Tomcat's Army Report

Preamble for the English version

What you can read here is the starting of a very special article series. As you might guess from the title, this is about my army service, which happened during 1998. You might be asking, "what's so special about it?" Well, simply that it happened in Hungary, a country which still cannot get rid of the remnants of communism, and still cannot become a truly democratic state. Even living in this country is incredible, as seemingly patriotic Hungarians always act opposing their own needs and demands. The army itself is a true parody of military as you know it, as you will see while reading. I doubt any of Hugi's readers, particularly those who have served in any Western army, have seen so much imbecility during their service that our army displays every day. However, I also doubt that other armies in the former Eastern block are able to display such a colossal stupidity. In this article series you'll read my adventures from the first day, starting at a training base as a rookie, to the day of demobilization nine months before I wrote it. These adventures were not unique, and are not products of my imagination; however, most likely some of you will doubt the latter. The text of the original report, published on the Web in Hungarian in 1998, cannot be precisely translated to English. Slang is always hard to translate, especially the slang of a subculture or a profession. The army has its own slang in every country, and the Hungarian military argot is so rich that a 600-page-thick book has recently been published about it by a linguist. There are words that don't make any sense even in Hungarian, or worse, sometimes soldiers don't follow the rules of Hungarian grammar, which is very flexible anyway, which most foreigners find hard to understand. For instance, imagine people speaking English in the "all your base are belong to us" manner. Despite that, I will try doing my best to reproduce the words of some relatively uneducated peasants I've met in there. If there is something that cannot be translated, I will include some notes in brackets. You will sometimes meet the expressions "February soldier", "August soldier" or "November soldier". This is the literal translation of how the soldiers were differentiated depending on their month of conscription. I was a February soldier, so when I arrived, the November and August soldiers were the old guys, while we were rookies. I hope you'll enjoy my writing as much as Hungarians enjoyed it when it first appeared on the Web. tomcat^grm P.S.: Greetz to dappa.