The Sheep and Me

I come from a farming family, my grandparents had a farm in Devon, so although I have never had to earn a living off the land I know how to do jobs like planting, harvesting and dealing with livestock including sheep. I say this so that anyone reading this can't say "well, this could only happen to a stupid townie who wouldn't know a ewe from a slap round the head with a jelly fish".
This true story starts when I went to visit friends who own a small holding with a couple of horses and four sheep. My friends are elderly and the husband had been quite ill so it was left to his wife to deal with all the animals. One of the sheep had a mild case of foot rot and one grey, muddy afternoon she and I tramped out to the field where the sheep were peacefully munching their day away, me wearing a pair of her old wellie boots, to fix the poor old animals foot which was not healing as well as it should.
The field was boggy, which is not good for foot rot, pools of water stood in little dips in the ground and after some chivvying and tempting with treats we got the sheep cornered and my friend got herself organised to tend the hoof. What was I doing? I was holding the sheep, I knew what I was doing, I had held sheep before and the ewe was docile until she realised that we wanted to fix her sore foot. She turned from being a friendly fat old woolly into a very large, old, soggy (because she had been standing in a field while it rained), extremely heavy grumpy sheep and suddenly I was clinging onto her for grim death. Slowly all her weight was beginning to press into my knees and chest which were bracing her while she stood on three legs and very slowly we began to sink into the mud. It was gradual at first but then seemed to gather pace and became like something out of a "Laurel and Hardy" film as my wellie boots went deeper and deeper into the mud and I struggled to stay upright, the thought of falling over on my back in a sodden field with a gigantic sheep on top of me was becoming a terrible possibility. Somehow I managed to stay on my feet, the treatment was finished and the ewe trotted back to her herd. Mud was over the tops of my wellies and I stank of "eau de sheep" and if you have never smelt that all I can say is you are lucky. I squelched my way back to the farmhouse aching all over.
This happened years ago and I had not thought about it until this weekend when I have been watching the war against IS develop and already you can see the tragedy unfolding, slowly at first with an accidental bombing by the American Air Force of a unit of Iraqi soldiers they mistook for IS fighters while the UK planes fly around in circles trying to find something to kill. Mission creep, such a wonderful term, will happen but then who will our ground forces be fighting for, who will they be allied to and who will be the enemy. Already, like me in that field, everything is getting bogged down but what do we do?
For years whenever I would oppose whichever war was being fought people would say "well, if we don't fight what do we do?" and that used to give me brain freeze.
When I was young I knew the answer, withdraw from Vietnam, stop the killing - it all seemed so clear cut but as the years went by the wars got more confused and the reasons for going to war murkier; wars that should have been fought weren't, wars like Afghanistan and Iraq were and always whether a war was fought or not by America and allies still the suffering of the ordinary people around the world is extreme.
Each of us has to make our own minds up about what I call "the new Iraq war" and whether it is right or wrong but there are simple things that can be done to help the civilians - donate to the various appeals for hospital supplies and support the refugee centres, sponsor an orphan and have an opinion, what is happening is happening in "our" name and we are all being dragged into the mud.