Confessions of a goth mercenary
Back in the dark days of 1984 in Maggie's favourite African country, a letter arrived for me, setting out my plans for the next two years, most of which seemed to revolve around being dressed in brown and being shouted at (and possibly shot at). My options were somewhat limited - do national service, or go back to Blackburn (with no qualifications and no job prospects, and being a burden on distant family members).

Decision pretty much made for me, I arrived at the depressing field next to Johannesburg gasworks where we were all catching a train to a godforsaken dump called Phalaborwa - an infantry training camp with a reputation that Deepcut seems to have followed. I was singled out straight away - possibly something to do with the spraypainted anarchy t-shirt and Norwegian navy trenchcoat, or the suedehead cut dyed black (I wanted a darker colour, but trichology was still in its infancy).

Sixteen hours later, arrive at hell on earth. Surprisingly enough, it wasn't quite as bad as I'd been led to believe, especially after the medical where they found me a gnat's nudger away from being totally unfit for soldierly duties. The deafness and colour blindness tests are dead easy to fiddle. The morbid underweightness and borderline diabetes came naturally, as a result of being a hard drinking headbanging goth (Jo'burg's nightlife was a bit limited, so diversity gave you a few more options come Friday nights). The psychologically suspect aspect was fun - playing mind games with the doctors...

Medically classified as fit to be little more than a personnel clerk (along with a few others), it was off to Pretoria for basic training. Six weeks of learning how to walk properly (not quite marching), being taught about the constituent bits of a rifle and how to take one apart (but not actually being allowed anywhere near one, for various reasons), and large amounts of heavily-subsidised lager. This was followed by a month-long clerk's course, where we learnt the finer points of military correspondence - useful stuff like the pointy end of a pen being the business end, and that secret and top secret correspondence was so much more interesting than restricted stuff.

After basic training, I was posted to a logistics base, which was like a dull 9-5 office job, but in uniform. All in all, I had an easy time, and never came close to being shot at, which was A Good Thing. Most of my memories revolve around copious quantities of alcohol, ably abetted by my best mate, a Czech-born Australia-raised engineer who could almost match my lager-necking rate. One new year's eve guard duty (with rifle magazines masking-tape sealed for safety reasons) was spent sat in my car (the Suicide Machine - a 1968 Cortina GT with a filling-loosening sound system) knocking back catembe (cheap red wine and coke) with loud New Order to provide the atmosphere.

I survived the two years without getting into too much trouble, except for the time I was given two extra guard duties for chatting up some brigadier's wife at a posh function I was waitering at. I'm not sure if it was the semi-drunken attempt at waltzing or the goodbye snog she gave me that upset her husband.

Cherry popping? Length? Girth? There's a baby somewhere missing an arm.
(CaptainParalytic, Tue 28 Mar 2006, 12:01, Reply)