A mother's lament for all the soldiers

Boys join the Army mainly because they haven't grown out of wanting to fight

Whom do you ring at 3.30am to find out if your son has become a military statistic? Listening to those first unconfirmed reports on the World Service yesterday morning (I'm an insomniac) about an Army helicopter crashing in Kuwait with maybe 16 British and American aircrew on board, I tried to imagine how I'd be feeling, what I'd be doing if I had a son in the front line. Whom do you ring? No one is the blunt answer. I've read and heard enough about Army red tape to know that this sort of information takes time to process. It has to when you consider the implications of getting it wrong.

This is the first war I have ever viewed from a mother's perspective. If things had been different, if my elder son rather than his younger brother had chosen to go into the Army, he'd be in the Gulf now. And then again if my second son had joined up straight from school as he wanted to, rather than after university as Colonel Peacock from the Army Careers Office advised, he'd probably be in Iraq as I write this, instead of in his first year at university reading ancient history on an Army bursary.

And yet, devastating as it must be for the families of those eight British Commandos and four American Marines now officially confirmed dead, at least they have the consolation of knowing that their sons died doing something they chose to do for themselves. There's no conscription here or in America. As a mother, naturally I would prefer my son to do something safe – become a teacher, a doctor, take over his father's business – but no, he wants to be a soldier and that's that.

The mothers I'm thinking of right now are the ones in Basra and Baghdad, Al-Sahra and Al-Taqaddum, whose teenage sons didn't choose but were forced as conscripts to join Saddam Hussein's army. Not for them the luxury of career options, of leafing through university prospectuses, discussing work experience and gap years. The face of that dead Iraqi soldier in his burnt-out Jeep that caused so much controversy when it hit the news-stands during the 1991 Gulf War haunts me to this day. Slim chance of his mother finding comfort in the knowledge that her son died doing the job he wanted to do.

When countries go to war, mothers of soldiers, both conscripts and volunteers, know the odds. Whether or not they believe it, they can brace themselves (unless they've read Wilfred Owen) with rousing Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori rhetoric. War is terrible. No one denies it, and yet there is and always has been something noble about laying down one's life for one's country. Why else almost a century after the event are those First World War graves in Flanders still so lovingly tended?

When Prince Andrew served as a helicopter pilot in the Falklands War, it's no secret that his too-old-for-active-service elder brother was painfully envious. It would certainly help mothers to bear the burden of having soldier sons if they knew that their boys were fighting because they were patriots for whom Queen and country meant everything. Alas, this applies to few young men, my son included. Boys join the Army mainly because they haven't grown out of wanting to fight or play with incredibly sophisticated boys' toys.

And it's the mothers in Iraq that I'm especially thinking about, the mothers desperately trying to protect children from the pitiless onslaught of missiles, bombs, grenades and everything else that's being hurled at them. My mother was in the same situation when the Japanese invaded Burma in the Second World War. She had just given birth to my elder sister and was advised that being Anglo-Burmese she'd better get out quick. Her husband was at the front, so my mother and a band of 30 other refugees set off on the gruelling six-week trek through the jungle from Mingun, north of Mandalay, to the Indian border.

Because of her condition, my mother was given a sedan chair carried by four Burmese boys, but on the second day she gave it to an old lady with bad feet. The others had packed food, clothing, medicine and money. My mother, carrying my sister, had the clothes she was wearing, nappies and cigarettes. When she stopped to feed Jenny, the others went on except for Margaret, a schoolfriend, who said she'd keep an eye out for tigers and Japanese soldiers.

Mothers as a species are tough, probably tougher, when push comes to shove, than soldiers. I nearly said when Bush comes to shove. If only.