USAIA Masuwale was just out of high school when the British Army recruitment drive came knocking.
It was 1961, and the young Usaia was just considering entering medical school.
“My friend said let’s go apply for this and I thought I was too skinny and too young at the time,” he said.
“We passed the written test and they promised us that the (muscular) body will come later. I was just 19,” said the now 76-year-old.
The Naimalavau, Nakelo, Tailevu man said it was tough early on. “The recruiters took us to Great Britain in November a time when they were having their freezing winter.
“For us, who joined the Royal Signals, we had to go to Yorkshire which is one of the coldest places in England so that wasn’t a good decision. They could have taken us in the summer.
“At that time, it was a sense of adventure and I had this sense of patriotism for my country. I wasn’t going to let the conditions affect me and that’s what drove us through the tests and made us stand out from the crowd.
Mr Masuwale served 16 years as a radio relay technician in RSigs in Germany, Cyprus, Singapore and Northern Ireland. It was as he described one of the best times of his life.
“I think it was a brilliant adventure — we were lucky to be the ones chosen to go. “The world was a big place then in the 1960s and to have served in places like Malaysia, Singapore, Cyprus, Malta, and Germany. Now the world is so small people can travel around easily. I think we were lucky to go at that time.
“I think the only thing we left behind is more people have been recruited into the army — a lot of us the veterans we’ve helped recruit some of these soldiers who are in Britain in their thousands. The British Army sort of has a preference for Fijian soldiers that is the legacy we left behind. ”
Mr Masuwale later returned to Fiji on voluntary redundancy, before serving in the RFMF where he went on peacekeeping tours to Lebanon and Sinai.
Then he spent eight years in Fiji working for Radio Fiji One at the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation as a broadcaster in the iTaukei language.
