My soldiering days
This seems like an appropriate topic with which to introduce myself to you, Jules’s readers. It is not one on which I’ve ever written before, but even in the most unexpected places you’ll find some military experience. In my own case, it is of a completely unheroic kind. For some years during high school I was compelled, like all the other boys in our co-educational school, to attend ‘cadets’. I think it was once a week, though perhaps only for part of the year. Here we learned to stand to attention or at ease, to clean a gun, to shoulder and present arms… that kind of thing.
The highlight of all this was some few days spent one year at cadet camp. It was at Heany Barracks near Bulawayo, I think, though I’m not altogether sure. We slept on the ground in tents, were woken up at the crack of dawn with the greeting, ‘The sun’s burning your eyes out’, were marched about, did some shooting, and so forth. But within a day I was as sick as a dog, with a strep throat and my temperature sky-high. The guy who was in charge of us was initially sceptical of my representations to this effect, seeing me as a shirker, but he eventually sent me to the hospital where the evidence of a thermometer and a look down my throat clinched the issue. I lay in bed for the rest of the time, and got to listen to the conversation of the real soldiers in the other beds.
There was a bloke there who’d broken his jaw, and it was now wired up - he could only take food through the spout of a teapot, liquids and mashed up stuff. He was desperate for a steak. Because of the state of my throat, I couldn’t have touched a steak, but I was happy to be in this kind of company - guys shooting the breeze - and away from the rigours of the camp being endured by my friends.
Not a story to impress, but what can I say? That’s my soldiering days, such as they were.
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Posted by Norm Geras at 6:48 am on Sunday, August 26, 2007
4 Responses to “My soldiering days”
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August 26th, 2007 at 9:56 am
Norm, surely you received the ‘PurpleThroat’. After all John Heinz…sorry, Kerry received Purple Hearts for scratches.
Of course,then he was awarded the coveted secret CIA hat, while singing Jingle Bells, the Christmas of ‘68 running agents into Cambodia.
August 26th, 2007 at 9:59 am
So you’re a StrepHawk! Who are you to comment on other types of viral infections…
August 26th, 2007 at 10:08 pm
El Cid, wouldn’t that be “Deep Throat”? No, wait, that’s already been used a couple of times……
August 27th, 2007 at 5:16 am
You’ve got more exposure to the soldiering world than most. The majority in our culture have zero clue except what they’ve seen in movies.