It was supposedly a rare time of world peace, but in fact nightly news reports said there was a war being fought by the Americans in an obscure place called Laos. Now this Laos seemed to be a friendly Buddhist pacifist innocuous sort of place where the young men were drafted as monks rather than soldiers and there just didn’t seem to be any reason why anyone would want to fight a war with them. Nor was there. But the US bombs rained down as they are wont to do, and the images of devastated orphanages were all too common.
It turned out, of course, that the Laotian War was the overt side of a covert war being fought in secret in its neighbour, Vietnam, which no one wanted to admit to. Even in the present age as new revelations occasionally appear concerning US terrorism there, it’s still called The Secret War in Laos, but that was never the secret bit and it still isn’t. Even the new revelations are themselves new lies…
The structure of the game of Trojan Crunch was as simple as could be. Half the school population would line up across the width of the yard, the other half would line up twenty-five yards away facing them, and when the moment came, both would charge. The astonishing whop! that arose from the bodies of five hundred boys at full tilt slamming into those of five hundred other boys meeting them head-on was an awesomely exhilarating sensation, no matter how horrifying it might otherwise have been.
The objective was to come out the other side in one piece. Amazingly, no one was ever killed or even seriously maimed—the resilience of young boys is the most indestructible force on the planet—but almost everyone came out bruised and battered. Any notions of the mental scarring involved were laughable.
Of course the game was banned, on pain of every known threat and punishment, and therefore took place only about once a week. It would take that length of time for the various rival gangs of bodgies to egg each other into it, allegiances switching from side to side continually. In winter the sides were jumpers and shirts, in summer singlets and skins. You chose your own side simply by adjusting your attire appropriately. The only other rule was that everyone had to participate—the most evil gangs of bodgies would roam every possible hiding place to flush out cowards. A sufficient number of pacifying teachers had found themselves trapped in the middle of the crunch to ensure that usually the staff turned a blind eye to the whole affair.
