Did you think that joining the army meant a life of sodomy at the hands of your bedfellow, while you wait around forlornly in the meek hope that one day you might shoot or be shot by someone you don’t know? In fact the army also means being yelled at until the spit drips down your face, crude banter and environmental squalor, and the prospect of dying long before battle when your commanding officer decides it’s high time you overexerted yourself on the assault course one especially warm day.
But now the army hopes to change these broadly true perceptions, via a series of adverts encouraging ‘become a better you’. The idea is that you’re probably working class and at school boasted no high level of intelligence, perhaps you don’t like people with darker-looking skin, and surely by now you feel buffeted by the fear of being nothing but a burden, stuck between filling forms at the job centre and stacking shelves as a donation to the dwindling coffers of Tesco.
In the spirt of full disclosure, the tagline for the current batch of army adverts is ‘Don’t become a better you’. It’s reverse psychology you see, asking you to go out and defy expectations, a message reinforced with others which taunt ‘Don’t make a difference’ and ‘Don’t stand on your own two feet’. You won’t be standing on two feet for long before a bomb sends you back home limbless, and while it’s almost certain that the difference you impose upon others will turn out negative, you’ll no doubt seem different as you wake up screaming suffering the effects of PTSD.
The adverts feature inane caricatures who wetly dismiss the army as a career choice before cowering in the face of a torrent of military logic. By the end the fledgeling recruits have won a newfound respect. If the acting doesn’t put you off and you really think the experience is all in the name of a good cause, then go join the army, because you might somehow contrive to do worse.
