From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Mon Sep 03 2001 - 03:04:38 MDT
On Mon, Sep 03, 2001 at 11:22:23AM +0800, Chen Yixiong, Eric wrote:
>
> Singapore faces the problem of compulsory enlistment and (attempts to)
>solve it by making an compulsory enlistment of all capable young males
>into its military to serve at least 2.5 years of service. For young male
>teens like myself, we have no means of to discard of this "obligation".
Several options spring to mind.
For starters, do they take insane people? Most armies don't. If you can
get yourself certified as a manic-depressive they'll probably avoid you
like crazy.
Or you could do what my friend C. did when the Italian army conscripted
him for a year. (Italy has since abolished conscription -- probably as a
result of their experience with C.) Make it a struggle of personal
survival, and fuck the army.
C. was midway through a PhD in computer science in Scotland when his draft
deferment ran out. So he went to do his 12 months' military service in,
shall we say, a spirit of open-minded enquiry. C. is an anarchist -- not
by ideology, but by attitude. He's also a computer language lawyer. That
combination is pure poison to a conscript army.
Conscript armies rely on drafting a large intake of relatively young and
inexperienced men, teaching them to obey orders, and telling them what to
do. C. was seven years older than normal when his deferrments ran out, and
was perfectly capable of managing himself. So at first he hunkered down, did
as he was told, and read the rule book.
(Note that last clause. All armies have rules and regulations, but most
soldiers don't read them. In fact, as C. discovered, most officers don't
read them either -- and can be embarrassed when this is demonstrated
under the right circumstances.)
C. did have a bit of fun during basic training. He's got weird eye trouble
-- not enough to get out of the army, but enough to have generated a
very big caseload for an ophalmic surgeon when he was younger. That's
probably how he got away without being court-martialled when he threw
the practice grenades the wrong way (at the passing officers). But from
that point, he managed to convince the army that he was more use as a
computer programmer than as cannon fodder.
(Remember that. Armies need clerks. Clerks get to stay in comfortable
air conditioned barracks and not get shot at. Remember this, too: NEVER
trust a piece of software written by a conscripted programmer supervised
by officers who don't understand what he's doing.)
When in barracks, C. read the rule books from cover to cover. He also
brushed up on his history of politics, reading various items -- Marx,
Hitler, that sort of thing -- and loudly explaining their views to the
naive 18-year-olds he was bunking with. (Do that successfully and you can
get a reputation as being a prize nuisance and politically unreliable,
without actually crossing the fine line into sedition. After all, all
you're doing is studying history, right?)
They gave C. a call-up database to repair. It ran on a PC and had been
written by an earlier conscript, but mysteriously stopped working a week
after he was mustered out. C. got the database working, but it took this
expert in compiler architecture six months to fix two hundred lines of
dBase code. In the process he Y2K-fixed it -- and made sure that nobody
with his family name would _ever_ be called up in time of war -- while
obfuscating the code to the point of unintelligibility.
C.'s rule-book reading paid off in several ways. When he finally mustered
out, his was the only platoon on the base here all the conscripts had
beards. He'd also discovered an interesting loophole that meant in his
second six months he spent eight days out of every two weeks on leave.
(He was assigned a weekend leave every two weeks, but allowed time off
in lieu for travel to and from his home town, by train and ferry. Only his
home town was down on his call-up papers as Edinburgh. Two days leave ...
and six days travel, because, as he pointed out to his commanding officer,
it said *by train and ferry* -- nothing about airports in there!)
The final straw was when they put him on guard duty one Saturday night.
As the oldest private in his squad he was in charge. He announced that
they were going to enforce the rules, by the book -- and proceeded to
do so with gusto. With so much gusto that the next Monday the General
commanding the base dropped by to politely ask him to notify the general's
office next time he pulled that stunt. Then he was unaccountably sent
on unscheduled leave for two weeks, and discharged two weeks early when
he returned.
(Regulations said that anyone entering the base after 10pm would be
arrested unless they had a pass signed by a certain senior officer. Said
senior officer was on home leave that weekend. This being the Italian army,
and it being a Saturday night, the rule was regularly flouted. C. managed
to legitimately arrest 50% of the officers on the base and hold them in an
unheated guardroom in winter for an entire weekend.)
In fact, by obeying the rules, C. probably did more damage to the Italian
army than a deliberate saboteur could. He really didn't like the whole
idea of conscription, and while he thought having the government give
him hiking clothes and training him in how to shoot was cool, he wasn't
keen on the sillier aspects of military life. So he made sure he
understood the rules, didn't do anything he could be court-martialled
for ... then had fun thinking up creative ways to fuck the army.
It was to some extent the spread of this sort of attitude that forced them
to abolish conscription. If they're going to draft you in Singapore, you
might want to meditate on it. Think like a programmer. Remember, managing
programmers is like herding cats. You, too, can be a cat ...
-- Charlie
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