In some respects I am a shining example of national service’s benefits. I entered the RAF in 1955 (two years duration then) having more or less failed at formal education; in those days journalists didn’t need to be educated. Took the RAF’s intensive eight-month course on electronics which transformed the rest of my career as a journalist.
But I was the exception. The majority became clerks, a coded term for the useless shuffling of paper, boring in the extreme and an enormous encouragement to drag one’s arse. The really unlucky ones got their heads shot off in Malaya or Cyprus.
One thing that disturbed me was the burden of accommodating, training, feeding, clothing and attending to the health of all these non-doers. Today I believe the UK’s army numbers about 76,000 souls. During national service the total must have been in the high six figures, spread around the globe. Huge costs and eventually too much for the country to bear. NI ended in 1968.
Tories continually advocate the re-creation of non-existent Golden Eras. Perhaps very aged politicos who spent their two years in the Brigade of Guards, cossetted in central London, have a different view of national service.
Me? Perhaps I’m whinging. My two brothers escaped NI (quite legitimately, I must add). I profited but there was much militaristic drudgery. I read a lot.
It's hard to know what right or wrong in this regard. I do, however, think the experience is useful for the people who survive national service. Let's face it, there are some high placed villains out there and each country needs to be prepared to act.
ReplyDeleteColette: In fact the proposals are very vague. I'm fairly sure they don't include training lads to kill the enemy. Senior officers (who actually say the UK armed forces are under-staffed) have said that none of them wants to go to war with servicemen who are only half trained. They may get trained soldiers killed through their incompetence.
DeleteIt's a badly thought out, unfunded tactic to try to win over the older voters who may still hanker after the good old days.
ReplyDeleteMaybe they think it will make them forget how long they will have to wait for their hip replacement (unless they use their savings) or how unlikely they are to get adequate care when they are beyond looking after themselves.......unless the new legion of hapless teenage squaddies are sent to do it.
Jean: Certainly under-funded. You put your finger on "new legion of hapless teenage squaddies are sent to do it", reminding me of the lengthy time I spent in sick quarters in RAF Seletar (Singapore) as the medics tried to clear up my seemingly incurable athlete's foot. As I had been trained to repair radios other national servicemen had been trained to repair defective airmen like me. To tell the truth one such national service orderly in particular did a pretty good during an especially gruesome period of the treatment. Rather better than I did repairing radios.
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