The Angst of Army Life

As Wang put it to me the other day, the first five minutes of your army life, if you're anything at all like me, will be spent ricocheting from the headiness of superiority to the hollow realisation that you're stuck in this place for two years. Two years might pass quickly, if you know how to have fun. They can also turn into a neverending hell. I've been in here for almost 6 months, and they have for the most part been hell, and I genuinely hope that things improve for the next one and a half years or there is going to be trouble. 

In the army, your brain shuts off - any NSF who's had a smidgen of an education will tell you this, and for the most part it's true. Sunday afternoons are dreadful with the futility of having to go back to camp. But by tuesday you hardly feel anything at all, there's no more 'oh, this place is a shithole' - rather, just a sort of anaesthetised haze where you run about and do your thing without quite thinking about it. Well, that's not so bad, you might say. Jolly Good Fun and all that - well it isn't. The real agony comes the following sunday afternoon, when you realise just how miserable you've been but your misery-centres in your brain have become overworked by tuesday and don't produce enough misery-chemical to do the place justice. During the week, you also become quite stupid, at times, although personally I excel at technical knowledge, you forget the day of the week and what time it is and whether you've just had breakfast or lunch although since it was sausages it was probably breakfast, dreadful isn't it well yes it is. So - your brain shuts off but not for long enough to have any real comforting effect, more like the creeping horror of losing your mind as you inch toward the age of 75, only I'm 19. 

The other thing is the tiredness, the physical tiredness. Now any army worth its salt will work its trainees hard, sure. Ours does. In fact, I would go as far to say that maybe some people deserve the jolly good whacking they get and it certainly gets them in shape. I'm all for the fitness stuff. In my experience though, there never quite is enough recovery time for me, and as any course progresses I get more and more tired to the point where I sometimes report in on sunday night -already- tired from the previous week and not having had enough rest over the weekend - this is not good. As if the slow degradation of your mind isn't enough horror, the slow degradation of the body compounds this triple-time and makes you seriously worry for your health. Not that, in the throes of lactic-acid poisoning, my body is really the first of my concerns. Army also breeds a certain self-destructiveness amongst the trainees, out of desperation or sheer bloodymindedness I don't know which, but more people take up smoking in the army than anywhere else i'm certain, and if we get a choice whether to down that can of likely carcinogenic Red Bull or just go the SOC alone with half a litre of water, the Red Bull is the choice anyone would make. 

Often I've come back from a gruelling route march feeling physically sick from fatigue, refusing food and almost vomiting if there was anything left to vomit. It took me a week to recover from my 32k, during which I often had problems standing up. 

So - yes, this IS a soldier's life and as far as soldiering goes it's probably necessary. But, I don't like it and I'm seriously concerned about my body and my health and I don't think it's fair to put so many people through it if the consequences are like that. At least put some real thought into the postings, Jesus. 

adam