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| | Tim Collins in Iraq |
 | | During the second Gulf War in 2003 Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Collins was a 42-year-old commander of The Royal Irish battle group and delivered this speech to his troops in Kuwait, just hours before they went into battle. |
 | | Collins spoke of history, family, respect, dignity, and the individual moral choice between killing justly, and just killing. |
 | | Before 1914, battle rhetoric strictly followed the cadences of Henry V and Henry Newbolt: “We few, we happy few”; “Play up and play the game.” But after four years of carnage, the holy abstractions of honour, patriotism and duty, framed into set-piece epitaphs by Rudyard Kipling and carved on numberless gravestones, seemed grotesque. |
| www.putlearningfirst.com /language/20rhet/iraq.html (678 words) |
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