Best badges:
During a det to Lossiemouth, my Harrier Sqn and the resident Jaguar OCU wore the usual hours badges each evening in the bar. On Friday, the visiting Puma sqn pitched up with newly-made badges on their usually bare sleeves. Among the expected “1000 Gurkha Curries”, “1000 Border Incursions NI” etc, the one that stood out was on the shoulder of a very new, very youthful SH pilot. It read simply “I’ve never done anything 1000 times.”
Most appropriate film:
Working for the UN in Sarajevo in 1995, each day we played a pirated copy of Groundhog Day. We lived it. Every day was the same crazy round of lunatic forays from the various factions, to a background soundtrack of mostly drunken automatic gunfire.
Best detachment film error:
At Airport Camp, Belize, in the 1970s, there was little by the way of entertainment. Each week, the Officers’ Mess would have a film show on the lawn outside the bar. The Army residents would bring their families in to share the spectacle. One week, the full audience, including children, soon became aware that, instead of the promised Flash Gordon, the film actually sent out was Flesh Gordon, with rather different content.