I was doing some coach driving and had to take a group of army ‘freshers’ from their camp in Harrogate to Leeds and back.

These freshers are a bunch of lads who are aged 16 and 17 and they’re just a few weeks into their basic training.

They spend the first year at their foundation college in Harrogate where they learn the fundamentals of being a modern soldier.

I got to chat to their commanding officer while we waited to depart. He told me that his group of trainees were shaping up well – ‘much better than some of the others’ he said.

That was obvious – his group were able to march properly for a good start.

One of the other ‘platoons’ were pretty hopeless from what I could see; they didn’t seem to understand left and right and were completely out of sync.

‘If we can get this cracked in the first six weeks, then we’re on to a winner’ said the Corporal in charge. He told me that the discipline was the first priority – they ‘could then build on the rest’.

You get to do lots of thinking when you drive a bus – and here’s what I thought about. What motivates these boys (‘cos that’s all they are really) to sign up to the army? What do they expect? And, what gap in their lives will the army fill?

One. It could be money. The reason for the coach trip to Leeds was so they could all go shopping. They’d just received their first pay packet. £900 of pure spending money. With their food and accommodation paid for, what they get each month is simply disposable income. And boy did they dispose of it in Leeds! OK there were about 40 of them, but I’ve never seen so many TK Maxx, Primark and JD Sports bags on one bus.

Two. Perhaps it’s a sense of belonging or comradeship. The need to be part of a collective group of people.

Three. It might be because eventually they’ll get to drive tanks, shoot guns and blow things up.

Then there’s expectation. Maybe some of them expect to be driving tanks, shooting guns and blowing things up. But, clearly many of them didn’t seem to take too well to being shouted at and made to march everywhere. But surely that’s naive? Why would someone join the army and NOT expect to be shouted at? It’s a bit like paying 50p to Ryanair to fly you to France. Surely you should expect the airport to be 100 miles from where you want to be and that the flight is going to be delayed? The Corporal told me that one lad lasted just three days into the course and demanded he ‘be allowed to go home to his mum because someone was always yelling at him’.

Finally, there’s the gap. I believe the army fills a void. There’s got to be something missing from a 16 year old’s life which influcences his decision to sign up.

I say this because – although he shouted at them quite a lot – the corporal had their attention all the time and they looked up to him. Listening to their conversations with him it was obvious.

They told him they wanted to be like him, have a successful army career like him, see action like him and drive the same car as him. If it wasn’t a mini kind of obsession about being him it certainly was respect for him.

Respect he didn’t earn necessarily – not by shouting at them anyway – but respect they wanted to offer him. At last, it seemed, they had a role model. Their alpha male. A surrogate dad maybe?

Perhaps I need to less bus driving. It seems I think too much.