About a day after that concert, I guess the boss had a phone call with someone up the ladder, and got the task to get us two city frajers straight on the matters of the political ramifications of rock'n'roll and negative tendencies at large.
That day we had spaghetti with sauce. Robert outdid himself, it was really great, and we already knew where in the fridge the parmesan was. Eating them without parmesan would be a sacrilege. The boss just arrived, to eat at his separate table in the kitchen itself - our mess hall was a little 3x3 anteroom of the kitchen - and asked what was it that we're pouring over the spaghetti. We told him, and he just had to try it. But he didn't want us to know he's learning the finer points of food from us, so he just went to the fridge, and found the other open bag. The stale one, which Robert didn't throw away yet, having just discovered that it doesn't smell right. He planned to do that during the cleanup after lunch, but the boss (i.e. senior sergeant) forestalled him.
Later, before dinner, he sat with us right in front of our transmitter shop, on a bench, and we just talked. I remember we didn't even wear shoes, it was practically summer on the coast, we wore just the plastic slippers. We didn't really look much like soldiers, except shirts and pants and sort of shaved faces. My mustache was almost civilian.
At some point he got to the point, about the anti-something stance that Riblja čorba had against all the sacred attainments of the revolution, for instance that song "In the west nothing new". We were freely opposing him, Morkec with the fervor of a high school graduate, me with the seriousness of a high school professor (which we indeed were). Specially that song, which caused a lot of controversy, was actually a setup for Bora Čorba to appear on Studio Be and refute the accusations one by one. The song is a list of bad news, ending in "it'll be better, someone shouts / dead words on the paper / in the east the old stories /in the west nothing new". The "cretins rebel and die", he said on the radio, "that's not what you thought, whatever it was, it's the Albanians on Kosovo and Metohija". "Another victory of the partisan - well you can understand that it's bad news for me, I'm a staunch Red Star fan"... and so on, and so on. And I knew that by heart, and spelled it out for him, and in the end he was totally confused. He came to deliver a political lecture, and received one.
In the evening he fell sick. We never knew whether it was the parmesan or the political failure that did him in, but he just called the other sergeant to come and take him home, or to the vojska's hospital, whichever. We were left alone.
Later in the evening a replacement came. An old bannerman (highest suboficer rank, i.e. that's the upper limit for those with only a high school), who used to work here before he got his last promotion, and naval at that (the naval subofficer ranks are the same). Within minutes he made an inspection of pretty much everything. He checked our stash - he obviously knew the place from before, we weren't the first guys to discover it. Gone is the drink... or so we thought. Later at night, after midnight, one of the guys was late from his leave. We had a situation. The guy could end in the brig, aka Kartina*, or worse, be sent to some really bad place. I don't even remember who was it, whether that insane Bosančeros (whom we caught steaing, wait for it, green peas cans (!)), or the semiliterate macedonian doghandler. He did appear some time during the night, and that's where the details get blurry - how did it go from "we have a situation" to "we're drinking with the officer". I only remember that we sat (our place, the transmitter room? possibly, it's big and rings a bell), we all sit and worry what will happen to the fool, and he just goes „...gimme that bottle“.
In the following days he tried to assert some strict rules, and there was an atmosphere of impending doom, but none came. The one who was doomed was our room painter, namely one Jovanović who was a decorator in civilian life. He was off duty and played pool against the aggregatist/driver in the bunker/club below our lab. The bannerman came and said he'll play with the winner, in beer. Now room painters are notoriously known as holding their drinks and holding a lot. They all traditionally drink and still can walk on a ladder without falling - and draw straight lines below the ceiling.
And this guy got Jovanović under the table. I don't know whether they were playing pool (on a quarter size set) or tried to outdrink each other. The bannerman clearly won both, and that was supposed to be a lesson to us because of our stash. "I can outdrink all of you and still take your shirts at pool, so don't even try." Which we didn't... all the booze was gone. For a few days only, until the TV crew came.
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* with the analogy to a kantina, and in rhyme with its commaning officer, something naval, Kartini or so.