I guess claiming you’re addicted to the Internet is easier than shooting yourself in the foot, as far as ways of getting sent home from military service go.
Although the real question the story raises is what the hell Finland’s doing with a conscript army – are they going to hold off the Russians with sheer manpower?
They have done it before…
This time, of course, according to the Finnish Defence Forces’s website, they’ve got tanks. 230 of them.
Which, come to think of it, isn’t that much less than the British Army these days…
One of my schoolfriends was (is) half-Finnish – not just in the ethnic sense but also in retaining dual UK-Finnish nationality.
Which is why it came as something of a hideous surprise when he was called up to serve in the Finnish army just before his eighteenth birthday – and there was no legal way out, despite him barely speaking a word of the language.
So off he went, and he seems to have had a whale of a time – and of course virtually all Finns speak fluent and idiomatic English anyway, so that wasn’t a problem at all.