Johnny Strickland is dying of pancreatic cancer. The palliative nurse, with her sour expression, reminds him of Irma Grese, the SS guard at Ravensbrook concentration camp, for her atrocious bedside manner and wishing she was somewhere else. He was not the least bit suprised when she left ten ampoules of morphine for him to end his life so he would not suffer any more unnecesssary pain. She said that he would not be taken to hospital because there were a lack of beds and people more deserving than him needed them. Johnny was of traditional attitudes and did not like to cause a fuss. His beloved wife, Catriona, had died many years ago and he was now alone, reliant on the every day visits of his daughter and grandchildren who lived three streets away. The thoughts dominant in his fevered mind are how can a deception not be a lie when a Prime Minister speaks. Are people so easily deceived, or do they just hear what they want and are beguiled by a complaisant B.B.C.? Strickland is proud to be British and not a subservient follower of fashionable causes that are so laughable. Johnny's father was one of the soldiers who were massacred at La Paradis by infantry from the Totenkopf Division during the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940. The truth did not emerge till years later, so Johnny understood how secrecy works. War, he realized,  should never be fought because of the vanity of  weak-willed men. With the invasion of Iraq in 2002, Johnny was proud of his son, Ian, who was serving on the front line. Ian's death devastated his parents. The equipment he had was useless as were many other things. Where was the preparation that went into other campaigns and not this one?  Had there been plans for the aftermath of the invasion? Johhny, many years afterwards, had heard of the subtefuge of the Labour Party and what was instigated to make sure no-one was held accountable for this unnecessary war. Why was the truth of this disaster hidden from people in authority who should have remonstrated against such a folly? Johnny committed his thoughts to paper and he wants his local MP to use his words to avenge the lives of the men and women who died needlessly. Johnny's bitter regret is that his death would not see him buried in the corner of a foreign field where his father and son lay.