Welcome to our new blog.

A story of how, who and why.

I want to thank you all for visiting the website and taking the time to read through this, our new blog.

Through this blog, I wanted to introduce a few things and get you all acquainted too, what the site is all about, who I am, what I am trying to achieve, and the direction I see the site going.

I also wanted to add a disclaimer, through the course of our blogs we do attach affiliate links, when you click these links they will take you to the associated websites, and if you make a purchase, we may take a commission for referring you. This allows us to invest in our projects to help veterans. I also want you to be aware that we will only refer you to products we 100% believe in or use ourselves.

So, firstly, the site, what is it all about?

The Website is the product, and the next step from what I have been able to achieve on Instagram with the memorial page I started 3 years ago after I left the military. After leaving the military, I started a memorial page, Inmemoriam639 publishing eulogies to all our fallen soldiers, sailors, and airmen who lost their lives during the recent conflicts in the Middle East, these were during the operations codenamed HERRICK and TORAL (operations in Afghanistan) and Operations TELIC and SHADER (operations in Iraq and the Levant).

Since these operations commenced, the total amount of British personnel who have lost their lives has totaled 641, plus 7 of our four-legged furry companions formally known as Military Working Dogs (MWD), through personal and government research I have been able to formulate a database of names, units, and dates, with these, I have produced a calendar and use it to publish a eulogy for each of them on the day they fell.

How did I come up with the name?

The name In Memoriam 639 is from the Latin translation “in memory of”, the act of remembering and honouring those who have passed. This act is very important to me personally and resonates to many who have served in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, as the risk to life and the risk of losing friends were a very real possibility during the conflict.

The name also resonates because whether it was fate or just chance, I happened to live in a flat in Maidstone town centre, a flat with a large statue dedicated to a cavalry officer, Captain Louis Edward Nolan who was killed during the charge of the light brigade, a famous battle during the Crimean War. So, why is this important? The importance is on the battle and in particular a poem written by a well-known poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

The poem had a very influential line written in it, one that was very prominent to the actions of military personnel during conflict: "Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die" a statement made knowing a soldier’s job is to follow orders, we carry out an order without thought, without questioning and in doing so we hope to be victorious in war.

For some, it comes as a shock, an absolutely absurd idea, but to those who serve, it is kill, or be killed, or questioning orders could in fact not only kill you but kill all those around you.

Reading the plinth citations and reading further into the poet, I discovered another of his famous poems, this time, his poem In Memoriam AHH, a poem he wrote after mourning the death of a close friend to a cerebral hemorrhage when he was only 22 years old, a poem that concludes with a famous saying known to this very day "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all".

This line gives some form of solemn comfort that I am grateful that I had this person in my life, I enjoyed my life with them and will always have the memories of the lives that we have shared.

This also comes very pertinent inside the military too, for those conflicts may have taken the physical bodies of those we have lost, but they can never take the memories of our loved ones, the sense of family and brotherhood, the lessons they taught, the lives we have shared with them or the lasting impressions made on all those around them and the historical imprint on the unit, the men, the women and the flag of the country they so bravely fought for.

Finally, the number, at the time of starting the page and the idea of a memorial page, we had lost 639 military personnel, and so, it leaves the impression that conflicts will continue, and that number will, unfortunately, climb higher and leaves that other famous quote on your minds that “only the dead have seen the end of war”- George Santayana.

Who am I?

My Name is Mike, I am currently a locomotive maintenance engineer for a rail freight company based in the Southeast of England, and a veteran of the British Army, who, after 16.5 years of military service chose that the military life no longer served him or his family, a decision I will forever stand by.

This section I will leave for later so I can go into further detail on where it all began and where it ended in its own blog.

What do I want to achieve?

The website is our home for everything, a landing site for everybody to come and see what we are about, what we are getting up to, and where we are going. The goal of our site is to help veterans find their next step, and become a stopgap between military service and the civilian sector as I feel what is currently available and offered between the MOD and the Career Transitional Partnership is lacking, I think it is lacking the foresight, the investment and the continued support for military personnel wanting to leave the military and start their lives back with the civilian population.

This isn’t designed to bad mouth what is in place, to tarnish reputations, or to start a slagging match between any organisations. It is only the opinion of this individual, who experienced, during his transition a system that is lacking and one that He saw was a vicious cycle designed to instill those leaving a false sense of reality through offered and sometimes overpriced accreditations and then leaving them to fend for themselves with a token phone call or email over a 2-year period, 1 of them while you were still serving.

My vision is to create a “Veterans Village” a place our personnel can stay, where it is affordable, has a community of people going through the same thing, and people on hand to guide them through the processes involved in living within the civilian sector.

Again, a section that needs further detail and one that I can dive into and make a full blog on, so please keep your eyes peeled for that within our next installments. Our next installments will include the following:

• Me: the beginning, middle, and end of my military career.

• The vision: what can be achieved.

• Road to the rally and our fundraising journey.

• The journey, step by step behind the scenes making veteran accommodation affordable.

Thank you

Thank you so much for joining us in this adventure, following along on our social media, and getting involved wherever you can.

Stay tuned for more, subscribe to our email list to keep track,

or add us to your social media platforms.

Have a great week and I look forward to sharing more very soon.