I have served under five Executive Presidents/Commanders-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and five Chiefs of Staff of the Guyana Defence Force since October 1992.

I disclose these credentials to support my unique perspective into Guyana’s Civilian-Military relationships and its development.

Your writer, Mr. Branch, like so many others, is selective as a historian and sadly lacking in his appreciation of sociological norms.

To merely describe the years of the PNC’s party paramountcy as a “horrible wound” panders to impressions of denial.

Sociologically, to expect the history of that era to be easily vitiated by current interventions is without foundation and precedence.

What the goodly writer has missed is the PPP/C’s careful cultivation of civilian military relationships over the past 23 years, promoting the very healing to which he apparently subscribes.

I contend that a regime that was committed to divisiveness and entrenching ethnic insecurity would have kept the military bogey man alive, quite the opposite to what the PPP/C Administration had done and is doing.

I defy any reasonable Guyanese knowledgeable in matters concerning the military and the PPP/C civilian-military relationship to establish PPP/C policies and practices that diminish the status of the GDF.

As an amateur sociologist, I lament and repeat the disappointment I personally felt by my friend, Brigadier ret’d David Granger’s design to lead a political party that is attracting openly managerial support from other retired military servicemen and women and assumedly from active ones too.

He too disregarded sound sociological principles that, I fear, has the potential of negatively impacting on citizens’ confidence in their military.

ROGER LUNCHEON