Recently a friend of mine at work emailed me a list of the casualties suffered by the British Army in Iraq. I wasn't sure why he had sent it round apart from the fact that he is an ex-military chap himself and I assumed he was sharing some news. It seemed like quite a long list of names and the email it self took a few minutes to open on my machine. So I deleted it.

Simply as that, deleted it, click.

And then...

Well then nothing happened, at least not at work. What did happen outside of work however was that I, that very night, watched a television show, one of my favourites, and in this particular episode the character are talking about the list of dead from that day in a fictional war. The scene played out like this:

Character 1: "Sir... the latest casualty reports have been posted."

Character 2: "How many this time?"

Character 1: "Including the troops lost at AR-Five-Five-Eight... seventeen hundred and thirty."

Character 2: "Seventeen hundred and thirty." (quietly)

Character 1: "That's a lot of names." (Sympathetically)

Character 2: "They're not just names... It's important we remember that.

(to himself) "We have to remember..."

Now watching that scene brought me to tears, not only because of the fictional story that was emotional and hard hitting but because art had imitated life absolutely and it had found me wanting.

So I want to say that the character was right. We have to remember that the names in the news are real people. Out of respect of their choices, out of respect for a fellow person we must remember that. This isn't about being about anti-war; this is about being a decent person.

Now I don't know exactly what difference it will make to the world to remember that they were people but I know it is the morally right thing to do.

So for myself I went back to my email and found the deleted email with the names of those dead soldiers and I read the names, I read the names of those people, all of them. And I wondered what type of people they had been. What their hopes had been and who had been left behind.

Again I don't know what it accomplishes but it feels right.

Let us never forget it is not a list of names, it is a list of people.