Well, I’m back. This time for good. I should be happy, but not really. It’s rather a strange sense of emptiness and the suspicion that three months of my life have vanished down a swirling black hole. Every day I struggled and toiled to roll a giant boulder atop a hill, and every time before I reached the top, the boulder would somehow roll back down, forcing me to start all over again. It was maddening, frustrating, sisyphean. It was also the longest three months of my life. Funny how quickly they went by.

Those who were there tell me National Service is quite like school. I have little difficulty believing it. I’ve a lower opinion of school than ever before, and of the advocates of that vile institution. But of course the people who weren’t there refuse to believe me when I tell them the similarities because, you know, I’ve never been to school so I don’t know anything. And those trainees who come back with glowing testimonies of fun in the sun? Those amnesiacs remember only their friends. Their friends act as an opiate, rendering them semi-conscious, half aware of what’s going on around them. In any case, they’ve grown up so accustomed to the stupidity and racism most don’t see anything wrong.

Red’s words from The Shawshank Redemption came to me a day or so before we packed up and moved out.

Andy crawled to freedom through five hundred yards of shit smelling foulness I can’t even imagine, or maybe I just don’t want too. Five hundred yards… that’s the length of five football fields, just shy of half a mile.

Not exactly true. So true nonetheless.