National Service

National Service refers to conscription in Singapore. It is compulsory for all able-bodied males to be enlisted in the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) when they are 18 years old for 2 to 2.5 years as full-time National Servicemen. After the completion of full-time National Service, they are required to serve as Operationally Ready National Servicemen. This entails being recalled from work or study for a few weeks of training every year.

Several other countries have forced-conscription, like Norway. In Norway every male above the age of 18 has to serve one year in the Norwegian military. If you have some kind of disabling disease or injury, then you are excussed from service. And those who have strong political or religiuse reasons can do one year of community service instead.

In the UK, national service refers specifically to the continuation of conscription into the armed forces following the end of World War II, which continued up to 1960, the only peacetime military conscription in British history (if you ignore the press gangs of the 1700s). In this period of Britain's decline as a world power this was more a tool of social control (and keeping the dole queues down) than a response to any military need that could not have been fulfilled better by a volunteer army, navy and air force, a view which was shared by the military leaders of the time; the majority of conscripts wasted time for two years in their late teens on drill and duties of the dig-a-hole-and-then-fill-it-in variety (my father-in-law claimed to have been set the task of weeding the barracks parade ground with a knife and fork), often in an atmosphere of bullying and intimidation.

Although I describe this period as peacetime, this was the era of decolonialization, and the unluckier national servicemen fought and died all over the world in bush wars and counterinsurgency operations in the rump of the empire in places like Aden, Kenya, Palestine (pre-1948), and Malaya as well as the Suez Crisis (the British involvement in the 1956 Arab-Israeli war) and the Korean War.

National service came to an end more or less as youth culture was starting to raise its head, and the gap in experience between those who went through it and those who missed it marks something of a generational cutoff point in British society. A very brief bibliography of the literature of national service follows:

• The Virgin Soldiers, Leslie Philips (and sequels)
• Ginger, You're Barmy, David Lodge

Also of note: the Dennis Potter TV series Lipstick on Your Collar.

There are some others which have momentarily slipped my mind, /msg me ...