So after three and a half years you make it to Mons Officer Cadet School, including two years in a war, only to discover the terrorist who had tried to kill you with a grenade and who, you in return, had tried to shoot, ends up in the bed next to you! What do you do? Advice from the staff to check your bed for a grenade every night before you get into it doesn’t really help. Six months of brutality, tiredness, sleeplessness and absolute pressure follow with course attendees dropping like flies. A year at a boys’ regiment when he is persecuted for not burning down the Officers’ Club follows and his career ends at a tank depot where an insane ex-para has storemen and vehicle specialists pretending to be fit paras. And the final stress is to look after a full general who is a menace to wood and the main contributor to Elastoplast’s profit that year! Join our hero, Jack, in this the second of the trilogy and be ready for the third!
It was autumn of 1964 – with one war about to end and one about to start – although no one knew about that yet. So imagine you have just turned 19, a young soldier, a Staff Clerk by trade, who, having volunteered to serve in Aden to be with your fiancée, are given your ring back the night you arrived there! Furthermore, you are about to discover that the Army’s maxim of ‘soldier first – tradesman second’ is about to be put into practice.
Now in your role as a soldier, you are to be issued with a rifle and bayonet – no bullets! Because that nice Mr Healey thinks you might shoot a citizen of an oil-rich state, causing all sorts of problems. So, much better a dead soldier than an annoyed oil-rich nation. Now, if your imagination has carried you this far, see if you can carry on as well as ‘Jack’, our hero of this first of a trilogy. See how he is to find himself, although only a private soldier, a confidante of generals, a correspondent with a prime minister, an instructor of RAF officers and a bogeyman for the top military policeman. It is also worth reading to find out how he is the only man to escape a poo shower of gargantuan proportions generated by a pyromaniac with 20 gallons of petrol, lots of used ‘compo’ and a hidden ingredient. Could you survive as well as Jack or would you go sick?
What’s it like to leave the Army, get a job as a Training Development Officer for a Training Board in Northern Ireland, a beautiful, quiet, peaceful place and have to open the door of a car fifty yards from the border with the Republic which might or might not have a bomb in it triggered to go off when a door is opened?
Read and find out! Jack, our hero finds out and then moves on to ‘war’ with trade unions as a quite different kind of war followed by 16 years fighting Industrial and Employment Tribunals where in one you have to prove a year is 1 January to 1 January and in another you have to prove that a year is 1 Jan to 31st December! Both cannot be right – so which one is it?
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