Can you tell me what Operation Nightingale is and who does it help? So
Operation Nightingale is a program of recovery for service personnel from the
British Armed Forces and overseas now as well using archaeology and Heritage as
ways of the mechanism for improving their condition basically giving them a good
time. Tell me how you achieve that? How we achieve the improvement in their
condition is by finding various projects that they can work in the open air and
have fun with with their mates and camaraderie and basically get that
whole banter experience the things that they're perhaps missing from a military
environment in their civilian world and making sure they're able to use their
mind and their bodies, physical skills bringing their their skill sets that
sometimes they don't maybe even realize that they still have into a project
environment and working working as a team together. When we do archaeology
with them that the crucial thing from my perspective is that they have to find
stuff because there's nothing worse than doing a dig where you find nothing at all.
And what is it about archaeology that makes it so therapeutic? Well the great
thing about archaeology is that there is a job for everybody, so you can be in the
open air, you can do some digging or if you don't feel like digging you can work
on the finds or you can do some photography. As many of the individuals
on the project aren't particularly used to that sort of environment, they
concentrate really, really hard because they don't want to screw up, especially
in front of their mates so they're thinking really really hard about making
sure that what they're doing is a good piece of work and I think of a case in
point when I was speaking to one of the soldiers who was working on this job he
was working on an anglo-saxon burial, and I said to him after a couple days are you
not bored of doing this work? He said no, no - I'm loving it because I'm not
thinking about Iraq and that must be great that they're actually able to block
this thing out and think about something completely different it gives them a bit
of respite and I've had numerous guys saying they've had some of the best best
sleeps that they've ever had on these projects that's not just because I've
been talking to them, it's you know it's being out in the open air and they're
physically tired at the end you know it can't be quite a hard piece of work
doing this so I think it's a mixture of being able to be in an environment with
friends, doing new jobs that are interesting and also connecting with
their own heritage, one of the things we do is working on a lot of military
projects and they bring them the skill sets of knowledge of these military
environments and and elements of the excavation artifacts we're finding and that I
don't have as a skillset so it's it's giving something to a project as a whole.
That's great, so how did you come up with the idea for all of this? The project
came in in 2011 so it's been running for a while now and in fact it was a phone
call I received from the medical sergeant in Beachley barracks over in
Chepstow, who was attached to First Battalion of the Rifles (that's the
biggest of the infantry regiments) and he suggested that he's got one of his lads
who was going to commit suicide if he said unless he was able to do some
archaeology, it's not not the normal reaction you get, normally it drives you
to it but um no he wanted to do some archaeology and whether as I work for
the MOD as an archaeologist, whether we could set up a project for him and
that's not breaking any confidences the guy's been on on television to say this,
and so the phone call went in 2011 and it's gone up to today of going from one
small unit in the army right through to all the the branches of the armed forces
and we put yeah well over a hundred people through this program and some of
them gone and done degrees, some of them have worked for archaeological professional
companies and others have just got a nice group on Facebook that they'll have
a laugh with and you know if that's that's something that makes them feel
better than fantastic job done. Okay and who is it that you're targeting to get
involved with the project? There's always a way in and it's just knowing the right
people at the right right time really in many ways, so if there's any veteran that
fancies having a go at something to do with heritage, or they've got a
particular question about heritage then one that they want to get involved in
then but I'm keen to hear from them and see if we can make that sort of
thing happen, there's always a job, as I said, for everybody within archaeology
and um a lot of people get the bug, we've had people on the program that just did it
to shut the mate up, who've been rattling on about archaeology, but they keep
coming back and I think it's a bit of a bug really I've been doing it for years
and it's nice to see other people from a military environment having that that
sort of excitement and passion that I've got. It's that discovery moment, it's
finding something connecting directly to history through an object, you can find
an object that was fired let's say in the First World War and you read about
the First World War and that's great but to see something that was actually there in the
First World War then that's that's amazing.
Firstly what brought you to this project? It's the history of it basically, having
served in the Royal Tank Regiment, being part of the history of it, also having
family who served in the First World War on tanks,
that's what brought me to this you know it was a another way of being part
of it and finding what they went through always been interested in history as
itself as you see as a living historian as well as a hobby yeah I just want to get
more immersed you know got me more immersed into it. And is it just the First World War
that you're interested in? No erm modern well any military history really. I
grew up on a diet of war films, being taken to museums by my family. Okay
so what is it about this project that you find so beneficial?
It's helped me in my actual physical recovery and mental recovery from
being injured in Afghanistan in 2009. I needed to find a way of overcoming the
barriers of my physical but also post-traumatic stress disorder which I was
diagnosed with before leaving the forces and it's a way of actually
overcoming that barrier and also taking my mind off it as well. While I was
on the dig, I wasn't thinking of my time out there, I was thinking it you know
this is something it's keeping my mind off it and also thinking of the history
and the background of it and what was yeah what happened 100 years ago rather
than my actual service. And what message would you have to any former servicemen
that might be dismissive of this project? I highly recommend it, so it's a way of
over-coming you know you probably see it on TV is a bunch of tweed you know chino-
wearing archaeologists, basically digging a hole really on Time Team, but
when you're, when you're actually doing it you know it's something you're
gaining something out of it, your sense of pride at the end as well, you've found
an object, you know and then you can think - yeah I'm actually holding history,
you know this is how we've all developed, you know. The human race should never
forget about history, you know, they should always keep it in their memory, an
event like this is actually doing it.
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