Chemical Warrior

And chemical warfare

Chemical Warrior by Hamish de Bretton-Gordon

We have spent some but not all of the past twenty-five years talking about weapons of mass destruction. Who has them, who is apt to have them, who wants them, where they might be used. Every day someone tells me that this or that crisis is really the big one, and that the nuclear missiles will soon surely start flying. It never seems to happen.

But some people did have chemical weapons. And some of them used of them — and quite a few times. Thousands of people have been killed by chemical munitions in recent wars, one of which concluded only last year. The Islamic State fired mustard gas shells at Kurdish Peshmerga positions in Iraq when Operation Inherent Resolve (better known as Inherent Contradiction) was trying to sort out who controlled both Syria and Iraq. And many of the massacre sites in north-west Iraq — chemically polluted from helicopters as many as thirty-five years ago — still have the mass graves and the contamination to attest to what went on there.

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon was a soldier; he served as an advisor to ‘partner forces’ tasked with fighting the Islamic State; and he was part of various efforts to investigate the Syrian civil war, to examine claimed uses of chemical weapons and to prove it — so that those who used them could be made accountable before a kind of justice they did not ever expect to see.

This is a breezy memoir, easy to read, and quite carefully constructed. It begins with the fear that came with training, quite a few years ago, for what British planners thought could easily prove to be chemical conflicts. Nation states like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq could have deployed chemical shells on advancing Desert Storm soldiers; terrorist organisations like al-Qaeda perpetually sought out the means to gain battlefield or terroristic advantage; and chemical weapons, nuclear arms, all of these things were obvious tools for adversaries of that kind to lunge for, either for fun or if in a tight spot. Thus mandatory chemical attack training. Thus fear unparalleled.

What de Bretton-Gordon discovers, after a terrifying chemical weapons drill — get the gear on as quickly as possible, do so just in time — is that there are ways to do something about these disturbing weapons. International law never helps; soft power has never disarmed a single foe; but modern militaries have CBRN units (chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear), whose sole purpose is to defend against threats of this kind. Thus he joins the British regiment that deals with such things. In Britain’s post-9/11 wars, he found himself transporting hazardous materials away from places where they could be harmful — all while under fire. And eventually, de Bretton-Gordon left the army.

When, years later, chemical weapons were alleged to have been used in Syria’s civil war — now confirmed as much as Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons investigations and exhaustive think thank projects can do — de Bretton-Gordon (then in the private sector), travelled to Syria, trying to collect samples. The Assad regime, at that time in power, did not want samples to be collected; because if they were collected they could be analysed. And if analysed and found in contravention of international agreements, there could be consequences.

The stories de Bretton-Gordon tells about trying to investigate chemical weapons use in the country (including travelling into Syria in the midst of civil conflict) are, even to those familiar with the war and its terrible character, quite significant. Without very swift attention, chemical traces dissipate and disappear. As soon as an attack is launched, and the people who were attacked surrender, those who attacked them take control of the scene. They come in and they hose down everything; they take control of bodies and of still living victims; they destroy evidence even as the instability of chemical agents slowly destroys its own traces. Only very careful and brave people can gain access to the site of an attack or the bodies of those killed; else investigators are left in a shadowy world of attempting to secure soil samples which their sellers allege were present at the place and time in question, and allege may have some of the signatures of chemical weapons.

This is what chemical warfare is today: widespread use, widespread denial, painstaking attempts to discover the truth. To tell the truth to a world which keeps proving, again and again, decade after decade, that it does not and never will care.