The Lazy Recruiter and Rich Men's Wars: My Army Introduction
When I was about seven or eight, my ambition was to become a Spitfire pilot, blissfully unaware that Spitfires hadn’t been in service for years. Like most childhood dreams, it dissolved when I faced the reality that staying in school long enough to qualify for the RAF wasn’t going to happen.
By the age of fifteen, my motivations were far more urgent than a childhood dream. I’d already been working off the books, first at a kennels, then on a farm and I knew I didn’t want to spend my life shovelling cow shit. More than anything, I wanted out: out of school, out of Trapp, out of poverty, and maybe even out of my family. My biggest fear wasn’t failure; it was ending up in prison if I didn’t change the trajectory of my life.
The turning point came one day when me and my best mate, Richard Hanney, bunked off school and caught a bus into Swansea. The plan was to finally speak to the RAF recruiter. But fate, or possibly one lazy recruiter, had other ideas. Instead, we walked into the Army careers office. What happened next is the story of how a single conversation, a lazy recruiter, and a moment of teenage impatience changed the course of my entire life.
The Unwitting Recruit
Walking into that Army office, I didn’t think about geopolitics or class. But looking back, I can see I was becoming a statistic, another name in a story that has been told for centuries. As Michael Moore pointed out, it’s an old truth that “rich men’s wars are fought by the poor.” Even 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosopher Plutarch said: “The poor go to war, to fight and die for the delights, riches, and superfluities of others.”
Nothing has changed. We need only look at the modern example of Donald Trump, whose rich father helped him dodge the Vietnam draft with a doctor’s note about “bone spurs.” Years later, Trump would compare his life as a wealthy womaniser to the Vietnam War, claiming that navigating the dating scene during the ’80s AIDS epidemic was his own personal battlefield. In his own words, women’s vaginas were like “potential landmines.”
I’m very sure the thousands of working-class veterans who have lost limbs to actual landmines in places like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Northern Ireland would disagree.
This section of the blog is the home for those stories. It’s where I'll unpack the memories, the political commentary, and the things I just need to get off my chest. It’s about my time in the Army from 1970 to 1981, but it’s also about why boys like me end up there in the first place.
The first story, which details that fateful day in the recruiter's office, is here: Come Back in Ten Days": The Sentence That Changed My Life