'I want to keep Ben's name alive'

FOR someone who believes his only son would be alive today if it were not for Army blunders, John Hyde is remarkably free from bitterness. He doesn't want to single out and shame those responsible. All he wants is for the Army to take steps to make sure it doesn't happen again.

This puts him largely at odds with some of the families of the other five Royal Military Policemen who died with his son Ben, in the Iraqi town of al-Majar al-Kabar, near Basra, almost two years ago. At the other end of the spectrum is Reg Keys, who lost his son Thomas on that June day in 2003. Mr Keys, who is standing as an independent against Tony Blair in the General Election, described the findings of the Army inquiry that no individual officer was accountable as an "insult".

But that doesn't mean John Hyde believes the Army should be cleared of blame. Indeed, he is emphatic that the Army Board of Inquiry's finding that there was nothing that could have prevented the deaths of those six RMPs "just isn't true".

The Red Caps, who had been training the local police force, were trapped and killed in the town's police station by a mob of around 400 Iraqis. Along with Lance Corporal Hyde, 23, from Northallerton in North Yorkshire, were Sergeant Simon Hamilton-Jewel, 41, from Surrey; Corporal Paul Long, 24, from South Shields; Corporal Simon Miller, 21, from Washington; Corporal Russell Aston, 30, of Derbyshire, and Lance Corporal Thomas Keys, 20, from Wales. It was the heaviest single loss of life in combat suffered by British forces since the Falklands Campaign.

"I can appreciate the Army not wanting to take action against any particular person, because it would make it out as their fault. I don't think you can apportion the blame to one particular person," John says. "The blame is in the Army command structure itself. There are people who should have made sure that things were done who didn't."

He points to the failure to equip the RMPs with satellite phones; the failure to inform nearby Paras of the RMPs' position; issuing them with 50 rounds of ammunition instead of the 150 they were supposed to have. On its own, each of these may not have saved them. But together they spelled catastrophe.

Other factors may also have made a difference: the decision to leave the least experienced officer in charge of the RMPs when the rest of the regiment returned to the UK; even the decision to retreat into the police station compound rather than evacuate when they first came under fire from the mob.

But for John, 57, establishing that mistakes were made is not going to make a difference, it is not going to bring Ben back. What it could do is prevent more lives being needlessly lost.

"We all agree that the Army was at fault, and it is not a matter of getting money or anything else out of the Army. It is just a matter of the Army admitting that because then they will take steps to make sure it doesn't happen again," John says.

"Reg (Keys) says he doesn't like the word hindsight, what he prefers is forethought, but whichever way you look at it, it is always easier to be wise after the event. You can look at all sorts of things, but how can you say it is all the fault of one person?"

Nor does he believe Tony Blair should resign for taking Britain into the war on false information. He may disagree with the timing of the war, but believes the Prime Minister thought he was doing the right thing. Again, this puts him at odds with some of the other families.

"They would like Tony Blair to apologise and resign, and I don't think that would do anything for me. I think the other families tend to veer more towards Reg's feelings than mine. I suppose Reg is at one extreme and I'm at the other," he says. "It's just Reg's way of dealing with his grief. We all deal with it differently."

John may not want anyone in the Army singled out, but he still wants justice for Ben. The people John wants held to account are those directly responsible, those members of the mob who shot Ben and his five comrades. It is a prospect which has been brought closer with the news that a number of individuals who are thought to have been involved have been identified.

"The people I want brought to justice are the people who pulled the trigger. That is something we all want," he says.

But even this is not the focus of John's energies. Instead, he wants to ensure the world never forgets those six Red Caps, and the courage he believes they showed that day. Even with just 50 rounds between them, they had the potential to kill many people, particularly in the narrow corridors of the police station. That they didn't, he believes, is down to the RMP instinct to try and calm an angry mob, instead of shoot their way out.

He acknowledges there is no proof of this. The only magazine recovered from the scene was full, but that belonged to Corporal Simon Miller, the first of the Red Caps killed and the one with the least chance to return fire. The only shell cartridges found were from Russian guns, not the SA80s issued to the RMPs. But the SA80 cases are brass and usually collected by the Iraqis to be sold, so could well have been cleared.

Still, John believes these factors, plus evidence from Iraqi witnesses, the lack of known Iraqi casualties and the pattern of bullet holes in the police station, suggests the RMPs showed remarkable restraint. Knowing that they were almost certainly about to die, and in the knowledge that opening fire was likely to have made little difference, they seem to have resisted the temptation to take some of the mob with them.

"I think that tends to get lost in amongst some of the other things that are happening, which is why I try and do things that are going to honour the lads," John says. "They're never going to be remembered like the Charge of the Light Brigade, but I would like to think that in time to come people will remember them and talk about them and the courage that they showed."

But this is where John and his wife Sandra, 59, differ. John doesn't want the interest in his son to go away. He is active in the RMP Association, which supports families and relatives, set up the Lance Corporal Ben Hyde Memorial Trust, to raise money for the RMP Benevolent Fund, and is writing a book about Ben. But Sandra, who runs a taxi firm in Northallerton, is reluctant to get involved, he says.

"Sandra would just like it all to stop and have Ben to herself, but because of what happened, it never, ever will. If he had been killed on his own it might have been different, but because there were six of them it becomes a much higher profile.

"I don't want it to stop, because it helps me, but that is completely the opposite of how Sandra feels. The attention doesn't help Sandra. It probably hurts Sandra in a lot of ways, but it is never going to be what Sandra would like," he says.

But for John, keeping his son's name alive is his life's work.

"We all deal with grief differently. I want to put my energy into trying to make sure that the world never forgets those lads and what they did that day," he says. "If, when I die, I feel that somebody somewhere is going to say 'Honour how those men died', then I will feel as though I have achieved something. That is my aim in life: to make sure the world doesn't forget them."

* Tomorrow: 'The Day I Buried My Son'