Non-combat personnel

and humanitarian workers are the glue which hold a lot of fragile fabric together in conflict zones.
I don't know a lot about the official non-combat personnel in the armed services. They presumably get given orders to go and do things and then get on with it.  I do know several non-combat personnel but it isn't the sort of thing we talk about. We are much more likely to talk about something positive - knitting perhaps?
I do know, if only through mail, email and other non-contact means, a lot of other humanitarian workers. Their work is often very dangerous.
Some of them have not survived. The first person I knew who did not survive was someone very close to me. He knew the dangers but went in to help anyway. I'll never forget his father phoning me and saying, 
       "Cat, have you got someone who can be with you? I have some very, very bad news, the worst." 
If it was bad for me I still can't comprehend what it must have been like for his parents. They both died early and I am certain it was part stress at losing their only child.
Each year at school we were told the story of "Simpson and his donkey" - the supposed story of John Simpson Kirkpatrick, the stretcher bear at Gallipoli in World War I. The story we were told was not quite the truth but it served to tell us that non-combat personnel were also present and were also courageous people. 
Since then I have known, one way or another, many other stories of those who have died trying to do good in the violence around them or through an accident caused by the conditions they were working under. It isn't always something you hear about. Sometimes it gets into the local media, even a state newspaper, but often nothing is said.
It is for that reason I have spent some time in the past month making some poppies and turning them into books with the help of outsize paper clips. It is the anniversary of my friend's death tomorrow. I have made poppies for remembrance and turned them into paper clips to acknowledge those who attempt to hold us together under the worst of circumstances.