Public reaction to the army’s chosen method of quelling a peaceful protest at Safi’s detention camp can be divided into roughly three categories: outright condemnation of the army, outright condemnation of the detainees, and the inevitable fence-sitters (“It’s true that the soldiers were aggressive, but the immigrants spit at them and insult them. How much can a soldier take?”). Amid the welter of platitudes, the accusations of racism, and the ‘Malta for the Maltese’ sentiments, no one has seen fit to point out something that is as fundamental as it is obvious. So let me be the first to do so. If these soldiers cannot take the heat of even the most basic soldiering, then they should leave the army and get a job with a private security firm, throwing Libyans out of bars. They can also get a desk job where nobody will spit at them, or become scout leaders and play at the fun side of soldiering (setting up tents and eating outdoors on rare occasions) with a crowd of juvenile admirers.

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Our soldiers have it easy enough as it is, and still they whine. They have never known any war and almost certainly never will. They will never know combat or see active service. They will not fight in desert or jungle conditions – or for that matter, any conditions whatsoever. It is a strange thing to join the army and know for certain that you will never be called upon to fight. Maltese soldiers never move more than 10 miles from their mothers, unless their mothers live in Gozo, in which case it would be – what? – 15 miles? They are not obliged to live in barracks. They will never be taken prisoner, nor sit for months and perhaps even years in a POW camp. They will never look any enemy in the eye or kill before they are killed. They will never be blown up at a barricade. They will never know hunger, privation or the terrible conditions of trench warfare. They will never have to hold a friend or colleague as he dies, out on some frozen wasteland. They will never lose limbs, sight or sanity.

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They will never go into Bergen Belsen and open the ovens to find people still smouldering inside. They will never be turned into smithereens by a mine in Vietnam, aged 19. They will never die of starvation and dysentery in a POW camp in Korea. They will never be tortured in a Japanese camp until they lose their minds and spend their remaining years on earth in a home for the mentally ill. They will never have their limbs amputated without anaesthetic or hygiene in a field hospital, only to die of gangrene or blood poisoning. They will never march for days in temperatures of 20 degrees below zero, on minimal food rations, getting their liquids by eating snow. They will never wake up after sleeping for two hours in the mud, with a 75 per cent chance that this is their last day on earth.

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They will never roll their tanks into Auschwitz and see the full-on horror of the living skeletons they have just liberated. Did any one of our soldiers listen to or read the words of the Russian Red Army commander, on the 60th anniversary of that liberation some days ago, as he described the reaction of his men to the sickening sight? They cried, they vomited, they collapsed, they wanted to turn around and go away, to escape scenes that were beyond Dante’s description of hell. He made them go in, wash the living skeletons, feed them, and find clothing for them. We are speaking here of soldiers who had fought more arduously, and in more terrible conditions, than any other soldiers in Europe. Millions of Red Army soldiers died in that war – not thousands, millions – and still the remaining units kept going. How do our Safi soldiers, unable to cope with the “psychological pressure” of a few hundred people locked up in a compound, fare by comparison? I had better not put that down on paper. All I will say is that I would hate Malta to be involved in a war in which we are defended by Maltese soldiers. There is too big a risk that many of them are just not up to the job, that they will desert – a serious crime – and run home to mummy when the going gets really tough and they see blood; that mummy will threaten the government with her vote if the army proceeds for desertion; that they will let down those of their colleagues who really are soldiers and not just mummy’s boys playing at Rambo and Action Man.

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The bodies of those soldiers who are rushed up and down the tiny island of Malta, in huge army trucks wearing camouflage, will never be placed in a grave among many thousands of others, each of them marked with a wooden cross and no name, and their only memorial a single monument to The Unknown Soldier. Their wives and mothers will not receive terse messages from the military, regretting to inform them that Private Joseph Abela is missing in action, presumed dead. There will be no 2005 equivalent to immortalize in poetry their suffering, their supreme endurance, and their sacrifice, for many future generations to memorize in readiness for O-level examinations. Those who try to explain the war poets to Maltese teenagers will tell you that it is a near-impossible task, that many of these teenagers know nothing about the First World War in Europe and the hideous privations that went with it. Culturally, they are so far removed from what soldiery is about in times of war that they cannot make the required leap of imagination. To these budding Maltese adults, the men guarding the immigrants in their Safi compound are the epitome of brave soldiery, the sine qua non of sacrifice. How little they know, and how poor their education has been.

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What would the Safi soldiers, so very upset by taunts and spittle, so terrified of “weapons” made from twisted bed-springs, have done if they lived in the days when being a soldier meant fighting and dying, far away from mummy? And as for all those soldiers’ mummies, writing to the newspapers and calling radio phone-ins to tell us that we cannot possibly know what their sons are ‘going through’, looking after those immigrants – well, then, what would they have done 60 years ago, when Maltese soldiers were fighting and dying all over Europe and North Africa? Would they have voted for Norman Lowell then? No, because the British administration would have had Norman Lowell deported to some detention camp for the duration of the war. The Maltese soldiers who fought and died then were the real heroes. They actually volunteered to join the army; they weren’t drafted because there was no draft in Malta. There never was, and there never will be. The protests by soldiers and their mothers indicate a weakness and softness made even sillier by the fact that soldiers are not forced into soldiering in Malta, and if they don’t like it, they can leave. If a man cannot even cope with elementary guard duty, then he is hardly much of a soldier. If his mother thinks that even this elementary guard duty is too much for her boy, then she is not much of a mother. Having raised a son who is still wet behind the ears in adulthood, she now lacks even the imagination to see that she is among the most blessed of soldiers’ mothers in the entire world, with her causes for anxiety cut down to next to nothing. Mothers of construction workers have more cause for concern in Malta than do soldiers’ mothers. How many men have died or been severely injured on construction sites over the past few years in Malta? And how many soldiers? There you have it.

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Our soldiers simply haven’t a clue what it means to be a soldier. They are thoroughly spoilt and, far from feeling any sympathy for them or empathy with their self-described plight, I feel disgust that so many of them – and let’s not forget their mothers, wives, sisters and brothers, all of whom appear to expect us to be “grateful” – seem to see soldiering as just another government job that will give them early retirement and a pension, while allowing them to moonlight here and there. It is just too bad that, because of the actions of these among them, their decent colleagues, who have committed themselves to the army as a true career with all it entails, are coming under scrutiny. There are decent, true soldiers in the army. They should not be embarrassed in this manner by their I-couldn’t-get-another-government-job-so-I-joined-the-army colleagues.

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Sadly, too many newspaper correspondents appear eager to encourage these half-hearted soldiers in the belief that they are little more than overgrown boy scouts who shouldn’t be inconvenienced or put out in any way. I’d like to see these specimens cope with the D-Day landings, but then they probably don’t know what the D-Day landings were. They would have probably asked their mothers to write to the newspapers to complain that they were forced to land before dawn in icy water on a beach in the middle of nowhere, with no access to medical care and Germans lying in wait to kill them. The question is hypothetical not just because, with warfare so sophisticated now, they would never be called upon to do something like that. It is hypothetical also because they would never be selected for such an operation. If a soldier cracks when confronted with an unarmed man wearing a T-shirt with a slogan painted on it, and begins to lay about him with no control, then he has demonstrated a supreme inability to cope under even the slightest bit of pressure. Grow up, boys. You’re soldiers, not girl guides.

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And there’s something else besides. It’s not the immigrants who are a drain on the Maltese taxpayer. It’s the army. We should be asking ourselves how much that army costs the taxpayer, and how much the taxpayer gets in return. We should be asking whether we need to have an army at all, whether it would not be far more cost-efficient to give that money to the under-funded police force, and let them get on with the job of cracking down on crime. The army in Malta doesn’t do anything that the police cannot do, because the only enemy now is crime and criminals. An army is not something that every State has to have, regardless of size, economy, position or necessity, in a demonstration of inability to think outside the box. A country should not maintain an army in the same way that a man used to maintain a mistress – to keep up with Mr Jones. The army does not do anything that the police force cannot or will not do, if the police are given the funding that is now drained off by the army. The only enemy today is crime. There are no Nazis lurking in the toe of Italy, ready to pounce. The only Nazis we have are in Malta, setting up websites, writing in the newspapers and holding public meetings for their Imperium Europa. And guess what? Nobody seems to know how to handle them.