30-XI-1981.
Saturdays and sundays being our days off, since the officers are still working people and citizens, there was a problem of how to kill the time. Even on workdays, if our guard stint would finish at noon, we were exempt from everything until next morning. Blaja and I found a spot up on the hill, in the laundry, where none of ours ventured, it belonged to the navy, and the atmosphere was even more relaxed. Also, one could find a surplus piece of garment - that's where I replenished my sock stock - so that's where we went to kill an hour or two. When we had enough, we went downhill in the company of one Rizvan from Novi, a sailor, smallish semiliterate Bosančeros. Us being both Zrenaninacs, we didn't have to rehearse anything, the lockstep dialogue was spontaneous.
Blaja: hey, what do you do when the ship's engine won't start, do you give it a push?
Riki: not can do that
me: why not, works for us when dajc* won't, we push
Riki: well there's water
Blaja: so what if it's water, what kind of sailors are you if you don't get your pants wet sometimes
Riki: can't do that, it's deep
me: aw cmon, how deep can it be when you're in a port
Riki: above head
Blaja: well you surely learned to swim, din'cha?
Luckily, by then we reached the corner, after which he turned right to his dorm(itory), we left to the canteen. We waited until he was far enough and eventually laughed then. That's our zrenjaninian gimmick, this stance that it's impolite to laugh first when you pull something or make a joke, you never know whether it'll be funny at all, let the audience decide and then later join them, if any. Until then, stiff deadpan, and „the deeper the bullshit, the more serious my face“. That came as natural at home, we were all that, specially the gimnazijalci, but here there were many, specially one Dario Osarec from guess Vinkovci (whom we'd occasionally mispronounce as Oserec, just like we'd address Šime as Lavorko...) who'd never know for sure which was for real and which was raw bullshit, I drove him nuts. It once occurred that I got a letter from home and, over a beer in the canteen, recounted how the weather was at home, nothing special, and even then he just had to interrupt and ask whether this was truth or bullshit... To which I'd regularly reply honestly, except sometimes, just to keep him off balance. He was never sure.
For the saint twentyninth they tried to play the trumpet on the PA. Awful all the way, the tape was stretched worse than the one cassette of Zdravko Čolić that they played on weekend afternoons. Never tried the trumpet again, and also nobody volunteered any other tapes, because who knows what the officers' manuals say about the bands you keep. And I later never attempted to listen to Zdravko Čolić again. It's 2025 when I wrote this first half of this article, and I still have none of his songs on my playlist, except that one single he made while in Korni grupa.
One of the oktyabrists brought a bass guitar and amp, something 60 liters big and who knows how many watts. He lived nearby, in Zadar (yet with a hungarian surname), got an afternoon off and just hopped home to get the instrument. I learned the riffs by heart (by listening, didn't try to play, I'm dumb with strings) for „smoke it on the water“ and „another one bites the dust“ (aka „kad Radovan baca daske“). Luckily, he didn't bring it into the guard quarters, kept it in the classroom.
Shooting out the tromblons. It's a kind of a mine that you fire off the muzzle of your rifle; it fits on the outside, not the inside, and only on PAPs (poluautomatska, i.e. semiautomatic). Which is where I got lucky, because mine was an old M48 without the thread on muzzle front to screw on the add-on which accepted the missile. The thing that propelled it was a blank, with just a case with gunpowder, sealed with wax, which left a lot of soot in the tube and was damn hard to clean, even with DRNČ (detergent solvent... of soot layers; in slang - the food scraped from the bottom of the kettle).
We shot blanks anyway, just plastic imitation. Well that was one kind, the others were metal, narrower though, and all without charges, just dummies. We went to a meadow behind the barracks, covered with weeds knee high. And despite Dalmatia being mostly stone, this place had soil enough that we lost more than half of these dummies. All places where these fell looked the same. We found more bird nests that we accidentally hit than anything else.
At some point a courier came to call Elvir into the barracks, so we were left with a desetar (a tenner, aka decurion... the 2nd lowest rank, actually just a slightly elevated private), and his orders were to find as many as we could. Which was perhaps two more, we just didn't bother and there's no way he could check (or would bother to check). The weather was mild, the sun was setting, the weeds were soft when you lie down in a thick šinjel... just lied down and had a few smokes, then the desetar said it must be dinner time, we shouldn't be late.
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* a TAM or FAP truck, for some reason called dajc, after some german brand which it replaced, which was probably Deitz - dunno, never saw it written in german.
Mentions: Blagoje Vajski (Blaja), Elvir Pozder, gimnazija, Korni grupa, Lovorko Olujić (Šime), Novi Sad, šinjel, Zadar, in serbian
2-XII-2019 - 9-X-2025