Its a fat mans world in the Army...

Teenagers too fat to join the army
Screams the headline as Army recruiters wring their hands in despair at the increasingly difficult task of persuading young adults to join up and become cannon (or rather grenade or mortar fodder) in Afghanistan or Iraq and wherever is next on our leader George's list - we Brits just bypass Blair now and look to Bush for the next trip to oblivion.

So theres a suprise then - "Join the Army and be a man" is all that was required when ah wor nobbut a lad, it didn't persuade me because I didn't really like the look of the sort of man that they had in mind for me, but still, it worked for some.

Later on it was videos of 17 year old Army recruits enjoying ski-ing holidays in Austria, hang gliding and water ski-ing in some carribean outpost that encouraged young lads to sign up and then find themselves confined to a large tank regiment barracks in the middle of Nowhere, Germany in what had once been the East/West Germany border but was now dullsville personified.

But now the entreaties of "Join the Army and go straight to a place where foreigners hate you so much that they'll kill themselves just to kill you" doesn't seem to work as well.

Neither will raising the body mass index qualification level - all it will do is convince fat kids that they can sign up now and provide bigger targets for Iraqi snipers - not that the Army will let the fat kids stay fat kids for long, within hours of their joining up to the new fat Army they'll have been shipped off to Deepcut Barracks where they'll be "persuaded" in that unique Army style to shed several stones through fear and intimidation with the alternative of sleeping next to a loaded rifle which may or may not accidently go off in your face through the night, sometimes twice, as an alternative.