If you can remember it...
then you probably weren't part of it!
I worked with a few "when I's" in civilian life, when this ex-Forces drinking culture was fairly obvious. Well, actually, it stuck out like a dog's balls! I liked a drink now and then, particularly when playing darts, but Holy Moly!
The problem became trying to drink like the young men we had been, on into middle age.
The funny thing was that I saw, and then got officially shown, the writing on the wall.Then I had to quit; I could either drink heavily or else not at all, but to sit there sipping one glass of slowly-warming white wine seemed ridiculous, pathetic.
Once I was sat there faking it, drinking soda water with bitters that looks for all the world like a proper whiskey soda, I could see someone I had taken for a bon vivant turn into a slobbering fool, telling the same "When I was on..." story twice or thrice, leant in close enough for little bits of his spit to hit me in the face... Ugh! Drunk, I never noticed, or at least never minded, that.
The problem is that the military teaches you to drink heavily, but then decants you into a world where that becomes a rather silly thing to do. Some of us just do not want to change, and I think we all know people who pay heavily for that, just doing what they had been taught to do when they were young and impressionable, and resilient. I used to fall over and bounce. Now I just hit with a dull thud and lay there, moaning. Boring, I know....
Last edited by chuks; 1st Jul 2013 at 06:47.