So you misspend your teenage years doing a bit of drugs and a bit of aggro, maybe more than a bit of drugs. You’ve managed to stay away from the law but done rehab and they’ve set the psychiatrists and their pills on you. And you’re cruising along day-to-day, no future, no prospects but no worries.

Then the draft papers come in the mail. Well, not what you had in mind, but what the heck, it’s not like it is interrupting any plans you have. You dropped out of school years before so you don’t have any fancy middle class excuse to get an exemption. And you can always hope for a black ticket.

Well, you win some, you lose some. You draw red, but at least it’s not the Poor Bloody Infantry so you should escape getting blown up on some southern country road.

Basic training is not exactly fun, but you find some mates and after a while you figure out the scams. You are a bit surprised at the training you get. The running about and the endless marching up and down are more or less what you expected. But then there’s all this riot control stuff. Isn’t that the police’s job? Not that you and your mates are all that good at it, but hell, you’ll never really need it, will you?

Then one Saturday evening there’s a bit of a scramble and they tell you to suit up in your riot gear and issue rifles with rubber bullets. You clamber aboard the trucks without anyone telling you where you’re going or what for.

You get dropped off in the middle of mayhem. Rocks and sticks are flying at you and the first thing you see is your sergeant shot. Some clown from another unit throws teargas when no one had been issued gasmasks and in the confusion you become aware that someone is taking careful aim at your side from an upstairs window. And this is not some other conscript not yet out of basic training. They’ve done this before.

By now guys are pissing themselves, some have cut and run and you have to keep lugging bodies out of the way of getting run over by the ambulances. But the violence subsides, and the worst you’ve suffered is someone swinging a stick with a nail in the end that raked the back of your body armour rather than your skull (someone stole your helmet early on).

The remnants of your group reassemble at camp swearing blue murder and threatening never to go back to something like that. The officers get wind of the muttering and quietly let it be known that they agree.

Then this week you are again told to put on your riot gear, but this time they give you live ammunition, grenades and bayonets. You spend two hours sweating and vomiting and are then told to stand down. But not for long. One morning you are assembled for what has to be the big push.

You form the second or third wave. The infantry, with APCs leading them, have been in before you and got chewed up. Some of the reds have firearms and some of them are M-16s taken from soldiers who have been killed, wounded or just plain skedaddled. You have no APC and your NCO is so bereft of experience and sense that he leads you into the open. The reds charge.

You try to keep shooting down, at their legs, but bodies are falling on both sides. You take an almighty whack to the head from a lump of wood. Your face mask shatters, your helmet cracks and you’re on your back. He’s getting ready for a second swing and who knows who could be behind him.

By the wisdom of your commanders, you have no shield, no baton, no tear gas, no stun grenades, no water cannon. There’s been no chance to fix bayonets, and you have only one thing left.

So you shoot him.

About author: Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire).