There seems to be an odd belief, so far uncontradicted, running thru this thread, that front-line combat experience is essential to gain promotion in the armed services. Of course, this is nonsense. The office chief clerk in HQ will hold senior NCO or Warrant Officer rank, for instance, without necessarily having to go and fire a rifle or drive a tank at the enemy in the intervals of organising the junior NCOs who establish the clerks' teabreak roster. Every service has a mass of support staff performing various functions as well as actual combat duties, within any of which promotion can occur. All will have received basic combat training at first enlistment in case they might ever be thus called upon; but it is by far the minority who actually ever see combat. And even then ··· I had an elderly relative in my childhood who would relate that he served in the actual trenches in France in WWi for nearly two years without ever setting eyes on a single enemy soldier.

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