The Armed Forces: time for change

The present recruitment age of sixteen is too young to enter full time military training. If you are not old enough to vote, buy a pint in a pub, to ride a motorbike or even to buy fireworks are you not also too young to join the army?

The punch of the automatic weapon into my shoulder was simultaneous with a shrill whistle of bullets, breaking the silence. It is the only time I have fired an automatic weapon with live ammunition. I was fifteen, a member of Blundell’s School, Combined Cadet Force, training at Lympstone Commando Centre in Devon. I felt much older than my years. We aimed at concentric circles on the bodies of black and white human shapes in front of a bank of sandbags. The bullets disappeared into them. I felt both a loss of innocence and an uncomfortable sense of physical power. It still informs my thoughts about under-eighteen-year-olds in the army today.

The present recruitment age of sixteen is too young to enter full time military training. If you are not old enough to vote, buy a pint in a pub, to ride a motorbike or even to buy fireworks are you not also too young to join the army? A young soldier trains with live ammunition, yet is deemed to be too young to watch an X-rated DVD of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocolypse Now – an allegory of the insanity of war inspired by Joseph Conrad. Isn’t it time we had a more consistent attitude to the age of adult responsibility?

See more: legislation & policy, recruitment age,