Tomcat's Army Report

Basic training

Soon our basic training started. The first thing we went through was a brigade lineup, supervised by Lt.Col. Naday. On the first Monday morning we formed our lines on the large formation ground, all the three thousand and five hundred of us, including officers and everyone, and the lieutenant colonel marched past us. We standed sniffly, and he tried to march. He did not manage... I am not surprised with such a large belly. Then he climbed the roofed platform that stood at the edge of the field, stared at us, and suddenly shouted out like a madman: - Baaaase... 'TEN'!! This can be translated to "base, attention!". Then he yelled at some soldiers from up there to stand still, like some third-grade sergeant. This is anyway the resort of commanding officers, surprisingly those are not the lower ranking ones who howl like you'd expect. The higher ranking officers lack any responsibility. Later I was told that the officers at the training bases were devaluated ones, who were there because they didn't fit the staff of any normal unit, and were only good to teach rookies to handle their guns, or else, if they were beginners, had just graduated. We also had a newbie lieutenant, named Tamás Molnár, commander of our squad. The other two in command were Captain Zsolt Kiss, a half-armed, terribly shouting, but anyway humane guy, and the one already mentioned, Captain Stumpfel. The first brigade lineup, or as we called it "brigade disco", had exactly the same point as the others held on the next Mondays: nothing. We received some guts about being proud of serving our homeland, and to wear these green rags, and that's all. We returned to our quarters. There were ten of us in our room, including the room commander, and there were ninety-seven in the company. Of course this was not a university hostel. If I say that there were some very simple minded people, I said nothing. There were some mud-minded village guys, who kept listening to "Ganxsta Zolee" (very primitive "hip-hop" music, that time popular in Hungary among primitive people, mostly about gangsterism and machoism, with lyrics ridiculously stuffed with rude speech), and thought they were the mafia. It often happened that two or three guys from the same village teamed up, and started threatening others, like claiming they were going to beat or knife everyone. Once one of those guys came to me and told me not to go out to the town, because he would look for me with his friends, because "they don't like such clever eggheads with a diploma". Later I saw him and his mates in the town, and I went there asking when would they beat me. He said he didn't have time for that right now, because he had to go home, but surely next time. I observed that the "music" of Ganxsta Zoli turns peasants agressive. So, it was an incredibly primitive bunch of people. It never became a community. Of course, there were two or three member cliques, but nothing more. Our room was the only normal place. Even if we weren't the best friends either, we were at least somewhat intelligent people. We did not steal from each other, we helped each other in this and that: cleaning boots, arranging beds and lockers, and so on. The "left two" soon became the best room of the company. We were mostly from Budapest. One of us had been nicked to "Choco", because he had formerly worked at the Stollwerck sweets company, and his colleagues sent him chocolate and biscuits of huge crates. Choco was a simple minded, however nice and warm hearted guy. The mud-minded would have certainly made a clown of him if we had let them so. Killer, a muscled boy from a small village around Pécs, was the hardest from us all, he finished training with the best results. A guy called Laci from Budapest, with large, day-dreaming eyes slept over my bed. Zoli was another from the capital, a silent one, but had a sudden anger. There was a boy from the town of Tata, called István, a kind of no-kind-of-all, later, in the last days we really got upset at him, because he ratted Killer and Zoli to the commander for sneaking into the toilets while the others marched to lunch. Droggie, who followed me later to the city of Székesfehérvár, was another silent boy, with a serious lack of self-confidence. Józsi Szabó, with the most common name one can imagine for a Hungarian, was the tenth member, he later stayed at Szombathely and became a lance corporal. So, this was our great "left two". We passed an intense medical examination on the first days. Everybody was injected fat without having been asked a question about past vaccinations and allergies. I was also given something against tick infection, despite I told that I'd just received it some weeks before. Fortunately, I didn't become sick. Then they filtered drug users. It was done with a scientific method. They lined up the company, a major came, and shouted: - Who is doing drugs? Of course no one, ah, sir, this company is clean. This was the official result of filtering. Later in the evening, a lance corporal repeated the filtering unofficially, and promised there wouldn't be a police case about it. Still no one presented himself. Some days later, when we first received our weapons, I saw that the guy next to me in the line looked weird, pale like the wall, and he couldn't stand on his feet. - Are you OK? - I asked. - No... - he stuttered - I am a drug user... Now, will your mother use Windows forever, I thought angrily. Weapons for a drug user, that would be cool. I called for the lance corporal. - Sir, this soldier wants to tell you something - I said. So, the soldier told him what's up. The lance corporal cursed, and took the boy to the doctor. When he returned, he told that the guy would be examined, and would surely be disarmed soon. But it didn't take three days and the drug user was back in the "left one". - What's that, weren't you disarmed? - we asked. - No... - he replied scared. During that evening his roommates caught him while trying to swallow an entire box of pills. He tried to commit suicide. But those morons just threatened to beat him if he "fucks their weekend up with this", as they said, instead of taking the pills from him. Finally the drug user got upset, grabbed a shtoki and attacked them. He scattered them, pushed the beds up, then ran to the opened window. Luckily the room commander rushed in and caught him before he could jump out! The others just standed and shouted: Jump! Jump! Nice people. The boy was sent back to hospital, and then he was sent to Budapest to see a psychiatrist. But he again returned after a few days, because they found that he had no problems and only simulated! The doctor later gave the following reasons for his decision: The country needs every man, and he can't let anyone leave! The days of training were all the same. The internal serviceman woke us up around dawn by shouting: "Good morning, soldiers, end of the night, wake up, now!" Then we got half an hour for washing ourselves and cleaning the rooms and the corridors. This was of course too little. Lucky for me, I had an electric razor, so I didn't have to stand in the queue for the taps and the mirrors, and besides, I never cut my face into strips in the rush. Later, within a few days, most of us learned that one should take a shave in the evening, when there was enough time to finish it, and anyway, one should not go to bed in pijamas, but in underwear or molino (warm underwear), on which we just pull the clothes in the morning. The entire company went to have breakfast after this. It was still dark outside at this time, around half past six. All companies arrived to the restaurant at the same time, and this of course meant that we always stood there in the cold for at least an hour. I always thought about why we didn't use this time to correctly shave our faces and clean up the quarters, but as they say, the guard is standing at the gate to disallow logic entering. So, this was one of the very annoying things, and the other was the continuous dressing. We changed clothes every hour. Mikado up, mikado down. Caps up, caps down. Winter clothing, sports clothing, summer clothing. If I didn't change clothes five times a day, then I didn't change them at all. The breakfast was usually some regular food, parisian meat or some cheese spread, but it was a ridiculously small portion. One single, thin slice of meat, with one small block of cheese, and one cup of tea (spell: hot water), but anyone could get as much bread as he wanted. Of course it was not that nice white bread you know from civilian life, but some cheap, sour, bad one. After this ungenerous meal we marched back to the quarters, of course practising stepping uniform, walking in place, and so on. Then we packed up our equipment for that day, and left for the "pampa", the training ground. Almost every day we had some field practice on the "pampa", or "tactics training" as they apostrophed, or some sport training in the sports area. We all hated tactics training, of course. It started with marching to the field behind the base, wearing battle suits, helmets, backpacks, carrying our AMD-65/5 automatic rifle, where they taught us many unnecessary things: watching, digging trenches, storming, defending, and so on. Everyone just loved to do this in the cold February wind from the Alps. We were almost freezing, although we wore much more than allowed by the regulations: for example I put on my sports clothes under the molino, my civilian pullover over that, most of us wore our hats under the helmets, besides double gloves and socks, but this all did little against the hellish cold. The training was usually led by non-commissioned officers, the oldies. Of course, as oldies usually, they didn't care about the entire thing, so the training only proceeded when an officer came in sight. We were creeping on the frozen grounds, throwed rubber grenades, clacked our empty rifles and so on. Once Captain Kiss was very nice to us. He had the idea to dig trenches in the cement-frozen ground, but within the quoted time, after the entire day of rushing around, and besides, to do this while lying on the ground! Well, it was a nice experience, I managed to dig some hole within two hours, while the quote was only half an hour, but some of the boys couldn't even break the rocky, frozen mud. The other kind of training was the so-called classroom training. This was of course far better than the pampa game. It's much better sitting on a shtoki, listening to the officers' bullshit, while writing letters to our girlfriends. The third kind of misery was sports training. It's like a PE lesson at school. Running, climbing, jumping, gymnastics. No one was interested in one's performance, however. But of course we rookies didn't know that, just like many more, so we tried to do our best. But once we had a special guest, when General Ferenc Végh, Commander of the Army, visited our troops, and he watched our running course. And he did not simply watch it, he also joined us, and ran five rounds on the course with us! Some months later the army's magazine, Magyar Honvéd (Hungarian Home Guard), was covered with our company's photos. Ferenc Végh was not that kind of office creep, like most other officers, he seemed to be a true soldier. He did not even feel it under his rank to talk with privates. We left for lunch in the middle of training time. The food was usually a dish of rat meat, or something similar. Most of us had our lunch in the canteen. Training lasted till 15:00, then free time followed until the evening, while the officers left for home. In other bases usually this meant the start of sucking time for the baldies, as rookies are called, but not here. Not simply because it was forbidden, but even our corporals were not from the asshole course. There were many ways for having a good time: there was a nice, large sports hall, a large library, where I surprisedly discovered almost all of Isaac Asimov's books, there was the canteen with flippers, darts, billiard table and typhoon (you know, that table game in which you have to push a hovering disc into a hole on your opponent's side), a cinema, and the base even had its own television link, on which there was a movie every day. Szombathely is a very "patent" base. Everything looks the way it should. There is order, the grass is clean. The soldiers receive correct training, I mean compared to what is going on at other places. The corporals are not picked by random, but were really checked. So then everybody, even those who heard of the hard situation of the army, starts to believe that this army is not that lost at all. Later now, as I remember, I am sure that military service at Szombathely is just as useless as everywhere else, but only the recruits don't realize this. Within one or two weeks we were all confirmed that everything had to be done following the regulations, and one should always try to reach the best results during the training, or else something bad might happen. But anyway, as I already said, we were not interested in that fact. A strange kind of disease appeared among the soldiers during the basic training. The sick had high fever, nausea, and showed the symptoms of heavy influenza. Within a short time Zoli became sick, and we carried Droggie to the doctor with Killer in the middle of the night. Lance Corporal Bencsics, the commander of the "left five", also became ill, then later me. It was not a miracle. There was little heating in the rooms. The shower rooms did not have windows, and the showers spilled ice cold water, I mean not that kind of cold-but-hell-I-can-take-it, it was the freezing cold water you can find in village wells during winter dawn. We almost never had hot water. Once it happened that a village boy, thinking he was hard enough, stood under this ice shower, and said he could take it. Some minutes later he was carried to the first aid barrack, because his circulation had stopped. Another addition to this fridge life was the vitamin-poor meals and the everyday freezing on the field. During my first free weekend - which was my second - I was transported to hospital, because I had thrown up, my blood pressure had fallen down, and I had felt like dying. I spent two weeks in hospital, however, at the end I left through the window with my friend to have a Doom party. :) I arrived back to my unit after these two weeks, but I became sick again, and I was sent to the hospital barrack. This hospital barrack was a nice place. First, in the base with 3500 people there was only an ensign as a doctor, which means he did not have a university degree (officers with any degree always start as lieutenants). Most diseases were cured the military way: they gave aspirine or eye drops. But when four rooms were filled with sick people, and even the officers' summer quarters had been transformed to a hospital, they finally started giving us medicines and vitamins. Of course, military methods did not disappear: they wanted to make us healthy faster by forbidding any books, magazines or everything else in the hospital that could be used to spend time. The usual agressive peasants, of course, were also present. They listened to the crappiest music on the radio all the day - Backstreet Boys and other Boys - and they tried to catch up with everyone. One day I was spreading the corridor, and I accidentally knocked a door with the handle of the broom. The door immediately opened, and a bullish redneck face appeared: - The fuck you thump here?! I said it was accidental, but he just told me not to bark back, and started walking towards me with an agressive face. OK, let it be a fight: I badly poked his stomach with the broom's handle. While lying on the floor he certainly felt deranged about this Budapest guy, who had not got frightened to death while he was looking with the usual face, which he also used at home, to scare chickens away. Later I heard that this asshole was the local mafiaguy among the peasants. No one tried to mess with me again. Once the plague was over, I returned to my company. The "left two" did serious business till that time. A young sergeant, friend of LCorp Mayer's, cooked coffee every morning, which we sold to the company. As a salary, we could drink coffee any time. I returned back just one day before the first live fire training. They said I would never shoot my gun, since I had not been present at the basic arms training, and I wouldn't shoot with the small-gauge sport gun either. Anyway, I solved the problem, so when the company's scribble walked around with the list, which everyone had to sign, proving that he had taken part in the arms training and understood the principles, I simply signed it with the others. Next day I was also standing in the queue for the weapon... The first shooting took place near a village named Egervölgy. Despite of its name, it's not in Northern Hungary, where a major city named Eger is located, but around a dozen miles from Szombathely. We travelled by bus, with full comfort and heating! All right, at least someone is NATO compatible in this goddamn army. At the shooting area, of course, we were immediately ordered to form lines and wait. Lance Corporal Endre B. Kiss, contracted non-commissioned officer, the service chief of our company, a pliant creep, hated by everybody, was keeping the drill. Soon we left for the basic shooting. We walked across the entire shooting field, which was around ten kilometres long, and had the same width. There were many different areas: tank shooting area, autocannons area, machine guns, hand rifles shooting fields, hand grenade throwing field, and other dumbnesses. Of course we marched to the rifle field, where Lance Corporal Endre B. Kiss realized that he had no tools to open the sealed and nailed ammunition crate. After a brief thinking - we could hear the cogwheels creaking - he grabbed the entire crate and started to smash it to the ground. After some smashes it broke apart, then he mentioned: - Hm, strange, it did not explode in fact... There are strong minded people around. We received three bullets for the first round each, which had to be fired to a target table from fifteen meters. But one should know that it's not like the soldier simply shoots and that's it, nah, that would be too simple. This had been taught at the basic training, which I had successfully missed. It goes the following. The soldier first lies on the ground, loads the rifle on order, then reports that the weapon is ready to fire. After receiving the order to fire, he fires. Finally, he reports that he has finished firing, and then there is a given way of displaying the weapon to the supervising officer, to prove that it is empty, no bullets are either in the magazine or the rifle itself. Well, I didn't have a clue about all of this, but to make me further lose my hope that it would go somehow anyway, the entire staff of officers, including the battalion commander, the two captains from our company, Lt. Molnár and another major, stood behind me, and had the idea to watch me from among the hundred soldiers they could have been watching instead. How would it all end up, I thought. Needless to say, I was a bit nervous. When Lt. Molnár, the commander of the training, stood behind me, and touched my ankle with his leg, I immediately fired my shots. Then I realized that there had been no command like fire or so... I received some heavy slating; however, they did not punish me because I fortunately had shot perfectly, two hits in the 10 and one in the 8 points round. It was pure luck that my weapon was so precise. The others' guns spilled the bullets all around the world, some stroke the skyline of the nearby forest, the others blasted the diligently labouring ants in the line of the fire. I hereby say thanks to the weapons factory worker who assembled the AMD-65/5 rifle numbered EL4518. Later we were sent to shoot so-called diving tables with short bursts. That was perfect again. I really liked the AMD-65 as a former sports shooter, it's light, small and durable - since it's a Hungarian redesign of the Kalashnikov AK-63 - and it's very stable during firing. Some people who were in the army curse this weapon, saying it's an imprecise crap, but the poor rifle cannot do anything against people who handle them as they do. These people had better realize that these weapons can still serve their owners in heavy rain or a dusty desert, not like the American M-16 for example, which gets stuck from a little steam. Some are jealous of the Italian soldiers for their plastic assault rifles, which weigh less than one kilogram, but they forget how fragile those guns are. Russian weapons are designed for war, not for parade and shooting field only, and this is what's really important. The abbreviation AMD anyway means Automata Módosított Deszant, which is approximately Automatic Modified Paratrooper Weapon in English. Despite of this, the Hungarian paratroopers use the AK-63D, which is more an infantry weapon. Hungarian military logic. After the AMD we tried the PKM light machine gun. This is a Kalashnikov weapon, which fires 7.62 mm machine gun ammunition. They say it's a very precise weapon, but I can't judge it, because I lied in a pit while firing, from inside which I could only see the sky, and I couldn't look out, because a sergeant stood on my back saying not to lift my head because the enemy would then see me. So I shot my fifteen rounds on the beautiful blue spring sky, which is certainly a very useful use of ammunition. Anyway, I received the "appropriate" level, since there were no more bullets. While playing with the machine guns, suddenly some wild whistling and "cease fire!" shouting broke the fun. It was because two American Chinook helicopters arrived from nowhere, and had the idea of flying across the firing area. This attitude reminded me of the former Soviet army's. After machine gun shooting we walked back to where we had left our rifles, and headed towards the place of the next exercise. Or better, we only wanted to do so, since some funny guy hid my rifle. He thought he would make me suck. Well, not. I told it to the commander of the shooting field, a major, who immediately lined the company up and told that whoever took it, should bring it back at once, if he didn't want to face five years of jail. Pretty interesting, someone immediately found out that while everybody had put their guns to the same place, lined up neatly, I had carried mine half a kilometer away, and thrown it among some bushes. How rude can I be with such a nice weapon. It happened that it was the strong guy, who had tried to mess with me right on the first week. Grenade throwing followed the machine gun training, but first we had lunch. Now, this was not a nice story again. The company got settled on the side of the training field, while five men had been sent for the food to the other side, to the command building. Of course I was among that five. LCorp. Norbert Mayer led us. We walked to the kitchen tent, perhaps you remember that this meant some ten kilometers. There we received 120 cans of meat and sixty loaves of bread in a large canvas. As you might imagine, this weighs a lot. All this had been given to us from aboard a truck. Then the truck left, and we saw that it went exactly towards our company, whereupon we had to drag all this shit on foot. But it was too late. We couldn't lift it even together, so we dragged it on the ground. It took some two hours until we got back, almost dead. But there was no rest. We received our 43M type grenades, and: Let's go throwing! The 43M is a pretty old device. It had been introduced in 1943, hence the name, but this of course doesn't mean that we used grenades from the second world war. Anyway, they weren't new, either. The main characteristics of this 43M thing is that it's so oversecured that it usually doesn't explode at all. For example, it will surely not explode if thrown into snow. It is a canister with a wooden handle, with a burning fuse at the end of the handle. When you throw it, you will have to give it a push with your wrist so the head of the grenade tilts and gives a loud crack, as it starts the fuse. It explodes in three seconds from the crack, and if not, one has to wait fifteen minutes, then bring it back. Well, as a matter of fact, it happened once that it exploded twenty minutes later, and the soldier who had been sent after his failed grenade had only survived because he had denied going out of the trench for the grenade, regardless of the threat of being jailed. My grenade went up perfectly. We did not have any targets in fact, we just threw the devices on the plain field, but hey, it was for fun. We couldn't throw them at any targets anyway, since the first dozen explosions opened a huge hole in the ground, slowly filling with water, in which the following ones fell down. My grenade blowed up in a nice, deep well. Of course, Captain Stumpfel could not do without yelling. - Target the wooden figure! Fire! - What wooden figure, sir? - I asked, because I could not see any figures around. - Don't ask bullshit you idiot, you moron! Throw it !! I threw it. It exploded. Cool. I still have the fuse. Months later, at the garrison of Székesfehérvár, one of our baldies told me about their grenade training. They had a very weak minded lance corporal. Everyone stood in the queue, waiting for his turn to throw his 43M, when this moron appeared, carrying an already thrown, unexploded grenade. He walked directly among the crowd, while plucking the head of the grenade, and mumbling: - Why no 'xplode, heh, no 'xplode... Everybody ran towards where he could, also the officers. The guy later did not understand why he was sent to court and later to jail. Another soldier, who surely got his guts from the state treasure, held another performance, luckily less dangerous. It happened that their company travelled to the shooting ground by a GAZ-66 truck. Later the company commander had a couple of papers in his hand, which he did not need, so he called for the nearest soldier, and put them in his hands saying: - Go, son, throw it in the GAZ! As a matter of fact, the word "gaz" in Hungarian means weed, grass. So the soldier, after a loud "YES SIR", turned around, marched to the edge of the forest, and threw the papers into the wind. Back to our adventures: the training was over with the grenade throwing, but we received another very neat task. Everybody was dead tired, it was already late afternoon. Suddenly, twenty of us were ordered to go to the command building, where we were given some suspicious tools. Spades, pick-axes, huge pliers. I didn't understand what this was all about, then they pointed to some concrete railway sleepers, sunk deep in the frozen mud, and told us that these had to be mined out and racked up. It was pure fun! Besides, we had to wear our rifles while working, because there was some rule saying the soldier must not abandon his weapon on the shooting field. No one cared about this rule during the machine gun training, as I recalled. The huge pliers, as it came to light, were sleeper lifting pliers. With four such pliers eight of us could hardly lift one of those heavy concrete blocks. And besides, we had to dig them out from the sticky, pappy frozen mud. Then that Stumpfel guy came, and as usual, started yelling with us, because there is some rule that six men have to lift one sleeper, so it is against the rules to lift it for eight of us. Fortunately Captain Kiss sent him away. Our mud-minded friends were active while working, of course. There was a guy who, just like me, was particularly interested in military technology. We were well in the middle of packing those concrete toys, when we suddenly heard the engine of a jet plane from above the clouds. - It should be a MiG-21 - I said to the guy. A nearby peasant of course couldn't stand keeping silent. - Hey wa' the fuck think ya' so cleva', how could ya know from tha' sound, wanna me to break ya' face! I did not feel like starting a chat with the peasant about the fact that it can only be a MiG-21, since the Hungarian Air Force has only MiG-29s apart from this type, but those are far from there. Suddenly the plane dived out of the overcast sky, and flew past us at a low altitude, swinging its wings as a greeting. It was really a MiG-21bis. The mud-minded one of course immediately reacted: - Nah, ya' now see that it's ain't not that whay ya' said, stupid! During the rest of the day he boasted to his fellows about how clever he was. The live shooting training had been finished with this exhausting work. We boarded our bus and returned to Szombathely. Meanwhile a huge scandal had broken out there, because two soldiers, a November oldie and a February baldie, had almost been thrown off from the roof of our battalion quarters. You know, they had thought the roof was safe to khm, make love. They had kept thinking so until half of the company had gone up, and they all had happened to be pretty intolerant towards gays. The training was continued the next day, and it lasted for some more weeks. Finally, on a sunny day in the beginning of April, some officers arrived from other bases, so as from the 43rd József Nagysándor Signals Corps, and they each took a busload of rookies, including me. We handed our clothes and equipment back, only keeping the walking-out clothes which we wore while being transferred. On the last day I was sent to win an intellectual contest; you might have a clue how hard it was with so high quality opponents. Then I left to the city of Székesfehérvár with some of my mates. tomcat^grm