SO Hugh Cleverly and Jacqui Broadbridge think that National Service should be brought back, well I disagree.

I joined the Army at 15 in 1942 as an apprentice tradesman and became a regular soldier in April 1945.

On my nineteenth birthday in 1946 I arrived in Haifa, then Palestine, just six weeks after a craftsman in our Tel Aviv workshop had been shot dead by terrorists.

I then went on to Shiaba in Iraq and came out when the Army pulled out in 1947. We then moved to Tripoli and I stayed there until my three-year term expired in 1949.

I was then posted to the Signals Research and Development Establishment at Christchurch.

This was not the ideal posting for a regular soldier as the staff comprised all National Service men. This meant that I was constantly training men, some of whom had no idea what a circuit diagram was.

I am glad National Service finished; an army is a fighting unit and everyone must be reliable and dependable.

Korea was almost all National Service men and they did well in extremely difficult circumstances as they did in Malaya.

During my service I came into contact with some dreadful characters who did not want to be in the Army and were sent to the glass house for various offences.

This can be very disheartening for other members of a unit when you cannot trust the man in the next bed to you.

When we were in the desert in Iraq we could leave our equipment and personal belongings without fear of it being taken but when we got to Tripoli that changed as the unit changed and nothing was sacred.

HAROLD PRICE, Fair Oak.