Advice Given to A Gurkha Recruiting Officer

In the May 2006 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Robert Kaplan quotes Colonel John Philip Cross recalling an advice from a medical officer when he joined the British Army:

Don't forget: a woman for children, a boy for pleasure, but for real ecstasy, a goat.

For many years now, Colonel Cross has been living in Pokhara. Mr. Kaplan went there to visit him and then wrote an article about the colonel's experience with the Gurkhas and some other tangential observations related to the current Maoist insurgency in Nepal. Why Mr. Kaplan chose to quote this particular recollection of the colonel in his article even though it is completely unrelated to Nepal or the Gurkhas was a puzzle to me at first, but the last third of that advice took my mind back to the foothills of middle Nepal. After all, I too spent part of my life--some would say formative years--in Pokhara. Even if this quote seems superfluous at first glance, its placement in the article might be quite intentional. At least one Nepali from the pahari region has uttered almost those exact words to me and jokes about goats were quite frequent among some of my rambunctious guy friends in middle school. Perhaps Colonel Cross has heard similar utterances in some parts of Nepal during his travels and chose to recollect in front of Mr. Kaplan this advice he received long before he set foot in Nepal as a recruiting officer for the Gurkhas and even connect it to Nepal in some way. One wonders.