I used to know a bloke who was just like the posters in that Mall Ninja thread, forever making wild allusions about his past military career. To this day I don’t know if he even spent a day in the TA.
I remember one time, probably in the mid-90s so we’d have been somewhere in our late 20s. He’d hooked up with the sister of a mate of mine. After a couple of weeks she rang me out of the blue, essentially asking if she should dump him to go out with me instead. I told her something along the lines of if she wasn’t happy she should dump him, but dumping him for me was a bit of a crappy thing to do. She elected to stay with him.
Fast-forward a couple of weeks, we’d all been out for drinks, ended up back at my mate’s folks house. I’d bedded down on the sofa, the happy couple had gone to bed, and for whatever reason she’d confessed to him that she liked me. He comes flying down the stairs absolutely incandescent with rage towards me (quite why I don’t know, the extent of my involvement was her propositioning me and me declining). Amongst his ranting he came out with a line I’ll take to my grave, “… and I fought in two wars for the likes of you!!”
