Para who faced tragedy on and off battlefield is aiming high

IN ORDER to make sense of his time fighting in Helmand province while his wife battled cancer at home, Dan Jarvis turns to Dickens.

“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times,” says the Barnsley Central MP, who was elected this year one hour after being discharged from the Armed Forces where he served with the Parachute Regiment in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2007, he was posted to Helmand on a six-month tour as a Company Commander in a special forces support group, soon after his wife and the mother of their two young children had been diagnosed with the disease which was eventually to claim her life.

“It was a very difficult time for me personally,” says Jarvis, who joined the Armed Forces in 1996 and also served as a Platoon Commander with 1 Para in Kosovo, Adjutant of 3 Para in Northern Ireland and Iraq, and for a spell was Aide de Camp to General Sir Mike Jackson in his role as head of the British Army. “I had to make an extremely difficult decision about whether it was appropriate for me to be in Afghanistan.

“In the end, my wife persuaded me it was the right thing to do. I was never certain it was, but it meant that when I just arrived there was a huge amount of pressure in my life and that was even before I thought about doing an incredibly difficult job.

“It was also a tough time to be serving in Afghanistan, the IED threat was very high, admittedly not as high as it was in 2009, but we faced it with equipment that hadn’t yet arrived. Some people might find it strange described as the best of times; but professionally it was.

“I was working with a fantastic group of people who were very well trained and extremely highly motivated, doing the kind of thing that we joined the Parachute Regiment to do. In terms of professional satisfaction, that was immense.

“But it was also very challenging and I felt a huge weight of responsibility to the 18-year-olds in my company. Not just to them, but to their parents to make sure that they got back safely. That is a burden of responsibility that you don’t take lightly.

“The tragic reality is a number were seriously injured, one of my Afghan soldiers was killed. That is clearly very difficult to deal with, but you have to because you don’t have a choice. You have to get on with it.

“I think the nature of my life means I have had other things to deal with. My wife died, I was bringing up two children on my own, I’m now in Parliament. I haven’t had much time to sit around and think about it, and that is probably a good thing.

“But that said, there is never a day that goes by that I don’t think back to that period of time between the summer and winter of 2007.”

Fittingly, bearing in mind his 15-year Armed Forces career for which he has received an MBE, Mr Jarvis was parachuted in to Barnsley to fight the March by-election triggered when his predecessor Eric Illsley was found to have fiddled his expenses.

Jarvis, originally from Nottingham, is reportedly the first Labour MP for the seat since 1938 not to have been born in Yorkshire or to have links with coal mining. But he secured an impressive majority in the town which is a traditional hotbed of Army recruitment.

His rise through the ranks has since been rapid, and in October he was promoted to Labour’s front bench as Shadow Minister for Culture. Despite the new brief, he regularly takes a stand in Parliament on the Armed Forces and looming Ministry of Defence (MoD) cuts which he describes as “appalling”.

Most recently, he addressed colleagues in advance of Remembrance Day, where he said: “I knew 10 of the first 100 men and women killed whilst serving in Iraq. At that point, I stopped counting. I had to.”

As Jarvis speaks about both his personal and professional life, there is a quiet tragedy etched on his face similar to many who have served and lost colleagues in Afghanistan. Like many too, he has reservations over the legacy of the conflict.

“There are still significant challenges associated with getting the Afghan security forces up to a level where they can take responsibility for their own security; we know we have a timeline to do that,” he says. “That is only part of it, because it is also about governance and corruption.

“The biggest enemy of the Afghan people is not the Taliban, it is corruption, which is endemic. We have to be realistic about what can be achieved over that period of time. It raises all kinds of questions about whether it was the right thing to do and whether we should do it in the future.

“I think ultimately it was the right thing to do, bearing in mind the primary justification was national security to make sure al-Qaida never had a base to attack the West the way it did in 9/11. But I’m not convinced our country is safer for it. In fact I’m reasonably certain that our country now is less safe.

“What I think, and hope, is that over a longer period of time this country will be safer by putting in place a Government in Afghanistan that will not allow that kind of Taliban al-Qaida ability to plan attacks on the West. But what I do accept, is in the short term that means probably the risk to our country is greater right now. I hope over the long term it will be proven it was the right thing to do.”

Jarvis, who retains strong links with colleagues in the Armed Forces, says a combination of repeated tours to Afghanistan, war-weariness among soldiers’ families and uncertainty over the MoD cuts means morale is now as low as he has ever known.

But with all four Yorkshire battalions braced to deploy to Afghanistan next year, he has urged the public to maintain its support for soldiers and welcomed the current Yorkshire Post Christmas appeal.

“I think sadly a soldier is killed almost every week,” he says. “That jolts people into thinking we are still at war, we have still got 10,000 people out there. Of course what is not reported is that for every soldier killed there will be another 10 wounded.

“But the reality is these are tough economic times for a lot of people at the moment and they are thinking about their own jobs, their own futures, rather than what is happening in Afghanistan. What I know for a fact is that when you are there it matters to you what people are thinking at home. It matters to you that there are people supporting you.

“Whether you think it is right that we are in Afghanistan or not, it is really important that the whole of Yorkshire gets behind our soldiers. They will know and see that and it will make their jobs much easier.

“Yorkshire’s commitment is a massive one, it has a strong and proud history of sending people off to do the work of this country. That has happened many times before, but clearly next year is a big year for Yorkshire.

“I will also be following their preparation very carefully, watching day by day how they are getting on. And when they are deployed, I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed for them all coming home safely.”