I learned big stuff and trivia from serving. I learned loyalty is to the people close to you; the other people in the chopper...
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His name was Billy Blake, a helpless alcoholic whose haunting tenor voice drifted out beyond the farmhouse fence into the surrounding bush, mesmerising us as we lay next to our rifles, absorbing his interpretation of the Ballad of the Green Beret:
“Put silver wings on my son’s chest Make him one of America’s best. He’ll be a man they’ll test one day. Have him win the Green Beret.”
Years later, when my son was born, I knew, instinctively, I never wanted to see him tested one day, to win any sort of beret, nor be any old war-monger’s idea of what the definition of “best” is in relation to any man.
This week, as that old debate about national service was rolling around on social media, it awoke the ambivalence in me about the two years of my life I spent in camouflage, press-ganged into fighting a war which could not, can not, have any moral justification.
Just for airing that thought, more than 40 years later, confirms me as a traitor for many. But, I can still smile at our peacetime copies of the old Vietnam vets T-shirts which proclaimed: Participant, Southern African War Games, 1964-1980. Second Place.
When we came marching home, there were no cheering crowds. No-one said: Thank you for your service.
For some, a country which now had new black rulers wasn’t home any longer… and they left. Yet, although there were plenty of bad times in that time in uniform, many things which still can’t be unseen and hearts which were broken along with minds left scarred, there were aspects for which, if I am not exactly thankful, made me realise they are part of what made me who I am today.
Those positive aspects of national service are what people are selling today. It will teach you, they argue, about discipline and self-reliance and make you a more useful member of society at the end. Just the way to sort out the lazy, soft kids of today.
National service does have things going for it, I have to admit. As long as you don’t let a war get in the way… I learned big stuff and trivia from conscription.
How to align shirt and fly buttons in a neat line, how to put a belt on pants the proper way (don’t ask…). But, also: how not to crawl up into a ball when things don’t go your way.
In boot camp, the instructors would laugh and give you a kick up the arse; in the bush someone might end your whining with a 7.62mm intermediate round.
I learned loyalty is to the people close to you: the other people in the chopper, the ones you look at in that suspended moment, breathing in jet fumes, aware life is about to get very serious, very shortly. Loyalty not to the army; not to the government; not to a politician.
That’s the way I still am. I have the backs of those I work with. My team. And my family. Being subject to the discipline of national service means I probably expect a lot out of people and have no patience when they don’t deliver.
I used to teach people techniques to survive in a firefight. Now I pass on knowledge to help some survive the even more hostile world of work.
Because of that, I was hard on my children. Perhaps to prove a point to me, they did well. Neither of them had to live through national service to acquire a work ethic, though.
And, maybe younger generations are not as lazy and as spoiled as we of advancing years like to believe they are. They don’t need silver wings to prove that, either.
