THE correspondent who criticised Joan West last week for her comments on ‘Armed Forces Day’ misses the point. Surely it’s better that wars are seen for what they are rather than covering them in glory.

However you put it, one of the jobs of armies is to kill foreign people in the name of this country. As an old soldier said, war is the ‘calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings’.

Almost 280 UK servicemen and women have been killed in the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – not to mention hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan men, women and children.

While most people might accept that the Second World War was justified because of Hitler and the Nazis, there isn’t the same belief that British forces should be in Iraq or Afghanistan.

What is needed is an examination of why this country has gone into the wars in which it is currently involved. Blindly glorifying wars just because British forces are part of them is no good to the troops or the people whose countries they are fighting in.

It’s worth remembering the words of Harry Patch, 110, the last surviving soldier to have fought at the Western Front in the First World War: ‘Too many died. War isn’t worth one life.’ Peter Billington, East Crescent, Accrington.