David Rew Consultant General Surgeon

Operation Telic Iraq 2003-2009: A surgical professional retrospective

David A. Rew - ASGBI Newsletter 2010, No. 32, 44-46

For it's Tommy this, an 'Tommy that, an"Chuck him out, the brute!"
But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an anything you please;
An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool - you bet that Tommy sees!

Tommy (Atkins)
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

The troops have come home. The official documents are locked away in the Army's Corporate Memory Vaults. The doors are closed on Operation Telic, a campaign in Southern Iraq which outlasted the Second World War, running for six years, from March 2003 to April 2009. 179 UK service personnel who died and 1,000 or more who were seriously injured in Iraq bore witnesses to a brutal new phase of warfare, in which the suicide bomber was pushed to the fore, and the Internet propagandised the work of the belligerents in gruesome fashion.