Why the Soviets Should Have Invaded West Germany on a Friday Night
Tax-Free Paradise
In 1972 at 1 Armoured Division and Signal Regiment in Verden, booze was tax-free for soldiers and their families, as were cigarettes and petrol. If I remember correctly, a bottle of vodka cost about 2.5 Deutschmarks in the NAAFI supermarket—practically pocket money.
Our squadron had its own bar, a converted barrack room with nothing fancy: just a bar, some stools, and a couple of tables. I don't remember if it was open every night, but I know it was open over the weekends, sometimes 24/7, depending on how long the stocks lasted.
When we were at the barracks, there was always a Happy Hour on Fridays. It usually started around 4 p.m. and would end sometime on Sunday morning.
Learning My Limits
I'd never been much of a drinker. I certainly enjoyed a pint or two and sometimes overdid things, only to find myself retching into a toilet bowl. A couple of visits to the Squadron Bar put me off making further visits.
Some of the single lads in the squadron took drinking to a whole new level. Apart from the fairly common sight of unconscious soldiers lying or sitting in pools of their own vomit, there were also the drunken "dares." One I witnessed involved drinking a glass of someone else's piss. A worse one was straining somebody's vomit through a sock into a beer and drinking it. (That one makes me feel nauseous just writing it.)
The Legend of Jock
There was the darkly humorous tale of Signalman J., also known as Jock—a tough Glaswegian who was a nasty piece of work and a bully feared and hated by most of the young lads in the squadron, including me.
In the early hours of one Saturday morning, Jock staggered into his room, effing and blinding and waking the other occupants, who all pretended to be sleeping.
What followed next was comedy gold.
The Great Defenestration
Jock's bed was next to one of the room's windows. He decided it was too far to walk down the corridor to the toilet, so he climbed up onto the window sill. These barracks had been built by the Germans before the war, and the window sills were very wide—I think there had been some kind of double glazing system fitted in the past.
Jock opened the window and started to undo his fly. As he did this, he somehow got turned around. He peed all over his bed, zipped himself up, turned around, and stepped out of the window. He hit the ground with a resounding thump two storeys below.
Jock broke both his legs and, as far as I know, never returned to the squadron.
The Official Investigation
Well, that's the story given by the people interviewed by the Special Investigation Branch. The SIB wouldn't believe that he had voluntarily walked out of the window. The witnesses pointed to the pee on the bed and floor. The SIB reluctantly had to accept their version, as Jock couldn't remember anything.
Perhaps it's fortunate for some people that DNA testing wasn't a thing then. Back then, pee was just pee.
Why Friday Nights Were Perfect for Invasion
The moral of the story? If the Soviets had launched their attack on a Friday night, they'd have found half the British Army of the Rhine unconscious in pools of their own vomit, and the other half trying to work out which end of their weapons was which.
The free world's defense against communist expansion was, for at least 60 hours every weekend, essentially non-existent.