There is indeed a disproportionate number of air bases close to Bordeaux (I mean within easy fighter plane flight range), and AFAIK there are busy bases, so that could explain it:
I should know as when I did my military service in the French air force near Orléans as a conscript in the late 1980s, that’s where the authorities wanted to send me there after what was called les Classes (the initial 5 or 6-week training period, then you were dispatched wherever they needed you, you had some say in the process though, family situation was taken into account etc. that was the case in the air forces anyhow, not sure about the rest. By and large, they tried to match your qualifications or skillset to their needs but, well, it rarely matched! (the variety of positions on offer was wide, eg hairdresser, chauffeur, medical staff, base protection jobs, office-based job, cook/canteen jobs, driving instructor, Gendarmerie, military HQs, cooperation abroad etc.).
Anyway, the officers in charge of dispatching the conscripts wanted to send me to the Cognac’s pilot training school (big air base at Cognac at the time, which doubled as a training base too, at the time it was very big anyhow, now with the many cutbacks it’s probably much smaller) as I was a qualified teacher of English (trainee pilots in France receive intensive training in English, so they told me anyway). But I wasn’t interested as I wanted to stay in Orléans for various reasons (I was at the air base there, just outside Orléans) mainly because I had the option of sharing a flat with mates in the pleasant city centre, and I preferred to stay close to Paris.
I soon rued my decision to turn down the plum and seemingly interesting Cognac posting as after my classes I was dispatched to a grim section of an on-site warehouse/stockroom where I was part of a team in charge of dealing with the aircraft part orders coming from the mechanics’ workshops, hangars and what have you (there were all type of flying things on that big base, fighter jets obvs. but also choppers, big transport planes such as Transalls etc.). OK, not exactly my dream conscript job I thought…
The job was very laidback. One member of our small team, a farm labourer, was functionally illiterate and I spent part of my time helping him with his literacy. He did sod all, I think on average he handled about 5 orders a day… The trouble is that it was neither interesting nor actually that easy, with 100s of 1000s of stock references, some very similar and so on. Luckily it wasn’t Amazon, we weren’t timed, we didn’t have to run like blue-arsed flies with a scan gun and there was no supervisor or “personal digital manager” yelling at us through a loud speaker to shift our arses into gear.
All conscripts in the team, except for the boss, the “juteux” (the adjudant-chef, sergeant major I believe in the UK ranking system), a veeeeery laidback juteux. So laidback that I never actually saw him doing any work apart from shuffling bits of paper and spending an inordinate amount of time on the blower, mostly laughing his head off. He was mainly to be found at the MESS or in the other on-site bars, where he had perfected his babyfoot skills to a remarkable degree.
It wasn’t exactly taxing for us either, lots of breaks (shockingly low productivity!) but what got my goat in the end is that it was excruciatingly boring and I really regretted my decision not to have gone to Cognac just to be able to have a civilian’s life in Orléans city centre, as after your Classes as a conscript you don’t have to stay on the air base, they couldn’t accommodate everybody anyway. 40 hrs a week for 400 Francs (£40) a month to count nuts, washers, flaps, bits of dashboards, metres of Velcro etc. sorry but non merci, très peu pour moi.
I could completely see the relevance of the Classes and indeed I personally enjoyed the Classes on the whole, but not of the post-Classes period. What “patriotic” point is there being a cook in the canteen for 10 months for barely £10 a week? For most conscripts, there was nowt patriotic about the military service in the post-Classes period, the 250,000 young men doing the military service each year were just cheap labour servicing the armed forces’ needs and that’s about it.
Luckily, our very sympathetic family GP help me to get myself discharged after three months (he wrote a letter to the military authorities). It wasn’t that hard to be discharged TBH, you just had to be determined, have a plausible story and stick to it. I simply threatened to commit suicide supposedly because my (non existent) long-term girlf’ had left me for my best friend. They immediately sent me “en observation” to a rather pleasant military hospital in Versailles, overlooking the Palace as it were! There I saw a couple of sympathetic shrinks (at the hospital, not the Palace…) and reiterated to them my dark thoughts. I even managed to break down, I was bloody determined to be discharged! They didn’t tend to fuck about with suicide threats, esp. if it appeared half convincing, so they signed me off as “P4” after barely a week, off you go, on your bike. I was absolutely delighted and air-kissed very puzzled-looking tourists outside the Palace as I left the military hospital on my way to the railway station.
P4, indicateur d’aptitude psychiatrique à l’engagement militaire de niveau 4 dans le cadre du SIGYCOP. Ce coefficient indique la présence actuelle et prolongée de troubles de la personnalité et de l’adaptation définitivement incompatibles avec la poursuite du service militaire.
