Roughly the day when the scirocco blew.
What Elvir said about us here being picked according to the needs of our territorial units and reserve, unexplainably we had four of us from Zrenjanin, one from wider area south of town, four guys from Dalmatia, all the way from Mali Lošinj island to Makarska in the south, barely 200km from one to the other, nobody from Slovenia and nobody from Macedonia nor Montenegro. Can't remember anyone from Bosnia either... Funny, we were a pure serbocroatian platoon. Okay, with two resident Albanians, but they're from Serbia too.
So that day, when it blew, the tall trees around the football court were already half yellow and the wind created a monotonous ssssshhh sound, no gusts no stops, just flat ssshhh all day. Annoying as hell, and everybody was on edge. Few guys almost got into fights, but the resident Dalmatians and the two guys from Zagora (one from Knin and the other from, if I remember right, Obrovac or Imotski) calmed them down. They have a day or two like that every year.
So okay, I asked one, what do you do when it comes? Wait for it to pass, what else. But what if there's a fight and there's nobody to defuse it? It's all forgotten the next day, everybody knows how it is, how everyone is on edge, so what happens on that day simply doesn't count.
Luckily it was a saturday, and we had the whole next day to cool it off.
The leaves fell off in by end of september, though, and we had to sweep them every day. One day, just after we finished that, shoving most of it into the rain ditch that ran from end to end, following the lowest line of the terrain, and then out by the gate into the sea. Then someone important from the higher command landed with a helicopter on the football court, blowing out the leaves from the ditch - it was dry, nothing stuck. We cleaned it again, then once more when the guy left. Into the ditch each time. Because nobody cared to do it in any more efficient way. It was actually better this way, the leaves were the easy stuff, so better do the easy stuff three times than wait for your lieutenant to invent something more interesting. And the lieutenant liked it this way, the men were engaged in useful work without any extra effort of his brain cells.
It happened that three of us from Zrenjanin were dežurni in the kitchen a few times. First time we volunteered, despite the known axiom that one shouldn't volunteer for anything. Because the kitchen is the kitchen, you're out of sight, nobody orders you the whole day, and there's always some extra something to take, at least a fresh bread. This is vojska, they always serve the oldest, waste not. And this is a small barracks, so this is not a proper kitchen, it's cooked in the big one down the road, and brought here in so-called bidons, alluminium barrels with sealable tops. We'd serve the meals from that, washed the dishes. Had a dishwasher, which has long ago lost the heater, so it was cold water only and we were also short on detergent. But it applied pressure and managed to wash it... sufficiently. By the end of a meal our fingernails were all soft. We had to learn how to walk around there, as the floor was pressed ground stone, smooth and slippery of all the water with thin layer of grease.
In the written off bidons, the ones which can't close anymore, we took out the swill. A tenner* went with Blaja and me to show us where the garbage pile was, where to dump it. He was a petite Bosnian, this Teljić guy, spitting image of what Branko Ćopić could write. Chatted with us along the way, and at some point asked us what were we „in the civility“. We just looked at each other, what we looked like, in those white blouses which were due a wash at least a week ago, hauling swill in a beat up barrel... and burst into laughter. He was thoroughly confused, did I say something wrong... „He is an opera singer, and I'm a professor of mathematics“. Bang.
A joke was circulating at the time about a surgery world congress, where the transplanters were fighting with prostethicians. So they showed off their accomplishments. Russian: „We had a guy lose both legs, and with our prostethics he's now running marathong and winning medals“. Amer: „Ah, the crude russian tech, we had a guy lose both arms, and with our prosthetics he's now teaching violin at the conservatorium“. Bosnian, on the side of transplanters: „We had a guy lose his head, sewn him an ass instead and he's now singing in the opera“.
Of course, I just had to forget that Blaja was among the listeners, and two seconds before the punchline I... decided to just push on, can't allow such a trifle concern destroy a good joke. He didn't mind, and told the joke further.
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* it's a soldier's rank, two red cloth stars, only razvodnik (usher!) was below