feel every other day. The same as I felt when I heard last week that the Chilcot Report will now be delayed until next summer.
The same as when I discovered in The Mail on Sunday that Tony Blair had committed us to war in Iraq months before a democratic vote and a full year before the invasion started.
And the same as I feel now, having learned from today’s edition that his Ministers were actually told to burn the documentary evidence – from their own Attorney General – that waging war on Saddam was never legal in the first place.
My 20-year-old son, Lance Corporal Tom Keys, was murdered in Iraq on June 24, 2003, the month after the war had supposedly ended. He was one of six Royal Military policemen shot by a 400-strong Iraqi mob besieging a police station in the south of the country.
Tom was actually on peace-keeping duties. He had been due home in two weeks.
Violent death is an occupational hazard for members of the Armed Forces. They all know it, they all accept it.
Soldiers get killed in battle and the loved ones they leave behind grieve for them. The bereaved may feel anger but the knowledge that their relative died in a just war does, eventually, help quell that anger.
I wasn’t angry when the men in grey suits came to tell my wife Sally and me that Tom had been killed in the line of duty. I was devastated, of course, but at that time I still believed that Tom had died for the greater good. I believed that Weapons of Mass Destruction would be found in Iraq. I believed that my lad would have been adequately equipped to be in harm’s way.
It wasn’t until afterwards, when we learned that the WMD did not exist, when we learned that Tom’s patrol had been only lightly armed and lacked essential communications equipment, when it became obvious that he and 178 other British armed personnel were sent to die for lies, that the anger – the fury – came. And since then I’ve campaigned for the full truth about the Iraq War to come out.
Mr Blair, who took us to war, hoodwinked the country, Parliament, you and me. He has never seen fit to apologise.
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