When you join the British Army you have to complete this long and tedious security questionaire before you attest and sign an oath of allegiance to the queen and the official secrets act.

Its got dozens of questions but my favourite was always:

"Are you, or have you ever been a member of a terrorist organisation dedicated to overthrowing her majestys government?"

I mean whose going to go... 'oh well actually now you mention it... yes!"

Not the exact words but the question pretty much asks you if you are or were a terrorist

I don't know why, but I'm suddenly reminded of

US Army, high speed low drag stuff. 1986 to 1994. Desert Shield/Storm. Loved it but left to get married. Sort of went back 2005-2008 as a contractor with DynCorp first for 6 months then got picked up by Blackwater for the rest of the time. Left that and returned home to bring kids into the equation. Loved that too but need to stay home if kids are about. Being a contractor was very similar but different from regular service, mostly better.

Military definitely helped me in all aspects of my life, even today.

Yeah... no. No way in hell am I jumping out of a perfectly good airplane to rely on a bed sheet and clothesline to get me to the ground. I'll take a ship through a hurricane before I do that ( - and I HAVE. PM if you want the details ).

I was also not crazy enough to volunteer for submarine service. Serving on a ship designed to sink built by the lowest bidder was not my idea of fun. I'm not claustrophobic, I just like the feel of wind, sun and salt spray on my face thank you.

@Gadge - yeah, I tried to tell my ex-wife that I wasn't dropping the f-word to be vulgar, it was more like for punctuation and emphasis. <shrugs> At least my girlfriend is a bit more understanding. Heck, she's let fly a couple times and I started taking notes! Different regional curses can be quite entertaining (I'm from the Midwest, she's from New England).

Being airborne is actually quite a rush. I actually enjoy jumping quite a bit.

Taking a ship through a hurricane does not sound fun in comparison.

Yeah... no. No way in hell am I jumping out of a perfectly good airplane to rely on a bed sheet and clothesline to get me to the ground. I'll take a ship through a hurricane before I do that ( - and I HAVE. PM if you want the details ).

I was also not crazy enough to volunteer for submarine service. Serving on a ship designed to sink built by the lowest bidder was not my idea of fun. I'm not claustrophobic, I just like the feel of wind, sun and salt spray on my face thank you.

@Gadge - yeah, I tried to tell my ex-wife that I wasn't dropping the f-word to be vulgar, it was more like for punctuation and emphasis. <shrugs> At least my girlfriend is a bit more understanding. Heck, she's let fly a couple times and I started taking notes! Different regional curses can be quite entertaining (I'm from the Midwest, she's from New England).

Being airborne is actually quite a rush. I actually enjoy jumping quite a bit.

Taking a ship through a hurricane does not sound fun in comparison.

It wasn't.

The main reason I'd never jump out of a plane is I have a thing about heights. And it's gotten worse as I get older. Weird thing is I'm fine in a plane, even been in an open cockpit biplane upside down.

I don't know why, but I'm suddenly reminded of

.

When i signed up it actually was illegal to be homosexual in the army and they did actually ask you if you were. Of course *everyone* said know but you knew who in the battalion was and nobody cared if they did their job well but it was 'official' policy at the time that it was a dischargable offence.

There was folklore in recruit training of two guys who wanted to be thrown out without paying for 'early release' (you can buy yourself out of your contract, or could back in the day) by pretending to be gay. I wont print what their OCs idea to 'test' them was....

The UK armed forces have it worse than UK prisons.

I've stayed in barracks and transit accomodation that would spark prison riots if you told lags they were living in them.

We once spent about a week in 1940s shelters in february on a course in wettest coldest wales. They were basically brick semi circles , a door in one end and big sheet of corrugated iron over the top.

Consequently I've done work in my current job in a recently decommissioned jail that made 'Army Training Regiment Litchfield' look like a 5 star hotel!

A mate of mine from my old battalion is a UK prison guard and he cant get over how much freedom and privelige convicts have compared to what we had when we were soldiers.

Still in the active service as a Medical officer for the Brazilian Army in the past 4 years. One assigment to UN mission in Haiti in 2013 and recently completed the paratrooper (Airborne) course. At the moment training my ass off to be part of the Para-SAR ( Save and Rescue) Team.

Still a newbie at X wing lol.

My FIL used to fly on the hurricane hunters in the USAF. No wonder why he hates flying now!

Yeah... no. No way in hell am I jumping out of a perfectly good airplane to rely on a bed sheet and clothesline to get me to the ground. I'll take a ship through a hurricane before I do that ( - and I HAVE. PM if you want the details ).

I was also not crazy enough to volunteer for submarine service. Serving on a ship designed to sink built by the lowest bidder was not my idea of fun. I'm not claustrophobic, I just like the feel of wind, sun and salt spray on my face thank you.

@Gadge - yeah, I tried to tell my ex-wife that I wasn't dropping the f-word to be vulgar, it was more like for punctuation and emphasis. <shrugs> At least my girlfriend is a bit more understanding. Heck, she's let fly a couple times and I started taking notes! Different regional curses can be quite entertaining (I'm from the Midwest, she's from New England).

Being airborne is actually quite a rush. I actually enjoy jumping quite a bit.

Taking a ship through a hurricane does not sound fun in comparison.

It wasn't.

The main reason I'd never jump out of a plane is I have a thing about heights. And it's gotten worse as I get older. Weird thing is I'm fine in a plane, even been in an open cockpit biplane upside down.

Most of my fighter pilot friends/relatives are afraid of heights. Falling and flying are totally different animals.

I'll be honest, the only reason I was able to jump out of the bird was because I had to pee so damned bad, to say nothing of the nausea induced by racetracking 5 times while facing backwards. I probably would have jumped without a chute.

I now work for militaria and shooting sports magazines.

I used to work for a magazine that covered various military topics and one job i had was following Parachute Regiment potential officers from first interview to being commissioned and going to battallion.

I felt pretty much 'at home' back in barracks while i stayed with them for a while and they asked me if i wanted to do some jumps with them.

I was really up for it but my wife (girlfriend at the time) put her foot down and sensibly pointed out i'd had to have bone removed from my spine thanks to my time in the forces and had two prolapsed spinal discs repaired and have massive nerve damage in my leg... she reminded me that if i landed badly i'd be in a wheelchair this time as i was lucky to be walking last time.

Gutted though as doing my jumps with the paras would have been a bit awesome.

Probably the smart choice there Gadge, even if it was a disappointment.

I'm curious - and by no means is anyone obligated to answer if they don't want to - but a.) how many of you got jobs related to your specialty in the military when you got out, or b.) your military service directly influenced the job you have?

Since I asked the question I'll answer first. My current job is pretty much exactly what I was doing while I was on active duty, I work for a large civilian corporation as a contractor for the US Navy. My job in the service led directly to my job in the civilian sector as there were only a handful of people trained in my specialty. And pretty much most of us are now working for the same company.

but a.) how many of you got jobs related to your specialty in the military when you got out, or b.) your military service directly influenced the job you have?

A) No. I started as a Ammo Specialist, but that was just to get my foot in the door so I could become a chopper pilot. But that didn't work out, I didn't want to deal with OCS or WOS bad enough to be a pilot. So I went from there into the Inf, and that has nothing to do with my job.

I work in IT

I have gotten a few jobs because I served, not directly but my service did put me over the top compared to other people also appling.

Since Artillery doesn't have pretty much any civilian equivalent, no.. My civilian job doesn't have to much to do with what I did in the military.

Having a military background did help though.

My actually military speciality gave me zero workplace skills as i was training to be an infantry platoon commander... actually thats not true it helped me become a brilliant manager in high stress situations as when you're used to thinking about planning a hasty attack and havent slept for three days and people are screaming at you and rounds are going off then a board room is no sweat

In all seriousness i got great leadership skills and lot of confidence for it but went from the army to working for Games Workshop. It *sort of* helped there having a forces background as its a toy soldier company so everybody there *secretly* regretted never giving soldiering a go.

My job after that was teaching in high school, again apart form learning how to influence people into doing what i wanted and handle arguing people, not much use there.

After that i wrote for a defence orientated magazine so it was a brilliant help, if only for the fact that when i went to visit a regiment i was one of them and not a 'civvy journo' and i knew how to fit it. I was also able if i was say writing an article on the RPG7 to talk to old mates who had either fired them in an engagement or been in armour engaged by one so i could get some very good 'sound bites'

I went from that to writing for airsoft magazines.. again a lot of people who day dream about being soldiers and a small core of players who miss 'exercises' so play to get out into the woods and crawl around being 'tactical' , so the background helps there as it lends a little credibility to writing an article on a AK47 BB gun if you compare its weight and build to the 'real steel' and actually have held a real AK (only briefly on a 'foreign weapons' course.. a well battered chinese type 56 actually with horribbly beat up furniture!)

I dont regret it but i always feel that if i'd have used my head and say joined the Royal Mechanical & Electrical Engineers, Royal Engineers or Royal Signals i'd have come out with all of the above *and* some proper career skills

(actually i did a short stint as a reservist - we call it the 'territorial army' - with the Royal Signals and i hated it as it was 'post strike communications' that basically meant sitting in a lead shielded landrover trailer tapping out morse . It was so boring i only turned up to the bare minimum of days and evenings i had to attend to stay on the books but i left after a bit as my hear wasnt in it. )

I am currently serving in the US army. Six years in and really love my job, planning on a long career.

I joined the New Zealand Army back in '86, when the Cold War was still going. Some of you might think that's a bit of an odd thing to worry about when I'm down in such a far corner of the globe, but when we went on exercise, a Soviet Union embassy staff car would park up on the main highway that ran through the middle of the training grounds, and erect a 50' aerial and listen in to communications. Bizarre that the Soviet Union would be concerned with what the Kiwis were doing, but that was about as close to the Cold War as I got. We all found our local Russians more amusing than something to be concerned about. At the time, the Royal New Zealand Armoured Corps consisted of a squadron of Scorpion light tanks and some M113s. Not much of a threat to Soviet Russia, but there you go...

I did find it amusing reading through all the posts concerning food, mess halls and eating habits. It seems that is a constant world-wide within the armed forces. We used to march from the barracks to the mess hall and form up outside before going in. It was a tricky balance deciding whether to load your plate up for one sitting, or light-load it in the hopes you could finish it before the cooks would call "seconds!" and you might get in for another plateful. Either way you virtually inhaled your meal.

On the whole the food in the mess hall was pretty good. There was a couple of mummy's boys that complained to the OC one day about it. The majority of the platoon just rolled their eyes in disbelief. For the following week the fresh eggs were replaced with powdered eggs, and the bacon took on the flavour and consistency of cardboard. Might even have been WW2 surplus! No one dared complain about the food again.

But as others have said, the military does give you a good work ethic that seems to be sadly missing within civilian life. Something that has stayed with me since my time there is TOFU - Take Ownership & Follow Up. If something goes wrong and everyone stands back (which happens at work a lot), I tend to just dive in and sort it out and make sure it stays sorted out.

When I was in the army, we were training for conventional warfare, which is something I think we will not see much of during our lifetime. As much as I enjoyed my time in, I wouldn't enlist today. The terrorist type of warfare being waged today isn't something you can adequately prepare for. A friend of mine was doing a tour in Afghanistan when the vehicle he was travelling in was hit by shrapnel from a roadside bomb. Our government had decided in their wisdom that the armoured vehicles we had would be too expensive to ship over there and run, so they supplied the troops with unarmoured Toyota Hilux pickups instead. The shrapnel went clean through the door panels. It was only the lock mechanism that slowed the chunk of shrapnel down enough that it didn't wound him. Still left a big bruise. How can you conduct patrols in unarmoured vehicles in a combat zone that is littered with IEDs? No, it's a different form of warfare today, and requires a very different soldier than when I was a soldier.

Ditto Rick.

I joined for a sense of adventure and i also felt strongly about the wars in bosnia and wanted to go help 'peacekeeping'

I wouldnt have signed up for the latest conflicts as i actually think that removing Saddam as a pretty stable pro western muslim leader was the stupidest move the US & UK ever undertook....

The wierd thing was that i joined about eight years after the collapse of the Soviet union and we *still* trained to fight a soviet tank army. Everything was 'genfor' (generic soviet force) in exercises. Even though the likelyhood of fighting a full on war in germany was minimal all our training was structured around mobil battlegroups fighting tank and aircraft heavy opponents

it was a bit mental really sitting in a briefing in 1998 and being told the structure and tactics of a soviet motor rifles battalion!

I have the utmost respect to todays soldiers and while we trained for counter insurgency with 'northern ireland' which we'd had on our doorstep for 40 years the 'good friday' agreement was signed pretty much as i was completing training so i never went to the province so had very little 'hands on' experience of terrorist asymetircal warfare. we had a few bomb scares, had to deply quickly out of barracks once and we were constantly vigilant for car bombs or people taking too much interest in the bases but never any real contact as it was all over by then.

I think the 'war on terror' was a culture shift for the US but its something we have been used to for a long time.

I suppose you've got a better understanding of it when it's been right on your doorstep for so long. Down here in NZ we're thankfully quite isolated from most of it. The major training theme for the armed forces here is as a Pacific Policing force in case one of the local island nations decides to have a coup or something. We were nearly deployed when Fiji had a coup, but nothing ugly eventuated, so we stood down in the end. There's a bit of training with the Australians, but the government has gutted our armed forces to the extent we're pretty much an emergency disaster relief force. It seems the forces spend most of their deployments helping out hurricane and cyclone victims. Not quite what it used to be.

Same here Rick.

We've gone from a cold war strength of about 200,000 plus doubling that with reserves to about 90,000 active regulars.

After the cold war we had a defence review called 'options for change' which everyone with a brain called 'options for suicide' as it essentially destroyed out capacity to operate individually.

Regiments got disbanded or amalgamated, good soldiers got sacked as it was more expensive to keep a ten year in corporal on the books than a new recruit.

My regiment predates the existance of a regular army and has been part of the crowns forces in some form or another for 500 years... we got 'amalgamted' to become a single battalion in a mongrel regiment of three other hacked up traditions.

In 1982 the British Army was able to sail 7000 miles across the atlantic and defeat a numerically superior enemy on home ground (who also had marginally better kit) *even after* we'd lost our helicopters and heavy equipment and had to march 70 miles across boggy mountains to fight the battles.

We cant do that now. We just dont have the men, the training or the political will, its a real shame.

I always used to be able to argue with conviction (and enough historical evidence) that the British army was probably the worst equipped but most capable army in the world. These days we've gone for better kit but less of it.

I think the dictionary definition of an army is 100,000 men or women under arms. Anything less than thatis legally a defence force or a militia... so i dont think the 'British Army' even exists any more in any true sense.

We dont learn as a country though. On several occasions we've overstretched or hackd down our army and we've had to fight (and win) a war with reservists and second line battalions.

The war of 1812 was fought by reserve units as the main regiments were out giving Napoleon a spanking as he was the real worry.

The first world war was won by 'reserve' TA 'kitchener battalions' as we'd managed to machine gun all the regulars to death early on and the 'regular army' didnt really exist after we'd tried the tactic of absorbing more german bullets than they could produce with it.

Ditto second world war, the BEF was pretty much destroyed at Dunkirk, the British Army that landed in Normandy in 44 or fough in North Africa in 41 was TA and reserve more than regular.

Then in Malaya... again a jungle war, outnumbered, miles away from home... fought by conscripts and reservists as most the regulars were in Germany facing off agains the 'real threat' of the time, the russians.

I do by the way recognise that our brave belgian, polish,french kiwi, digger, Indian, African russian , czech, canadian and american (listed in rough order of participation in WWI, WWII) made all those victories possible and couldnt have been done without their help but my point is that the British always neglect their army in peacetime and then have to ramp it up and pull in reserves whenever we're in trouble and we never learn.

The US never seems to have that issue, they realise that a strong army is essential and actually creates jobs other than 'more soldiers' as you end up with more people making kit and an export market for your surplus.

The UK ministry of defence is ridiculously inefficient and wasteful and throws away billions a year on over priced projects and projects that are tendered at say £2million when undertook and then end up costing £8 million when delivered but because we only have one company left who make say 'warships' we're over a barrell.

I really hope it doesnt happen but if by sheet misfortune their is another war with Russia (or a second cold war, which is incredibly likely) we just wont have the ability to take part.

Im not pro war, but im not stupid either so i am pro defence of the realm.

That's the military for ya... We perfect the art of fighting the last war, just in time for the new one.

Look At Eben-Emael during WWII: We (Belgium) built a nice big fortress so the germans could never get past it, and on day one of the invasion, they flew over it and blew up the gun cupolas. It's not good for morale when teh enemy takes your impregnable fortress on day one.

Oh and thanks for coming to help us during WWI and WWII.

I truly understand your frustrations Gadge. At least you've got something that resembles an army. We have 4,500 regular personnel and 2,000 reservists - and that's it. Our armoured force is the Royal NZ Armoured Corps and consists of one regiment of 3 squadrons of LAV-25s. No tanks at all. Infantry strength is just 5 battalions 3 of those are reservists. It really looks quite feeble on paper. I do know a few guys that have served over the years, and the training and level of experience is on a par with the British. They're just generally lacking the right equipment to do the job. Never ending budget cuts from our government have really gutted our forces. These days they resemble boy scouts with limited artillery.

It used to be that you could join the army and get a trade behind you, but I think even this is getting harder to do. Much like the British, a lot of the trade work seems to be going to civilian contractors instead. When I joined, I was aiming to join the Electrical & Mechanical Engineers and get a trade, but timing was against me and the army in their infinite wisdom decided that driving a FV101 Scorpion would be a better option. I'm not a short bloke, and the inside of a Scorpion doesn't even give you enough room to fart, let alone move. I would've prefered driving the M113s we had, but that's the army for you.

I just ended a 21+ year career in the U.S. Army. Started as a Cavalry Scout (Armored Reconnaissance Specialist) riding tanks, trucks, walking a lot and jumping out of planes and helicopters from time-to-time and ended as a Kiowa Warrior pilot. Actually, most of my time was spent flying. I did a trip to Atlanta to help with Olympic security, the US southern border in 98, Bosnia in 01, Iraq in 04-05, 07-08, 09-10 and 4 very short trips to Afghanistan from 11-13. It was tough at times (a lot actually) but I wouldn't trade it. Got to work with Brits, Canadians, Australians, Spaniards, Germans, Dutch, French, Italians, Iraqis, Poles, and Georgians (no, not the SE U.S. Georgians either haha). Been stationed in Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Schweinfurt, Alabama, and Washington. God bless you all for standing up to defend your people.

Served in the US Navy 1977-1985....did 3 WestPac cruises, 2 on USS Halsey (CG-23) and 1 on USS Belleau Wood (LHA-3). Fun fact...while I was stationed aboard USS Halsey I got to watch the Village People film the original video for "In The Navy" aboard USS Reasoner (FF-1063), which was moored ahead of us on the same pier. You can even see the USS Halsey in the background in some of the video.