a vacation in a foreign land

Never mind the thousands of lives and the billions of pounds thrown away in all of those pointless conflicts across the world, I’m worried about the amount of money that the British Armed Forces have thrown away in advertising over the years. Newspapers, magazines, cinemas, magazines.... no medium is too expensive to be used. Be like Frank, we are told, join the army. Travel the world. Meet lots of interesting people. Go windsurfing. Go skiing. Make great friends. Slaughter innocent civilians in a war with no objectives and no clear enemy. Oh hang on, they don’t use that one in the adverts. I must be reading between the lines.

Sounds great though, doesn’t it? But what kind of skills does one need to join the army? What kind of person are they looking for? Well, from what I can gather from the advertising, the ability to take off your sunglasses when you are roundly patronising some generic African villagers is highly prized. You’re officer material if you can pull that trick off, I’m told. Prince Harry is currently working on this particular exercise at Sandhurst as we speak, although I’ve heard that he’s really struggling to grasp it, but he has scored very highly in his classes on misogyny and casual racism, and should pass out with flying colours. Perhaps top of the class.

Maybe I should consider a career change?

Or perhaps I’d rather pull out my own intestines with chopsticks and stir-fry my sweetmeats to serve as a starter.

Why all the advertising though? Are they running dangerously low on cannon fodder or something? Is the average IQ of the survivors running dangerously high and in need of dilution by some new blood?

Why do we have an army again?