18-XII-1981.
Or thereabouts. Even though we're at the seaside where "it's always warmer", nope, the difference between it getting to -18 at home and -7 here doesn't mean much, it's still cold. Usually someone would want to air the dormitory, but would be overwhelmingly voted down by proponents of the thesis that "nobody died of stink but did of cold". However, this whole month, just like the previous two, my platoon is on guard duty, because Elvir and his gang of morons are unable to organize a shooting for the october generation so they can start doing it - we should be practicing telegraphy, our exam is, like, next week. So we manage to get some exemption from guard, here and there, but not much.
I, for example, was the PDO, assistant to dežurni officer, which meant I'm to be in his office or thereabouts until midnight, and then take over, check on the guard and the firewatch and the PDČ (assistant to rote's dežurni, likewise taking over at midnight - did that once too). Instead, I just sat with him in his warm office, stoked the fire, and only once I had to go out, to follow his instructions. He told me exactly, within a meter's precision regarding the location and the best route of approach, where to steal a bucket of coal (from the navy's laundry, which was in the same yard).
When I came back and stoked the furnace, he had a bullet put on top of the tv set, and lied on his bed, somewhat propped against the wall, staring at the bullet. And said it doesn't work tonight. There are times when his telekinetic abilities just throw the bullet off the tv.
Speaking of mystical powers, once in the guardroom's little dorm, I discussed those matters with two guys (an el. engineer and a student of FON - organizational sciences, if anyone can count them), and just to prove my point I threw five coins on the bed. The point being that there are no mystical powers, there's only randomness and probability, but my experiment disproved me, I threw five heads. See that it's random - and darn near impossible to repeat, says I and throws another five heads.
Which happened before. Last year, in Perlez, there was a class with exactly 32 kids, so I summoned them by tossing a coin five times. And it happened that it was the same kid, first desk to the door, twice during the same class. Because his location was arrived at when it's heads five times.
One day I had a brief respite from the guard - I was sent to the „command of the apartment“ - the miliary abuse of common language still manages to surprise me from time to time - to be the assistant to the dežurni officer of the whole... whatever, garrison, city, whatever. What surprised me was not the contact with the upper echelons - the officer was a major or a battleship commander or who knows what, but actually a common guy - but the standard. The vojska was supposed to provide equal accommodations to everyone, but no, this was much better. First, the room was big. Second, it was warm. And somehow it managed to look much cleaner, despite being made from the same elements - bunk bed (though without the upper one), clean sheets (ours were clean too, but this somehow felt cleaner), and, above all, silence. Not a sound.
My duty was to just stay awake and be by the phone. If anything untoward happens, I was supposed to wake up the officer and that would be it. No problem, nothing happened. I went to sleep around 21:00, had my three hours of sleep - and after some 400 hours of guard duty, sleeping in irregular intervals was routine - and then just sat and tried not to smoke too much until 6, when my duty ended. Then I just went down for breakfast, and slept until lunch. Too bad it was a saturday, so I didn't miss anything.
The command of apartment was in this building, uphill from our classrooms. Note that there was some civilization between us. On the picture, pedagogically (from near to far), is our desk, aka bench, where we cleaned our rifles. There were three of them and I used one as a stand from which to shoot this. The planks were never painted, didn't need to be, there was always enough rifle oil dripping on them.
Beyond it is the dump - the cardboard boxes are from the SDO (something daily meal, i.e. field rations), which we had once a month or so. It usually contained a can of something (usually spam, sometimes molten cheese, never pašteta), one tab of something energetic, mostly fig, plum, grape and maybe other fruit, irrelevant because fig overpowers all other tastes, a piece of hard bread, 25g of butter, 25g of marmalade or jam, a bag of instant tea, one of instant coffee, and two fuel tabs containing some alcohol in a gel. We'd also get half a loaf of bread. Of course lots of this was never even opened, because there would always be enough of mother's spoiled sweeties who'd never dare try a can of mutton spam, but would rather just visit the canteen and buy some biscuits, Eurocrem blocs (looks like a chocolate, but is made of Nutella-like cream, just sufficiently stiff to form a bar). The unused bits always found their way to the guardhouse, I ate lots of the unusual spam.
Then among the trees there was the railroad and the wires, the least guarded edge of the barracks grounds. Anyone who wanted to skip would jump the fence on that side. There was a dump of old water heaters and whatnot, and if one climbed that heap, the wall was just a step away, and outside the wall the soil was almost flush with its top. Then following the rails one could get to town almost unnoticed, which a couple of guys from my platoon actually did. One got caught, though, and was in the slammer for a couple of days, then reassigned into infantry or some such low grade post, but at least he managed to have a weekend at home in Knin, which wasn't too far anyway.
The heaters... in the building next to the dumo, left from this scene, there was the building of some majstors unit, some kind of general workshop, some kind of artisanal platoon. Never saw much activity there. Sometimes a few guys would come or leave, perhaps do something for a couple of hours.
I made this shot at night. There was no moon or anything, this is just city lights reflected off the clouds.
Mentions: dežurni, Elvir Pozder, majstor, pašteta, vojska, in serbian