I was unlucky enough to have to do national service. FWIW there was a civil service alternative I could and bloody should have opted for, but it was four months longer. Still, I wish I had.
National Service is shit from every respect, even the military one. The first thing our drill sergeants and instruction officers told us conscripts (as opposed to the volunteer recruits also serving) is that they disliked us being there almost as much as we did, for the very logical reason that x amount of willing volunteer long serving and continuously training soldiers are of more military value than ten times as many reluctant civilians taught a few months’ worth of basic war games.
And I don’t know about other countries, but in Spain all the useful military training was taught in the first three months of your service; the rest of the year was mostly the army using you as free labour to run their barracks or do the same basic drills you’d already learned to. Whereas I would have missed National Service altogether had I been born six years later, I was at least lucky to get drafted in the first year it went down to nine months. My brother did a year, my dad something like 14 months, my grandfathers two fucking years.
Fuck all that shit. If a country is suddenly fighting for its freedom against an invading enemy, you can train civilians to the same level of combat readiness in two weeks as anyone who had served military service a few years earlier.
