During World War II my uncle
Charlie ‘borrowed’ his older brother’s birth certificate and joined the army. His mother (my grandmother) tracked him down and dragged him back home, but he later ran away again and joined the navy (left).
Charlie followed in the footsteps of around 250,000 underage boys who joined the army during World War I. It is estimated that half of them were killed or wounded. These were impressionable young lads who were, in many cases, motivated to ‘join up’ by the ‘misleading’ tales of the recruiting sergeant and the ‘glamour’ of the uniform.
Now it seems that a report by The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust has accused the Ministry of Defence of once again giving young children a ‘misleading’ and ‘glamourised’ picture of life in today’s armed forces.
It has always been so ! … for as long as there have been wars the British Army has recruited young men to fight in them. Sometimes very young men !
The days of the recruiting sergeant’s 
devious ways of getting, usually poor, young men to ‘take the King’s shilling’ are long gone, as are the eleven year old drummer boys, but it is still possible to join the army at the age of sixteen, so recruiters target schools and have expensive advertising campaigns aimed at youngsters. They even have a web site where kids can play computer games and watch videos of such military activities as skate boarding.
If we have to have an army, surely our soldiers should be fit young men and women who are old enough and experienced enough to make informed decisions about putting their lives on the line in defence of their country, or taking the lives of others in some bloody mess of a war like the one in Afghanistan.
So let us hope that when these kids swop their trainers (sneakers) for heavy boots and are shouted at by a big man with stripes on his arm, they use their mobile phones to call their mothers and are ‘dragged home’ …
… just like my uncle Charlie.
bigjohn 
