It tickles me to hear people rattling on about bringing back National Service to stamp out hooliganism and teach the young how to behave and respect their elders.

The theory is that a stiff dose of military discipline would soon sort out the drunken yobs who raise hell in town centres across the country on Saturday nights.

Ditto soccer hooligans, joyriders, petty criminals and graffiti merchants.

If only it were true that the Queen's uniform and a few drill parades, with sergeant-majors bellowing orders, would somehow transform them into model citizens never again to spit and snarl in public.

As I always say, the Army gave me the biggest laugh of my life. The pantomime went on for two years. However, let me confess - law and order never came into it. Anything but...

Drinking and smoking are very much part of military culture. If you serve abroad, as most soldiers do, the booze comes stronger and cheaper. I was drunk several times a week in Austria.

My behaviour was disgraceful.

Once I walked through a plate glass window. When the Military Police caught up with me, they had to accept my slurred protests of innocence - there wasn't a scratch on me.

God knows where people get the idea the Army turns soldiers into law-abiding citizens. I came across more villainy in two years than the rest of my life put together.

The guiding philosophy seemed to be if it moves - pinch it.

I remember seven sergeants, all regular soldiers, held simultaneously in our small cellblock on charges arising from the theft of military equipment. Most had been flogging petrol and tyres on the black market. What a splendid example for us young conscripts.

Don't get me wrong, the British Army is the finest in the world and serving in its ranks the experience of a lifetime, but it has nothing to do with turning young tearaways into goody-goodies.

I'll always remember the comradeship and the laughs. There we were, youngsters from all walks of life, suffering together under the lash of NCOs screaming orders night and day and working us like slaves.

As Michael Caine, the most illustrious of our number, recalled years later: "They called it National Service. We called it hell."

Mind you, he spent much of his conscription dodging Communist bullets in the Korean War while the greatest danger I faced was sunstroke in an Austrian tourist resort.

But we both reached the same conclusion, along with just about every other conscript, that National Service was a complete and utter waste of time and money, which proved nothing and served no useful purpose.