Hamlet in Helmand: Wild

Justice_________________________________________________________________

Graham Holderness

“Shuffle off this mortal coil you c***.

It’s nothing you wouldn’t do to us.”1

This is a quotation from the recorded speech of Sergeant Alexander Blackman of the British
Royal Marines as he fired a bullet into the body of a captured Afghan insurgent in Helmand
Province in September 2011.

Inside that quotation lies another much more familiar quotation, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil

Must give us pause. (3.1.67-9)

If you were to read the opening words of this chapter aloud, you would be quoting
Shakespeare at fourth, Sgt Blackman at third, and my own words at second hand. Given that
Hamlet is often regarded as a play that seems to consist entirely of quotations, the iconic
aphorism itself may well have had an origin somewhere else, might have been already
second-hand when Shakespeare coined or re-minted it. And along with many other phrases
from Shakespeare, and especially Hamlet, this one has entered the common language, and
1
From transcript of the ‘Helmand Province Incident’ audio recording, published by The

Guardian, 25 October 2013. [Available at] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-

news/2013/oct/25/royal-marines-court-martial-video-transcript [Accessed 20 September

2018]. The video recording was released in 2017 and is accessible on Youtube. [Available at]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKxCZxPmvN8 [Accessed 20 September 2018].

could be both spoken and heard without necessarily raising the ghost of Shakespeare in its
wake at all. Sgt Blackman may have been citing, rather than quoting, Shakespeare: using a
short-hand form of reference to a familiar shared source. Nonetheless, in media reports of this
incident, the citation was recognized, and commented on, as a quotation from Shakespeare.
Sgt Blackman was identified not as a soldier who killed his prisoner, but as a soldier who
quoted Shakespeare while doing so.

Quotation is the natural condition of language and of poetry. It has no end, and possibly no
beginning either. Which means that for good or ill, by accident or intention, Shakespeare has
become inextricably implicated in this controversial incident.

In September 2011 Sgt Blackman was on patrol in Helmand Province with 42 Commando
Royal Marines, and came across a Taliban insurgent who, in the course of attacking a British
forward post, had been mortally wounded by an Apache helicopter. MP Richard Drax,
introducing a Parliamentary Debate in 16 September 2015, said:

Sergeant Blackman and his patrol were directed to an insurgent who had been fatally
wounded by gunfire from an Apache helicopter. Horribly exposed in a known hotspot
for enemy activity, they knew that other insurgents were in the area. They dragged the
fatally wounded man to cover.2

The Apache is equipped with the M230 chain gun, which fires six-hundred-and-twenty-five
30 mm rounds, each capable of piercing an armoured vehicle, a minute. Blackman and his
comrades pulled the fatally wounded man out of sight of a surveillance balloon. The whole
operation was filmed via a helmet camera worn by one of the Marines who accompanied Sgt
Blackman. The footage was later found by civilian police officers searching a soldier’s laptop
for unrelated reasons, and passed to the military police. The audio component of the video
recording (the former was publicly released in 2013, the latter in 2017), shows clearly that the
Marines debated whether or not to administer first aid, and tried to keep their actions shielded
from the sight and surveillance of other army personnel. They also show that Blackman shot
the insurgent with a 9mm pistol, admitted that he had “just broke the Geneva Convention”,
and enjoined secrecy on his comrades – “obviously this doesn’t go anywhere, fellas.”
2
Richard Drax, MP. House of Commons Hansard, 16 September 2015. Column 339WH.
A year later, five Marines were charged with murder. Charges were dropped against two, and
proceeded with against three, including Blackman. A court-martial found Blackman alone
guilty of murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment (minimum ten years) and discharged
in disgrace from the Marines. He lost his appeal, though his sentence was reduced from ten
years to eight. He was the first British serviceman to be convicted of the murder of an enemy
combatant on a foreign battlefield.

Following Blackman’s conviction, support for the Marine sprang up from various quarters,
both within the military and the general public, producing social media support groups and
petitions to have him released, or his sentence reduced. A public campaign, fronted by
novelist Frederick Forsyth, received strong support from the conservative press, especially
the Daily Mail. Over three and a half years, representations were made to the Criminal Cases
Review Commission to send the case back to the Courts-Martial Appeal Court. In 2017
Blackman’s conviction was reduced by the from murder to manslaughter with diminished
responsibility, the “disgrace” stigma was removed from his dismissal, and he was released
from prison.

There are two interpretations of this complex and difficult case. The court-martial convicted
Blackman of murder, a verdict supported by senior military officers, the court-martial judicial
system, the Ministry of Defence, and implicitly the House of Commons. Within this
perspective Blackman acted both illegally and dishonourably, since it was his duty under the
Geneva Convention to protect the wounded prisoner. The view of the Ministry of Defence
was that “no serviceman or woman of our armed forces is or can be above the law”.3 The
video and audio evidence is certainly damning, since it seems to show that the soldiers
abused the captive, both verbally and physically, before illegally killing him; tried to hide
their actions from the knowledge of others; and were complicit in a conspiracy to keep the
crime a secret amongst themselves. Had it not been for a combination of military carelessness
and civilian police zealotry (it has not been revealed how the civilian police came across the
evidence on the laptop) it is probable that the crime would never have been discovered, and
the perpetrator would have gone undetected and unpunished.

3
Mark Lancaster, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence. House of Commons
Hansard, 16 September 2015. Column 357WH.
The opposing argument, which is one of mitigation rather than defence, was the basis for the
campaign of public support for Blackman. At his trial Blackman admitted that he had shot the
man, but claimed that he believed him to be already dead. In the audio recording, several of
the soldiers offer the opinion that he was already dead, supporting Blackman’s contention. He
had tried to take out his anger on a corpse, he claimed, and felt deeply ashamed of his actions.
In mitigation, supporters and press commentaries have highlighted the psychological damage
of post-traumatic stress, and specific atrocities committed by the Taliban that Blackman
experienced at first hand. In sentencing Blackman Jeff Blackett, Judge Advocate General,
acknowledged this context:

We accept that you were affected by the constant pressure, ever present danger and fear
of death or serious injury. This was enhanced by the reduction of available men in your
command post so that you had to undertake more patrols yourself and place yourself
and your men in danger more often. We also accept the psychiatric evidence presented
today that when you killed the insurgent it was likely that you were suffering to some
degree from combat stress disorder. (quoted in Hansard Column 341WH)

Despite these admissions, none of the mitigating circumstances were considered as relevant
to the conviction, no psychiatric assessment was made before conviction, and the only charge
considered was murder. Crucial evidence of supervisory failures, which could have provided
support for a manslaughter charge, was withheld from the court-martial. It has been argued
that Blackman was a scapegoat for wider failings in the chain of command. An online e-
petition that attracted over 100,000 signatures demanded Blackman’s release on the grounds
that he had “defended his country against a terrorist” (November 2013). A later petition
drawn up by Blackman’s supporters, which attracted 31,478 signatures, affirmed, in defence
of his actions, what they see as a basic principle of natural justice: “A soldier should never go
to prison for killing the enemy in a battlefield situation. Sergeant Alexander Blackman was
sent to prison for killing a member of the Taliban in a battle in Afghanistan.” (September
2015) The petitions triggered a parliamentary debate, conducted on 16 September 2015.
Mitigation in the form of diminished responsibility was the basis on which Blackman’s
conviction was finally reduced from murder to manslaughter.

4
There is however a third way of interpreting this incident, via the Shakespeare play alluded to
in Blackman’s battlefield citation. The context of the quotation is of course Hamlet’s famous
“To be or not to be” soliloquy, and the prince’s meditations on suicide. The afterlife ought to
be a respite from the intractable, labyrinthine “coil” of living, “a consummation devoutly to
be wished.” But suppose the afterlife is haunted, like life itself, by “dreams”?

The ontological musings of a Renaissance scholar seem worlds away from the harsh
exigencies of war in contemporary Afghanistan, and Sergeant Blackman may well not have
had Shakespeare much in his mind. Hamlet, however, is not a play about eschatology, but a
play about revenge and justice: in particular about whether they can ever be the same thing.
We can infer that this aspect of Hamlet was very much in Sgt Blackman’s mind from his
subsequent remark, addressed to the dead or dying prisoner: “It’s nothing you wouldn’t do to
us.”

This follow-up remark is not of course a quotation from Shakespeare, but it certainly
operates as a citation, by irresistibly invoking Hamlet’s prior justification, confided to
Horatio, for killing Claudius:

Does it not, think’st thee, stand me now upon –

He that hath killed my king and whored my mother,
Popped in between th’election and my hopes,
Thrown out his angle for my proper life,
And with such cozenage – is’t not perfect conscience
To quit him with this arm? And is’t not to be damned
To let this canker of our nature come
In further evil? (5.2.64-71)

Horatio implicitly agrees: “Why, what a king is this!” In the same vein one of Sgt
Blackman’s comrades endorses the validity of his talionic assertion – “It’s nothing more than
you would do to us” – with the laconic “I know.”

Nothing you wouldn’t do to us. In fact of course a British soldier fallen into the hands of a
jihadist enemy could expect much worse: to be summarily executed, crucified, even skinned
alive; or held hostage for years for ransom or propaganda, ending his days in an Islamist
beheading video. “In Afghanistan”, observed Richard Drax in the Parliamentary Debate, “the
enemy were clever, motivated, difficult to identify, ruthless and cruel. Torture and death
faced those who fell into their hands”. (Hansard Column 339WH) To state that immediate
death by a bullet to the chest is “nothing” compared to these possibilities is not in this context
an outrageous exaggeration. It could be argued, making allowances for the manifest linguistic
differences between Shakespeare’s Danish prince and British Royal Marines on active duty,
that the details featured in the audio and video recordings – the Taliban’s combatant role, his
weaponry (an AK-47 assault rifle), the grenade concealed in his pocket – draw a parallel with
Hamlet’s inventory of Claudius’s manifest crimes. Even the verbal abuse of the prisoner via
repeated obscene expletives can be read not as unprovoked racist hatred, but as the indignant
anger of men who had witnessed their own comrades killed and desecrated by the same
enemy: “F***ing c***, shooting at Taalanda [a British post], you twat.” Hamlet’s list of
charges against Claudius amounts to an insistent protestation that in this case revenge and
justice are perfectly aligned: “is’t not perfect conscience / To quit him?” (5.2.70) The Royal
Marines might well have been engaged in a very similar effort of self-justification.

How all occasions do inform against me,

And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event,
A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward, I do not know
Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do;'
Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
To do't. Examples gross as earth exhort me:
Witness this army of such mass and charge
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
 Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep? while, to my shame, I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That, for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth! (4.4.32-66)

In a soliloquy that appears in the second Quarto, but not in the Folio, Hamlet observes the
Norwegian army, led by Fortinbras, marching against Poland. The military virtues of
ambition, courage and honour manifested in this operation reproach him with his own
indecision and delay. By contrast the Prince himself seems to display inertia, “bestial
oblivion”, or a scrupulosity that seems close to cowardice. Given that these Norwegian
soldiers, and their commander Fortinbras, are prepared to risk their lives for a “little patch of
ground” (4.4.18), Hamlet – who possesses abundance of “cause and strength and will” – has
no excuse for failing in his duty. The injuries inflicted on him are manifest – “a father killed,
a mother stained” – and the justice of his cause is not in dispute. The spectacle of soldiers
marching to their deaths compels him to strengthen his own will and focus on his duty of
revenge:

O, from this time forth,

My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
At the time of the Helmand Province Incident, “all occasions” were certainly informing
against Sergeant Alexander Blackman. The context was described by Richard Drax in the
Parliamentary Debate:

In Afghanistan, the enemy were clever, motivated, difficult to identify, ruthless and
cruel. Torture and death faced those who fell into their hands. It was into this hellhole
that Alexander Blackman and his fellow Royal Marines from 42 Commando were
pitched in 2011. Sergeant Blackman was a 15-year veteran of six operational tours: one
in Northern Ireland and three in Iraq, and he was on his second in Afghanistan. There is
nothing that this former Royal Marine has not seen. In each tour he had served his
country and his corps with great distinction and courage. He was that most valued
member of the Royal Marines, the elite’s elite—a senior non-commissioned officer—
and he had been recommended for promotion, but then came his last tour in Helmand
province, the toughest of his military career.

Sergeant Blackman was posted to the remote command post Omar, with 15 younger
Royal Marines under his command. They lived for more than six months in a small
mud enclosure, in appalling conditions of physical discomfort. Daily, they patrolled on
foot for up to 10 hours in a large hostile area where the Taliban were most active. IEDs,
or improvised explosive devices, the roadside landmines favoured by the Taliban, were
a constant threat, to the extent that the squad seldom used their vulnerable Jackal
vehicle, preferring to patrol on foot instead. They were aware that hundreds of their
comrades had already been killed or maimed by IEDs. The psychological impact was
devastating. Firefights with the Taliban were common. So, too, were deaths and life-
threatening injuries. Overall, 42 Commando lost seven men, and a further 45 were
injured, many of them very seriously indeed.

On 28 May 2011, several Marines from Sergeant Blackman’s troop were tasked with
establishing a new base in an area known as the badlands. During the operation,
Corporal Little was caught in the same blast that killed Sergeant Blackman’s troop
commander, Lieutenant Ollie Augustin, and Marine Sam Alexander, who had won a
Military Cross on a previous tour. The blast also badly wounded Lance Corporal JJ
Chalmers. Later that day, the Royal Marines discovered body parts hanging mockingly
 in a tree. We can all imagine the effect of such an incident on hard-pressed, very young
troops. (Hansard Column 339WH)

In describing the conditions that led a distinguished officer to commit a crime, Drax is
engaged in a justification of Blackman comparable to that of Hamlet in his “How all
occasions” soliloquy. The Marine was thrown into a “hellhole” to avenge his country, just as
Hamlet is commanded by a ghost from Purgatory to avenge his father. Blackman was the
perfect officer, as Hamlet was the ideal Renaissance prince. Both have by this stage suffered
injury, and are psychologically damaged, from Hamlet’s “excitements of my reason and my
blood” to the “psychological impact” of sustained combat on Blackman. Blackman has seen
his comrades killed, as Hamlet observes the Norwegian soldiers marching to their deaths.
And although Shakespeare’s Prince eloquently explains and justifies himself, while
Blackman’s mitigation is mediated through his supporters, the Marine himself clearly
endorsed those arguments, when from his prison cell he told the Daily Mail: “I had been sent
to a brutal battlefield to fight for my country in an unpopular war.”4 Jim Shannon, ex-soldier
and DUP MP, in a powerful contribution to the Parliamentary Debate, depicted Blackman as
an isolated, suffering hero who shouldered responsibility and was ignominiously betrayed:

Sergeant Blackman was a man prepared to lay down his life for his country, who saw
two of his comrades blown up, saw another comrade tortured and murdered, and saw
another’s severed limbs hung from a tree by the Taliban. That was the daily hell that
Sergeant Blackman faced. He had to keep it together for the men he led, just as now he
keeps it together for the sake of his wife. He did all that in the face of post-traumatic
stress disorder, another factor that might have significantly impaired his judgment on
that fateful day. Now, this man has been let down by the country he fought so
courageously for. (Hansard Column 345-6WH)

Hamlet also assumes a costly burden of obligation, and is similarly betrayed. “The time is
out of joint”, he protests: “O cursed spite/That ever I was born to set it right!” (1.5.196-7)

4
Quoted in “Royal Marine Alexander Blackman 'made scapegoat' over Afghan murder
conviction”. Daily Telegraph. 11 September 2015.
6

Julie Maxwell and Kate Rumbold open their book on Shakespeare and Quotation with an
allusion to the Helmand Province Incident:

William Shakespeare is the most quoted author of all time. Quotations occur
everywhere – from kitsch pencil-tin cases (2B or not 2B) to the controversial incident
involving the British marine who said “shuffle off this mortal coil you c***” as he shot
a wounded insurgent in Afghanistan. (Maxwell and Rumbold 1)

In an Afterword to the same book Margreta de Grazia reverts to this quotation and asks
whether the very act of quoting it does not constitute some kind of “abuse”:

One is free to quote Shakespeare out of context, inaccurately, without attribution, with
omissions and substitutions, and to any purpose. But in the wake of these chapters,
which discover such fecundity in that licence, one might also ask, is there such a thing
as abuse? The editors in their introduction twice risk reproducing one such dark
example, already gone viral: a marine quotes a line from Hamlet’s soliloquy while
killing a wounded captive. The atrocity backed by Shakespeare cannot be ignored of
course, as an earlier age might have done in the name of decorum or decency. But if we
as literary critics are to address ourselves to such an atrocity, we might need to ask what
we are doing when we reproduce one merely as an example of Shakespeare’s ubiquity
or of quotation out of context. (de Grazia 298)

No-one ever suggested that Sergeant Blackman’s action constituted an “atrocity”, suggesting
a war crime, of the kind routinely perpetrated by his combatant enemies the Taliban. This is
certainly not the verdict ultimately delivered by the legal process. At best then, in the legal
and military context, “atrocity” (used twice) is a misleading term, though Margreta de Grazia
is entitled to her personal opinion on the morality of the action. What is more surprising is
that the quotation is assumed to be “out of context”, and has therefore little to do with
Shakespeare’s Hamlet. On the contrary, as my analysis has shown, there are in fact many
illuminating parallels between the play and the modern battlefield incident. In my view
Sergeant Blackman’s quotation can make us think again, about both Shakespeare and
contemporary warfare.5

5
An operation that would not be possible if we followed de Grazia’s suggestion and refrained
from reproducing – in other words censored - quotation that seems involved with what she
7

“Revenge,” wrote Francis Bacon, “is a kind of wild justice.” (Bacon 9). Revenge is no more
a part of the modern judicial system than it was in Shakespeare’s day. But it remains, over
2000 years after the Sermon on the Mount, an obstinately enduring element of popular
culture.

Hamlet is sent by his father’s ghost on a mission of revenge; but he interprets it as one of
justice. Most analysts of the play have agreed with him. Sgt Blackman was also sent, it could
be argued, by his political leaders, on a mission of revenge, for the atrocity of 9/11. The 2001
invasion by the Anglo-American coalition was triggered by the Taliban government’s refusal
to surrender Osama Bin Laden and other terrorists, and expel Al-Qaeda from their territory.
The coalition was joined in due course by NATO and United Nations forces. But
notwithstanding the political motivation of the war, in common with all other military
personnel involved in this campaign, Sgt Blackman was expected to operate within the
parameters of British and international justice. As Colonel Bob Stewart, former UN
Commander in Bosnia, said in the Parliamentary Debate:

… the law is clear. Servicemen and women have a duty and a right to kill the enemy,
until that enemy comes under their control—de facto, a prisoner. Once the enemy is
under control, they have a responsibility to care for that person. In this case, clearly,
Marine A did wrong by killing, or assuming he was killing, someone. That is against
the law of armed conflict and the Geneva convention. (Hansard Column 355WH)

There was no space then within this sphere of responsibility for the kind of “wild justice”
permissible in Hamlet, and indeed advocated by the revenge-based plot of thousands of
popular films.

Filming the event via a helmet-mounted camera made it a form of theatre. Quoting
Shakespeare inside such a theatrical environment renders the action a kind of performance.
Clearly the Marine who did the filming never expected his little play to gain an audience;
rather it was staged for his own private satisfaction. But once the film was released – fully in
audio and partially in video – it became nothing less than a revenge tragedy played out
among the cornfields of Helmand.

(incorrectly) considers “atrocity”.

In legal terms, the distinction between drama and real life is absolute. In real life you cannot
“poison in jest” (3.2.220): murder is murder. In the initial trial, according to the army, the
courts and the MOD, Sgt Blackman murdered a man he should have saved. To Blackman’s
supporters, a soldier who had been pushed beyond the limit by the terrible circumstances into
which we ordered him made a vindictive but justifiable error of judgement. They stood on the
principle that on occasion that which belongs inside the theatre may, even should, be
permitted to operate outside it. In the event the law was found to concur with this principle of
poetic justice.

Works Cited

Bacon, Francis. “Revenge”. The Essays of Francis Bacon. London: George Sawbridge, 1696.

De Grazia, Margreta. “Afterword”. In Maxwell and Rumbold. Pp. 295-299.

House of Commons Hansard, 16 September 2015. [Available at]

https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2015-09-
16/debates/15091640000001/SgtAlexanderBlackman(MarineA) [Accessed 20 September
2018)

Maxwell, Julie and Rumbold, Kate. “General Introduction”. Shakespeare and Quotation.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp.1 and 6.