Military Funerals are somehow more emotional for me than civilian ones, I don't know why...
When I was a cadet in the British Air Force as a teenager, I had the sad duty of attending the funeral of two fellow cadets (from a different but neighbouring cadet squadron in the same region) who were killed in a light aeroplane crash.
Every single cadet squadron in the region sent at least a dozen of their cadets to attend the ceremony along with two commissioned officers each. There must have been at least five hundred of us on parade that day.
At the end of the religious portion of the service, the National Band of the Royal Air Force Cadets played the song "You Raise Me Up" and I struggled very hard not to cry because I knew the two cadets personally, having been part of a large scale training exercise with them in Belgium only a few months before. It was a shock seeing the two small caskets covered with British flags... knowing that two colleagues had been killed simply because their pilot was not paying attention and could have avoided the collision with the other small aeroplane that killed him and his two young passengers... a tragedy that could have been avoided had the civilian pilot paid more attention to his wider surroundings instead of being fixated only on what he could see out of the aeroplane's front windscreen...
Every single cadet squadron in the region sent at least a dozen of their cadets to attend the ceremony along with two commissioned officers each. There must have been at least five hundred of us on parade that day.
At the end of the religious portion of the service, the National Band of the Royal Air Force Cadets played the song "You Raise Me Up" and I struggled very hard not to cry because I knew the two cadets personally, having been part of a large scale training exercise with them in Belgium only a few months before. It was a shock seeing the two small caskets covered with British flags... knowing that two colleagues had been killed simply because their pilot was not paying attention and could have avoided the collision with the other small aeroplane that killed him and his two young passengers... a tragedy that could have been avoided had the civilian pilot paid more attention to his wider surroundings instead of being fixated only on what he could see out of the aeroplane's front windscreen...
36-40, M
