Or maybe the day before.
We didn't have much in terms of classes, nor exercise. Learned ranks, and that's a double set, of the land vojska and the naval, because this is a mixed environment where you may meet officers of both kinds.
We get dispatched to various places for the training. Which is good - anywhere but here. We saw the line guys coming from field work, all dusty with the white powder of the limestone they were breaking all day. All nicely tanned and muscled, and dog tired. The squad commander is an enthusiastic idiot - the squad kept getting the blue ribbon for achievement every quarter, for progress on his plan of getting all the installations underground. Or that's the story I heard, and never saw a way to check it. Anyway, off to the boat.
I'm rather confused as to how to pack all that stuff into the knapsack, specially the heavy šinjel. And I thought I had some experience packing, after all those summers when we carried so much stuff to vacations. Again, my age or whatever makes the tenner take my stuff as an example to the others how to pack, so he practically packs it for me.
I'm destined to Šibenik, with two other guys - Toške, a teacher from Kosovo, and Dudek, peasant in the making, from Zagorje. In Split we get on the train (at least I know the port, more or less), not any express line, army pays only the lowest fare. It goes over Perković, of course, that's a major joint where each train has to wait, have a beer there. On the way, we talk to some Belgian girls, me translating as usual, and point to our ancient M-42 rifles as "these are our girls for the next 12 months".
We arrive in Šibenik late in the afternoon. Some tenner, obviously waiting to get on our train on his way for a leave, points us to the barracks. Seeing how much we have to carry, says we're lucky, it's the small one at the end of the bay, less than two kilometers. The big one is twice that far and five times that serious. I understood much later what he meant.
Again, another few days of doing nothing, waiting for others "in offcommand" to arrive during the weekend. We'll meet our lieutenant Elvir on monday. From this first weekend it seems much more relaxed than what I saw on Vis. And it's not in any severe mountains, it's just 50m from the shore, stuck between that, the railroad and the road to the big garrison. On the other side of that road are the shipyards, where they maintain the ships and submarines. And the brig, which I had the luck to never visit.