Tomcat's Army Report
This means war!
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August left, and we were locked up with the November. Since the February
truck drivers also arrived, we had a nice amount of baldies. Actually one of
the drivers tried to commit suicide right on the first day, he cut his veins.
Perhaps he took a better look of the place where they wanted to keep him during
the forthcoming months. Fortunately he didn't die, just splattered the M3
with blood.
The November soldiers didn't make us suck till that day, although they were "rubbers", so they had the right to do so. What is a rubber? There is a period in a soldier's life when he's not yet an oldie, but not a baldie any more. There is a little rhyme about this:
I am a baldie, I do the wash-up.
I was already working as the battalion's scribble, under the hand of Captain Korcsak. I became the chief scribble, because of my computer education, and Szuhai and Torzsok became my subordinates. The high command of the battalion consisted of only three officers: Lt. Col Laszlo Andrekovics, the old officer I had met on the first day, and who was just called "Andrej" by everyone, Captain Tibor Korcsak, the staff commander, and a young sergeant-major called Lajos Csizmadia, the battalion technician. In fact Korcsak was the only I ever saw working. He was a rigorous, precise man. Every morning he gave us our daily tasks, and he asked for the results at the deadline. Anyway he didn't intervene in anything, he didn't care who did the task, when and how, all he wanted was to have it on schedule correctly. This was hard at the beginning. I was a bit heavy minded, so as Torzsok, and Szuhai rarely came to the office. A battalion scribble has to prepare several papers regularly. Just to mention some: write the battalion diary, type the plans of the maneuvers, create the monthly training plans, arrange the payments for the officers' meals, type different documents - I thought I would go crazy. I started with building some order on the computer. I arranged documents to separate directories, deleted games and put a note on the machine forbidding playing on it. Until that day the entire battalion had used the poor XT as a game console. Of course the oldies tried to threaten me for this, but it was enough to say them that it was Korcsak's order. Korcsak was feared by even higher ranking officers. He was a person born to command, filled with charisma. Both conscripts and professionals were petrified when seeing him, and even more when they had to visit his office. He ordered a fall-in every morning and asked questions from the soldiers about the regulations and stuff. He had a list of 36 questions - the so-called 36 Points of Korcsak - which he used for this purpose. We received this right on the first day and we had to learn them. I don't remember all the questions now, but some are: What is the difference between short and long leave? or Who is your commander? Everyone hated and feared these questions, but somehow not many thought about actually learning the answers, which were given along with the questions. Who couldn't answer a question, got his name written on the "death list", and his leave was cancelled for that day. If he got there the second time, he lost his next long leave. And for the third occassion he got grounded for a month, and so on. I was to write the "death list", as the chief scribble, the captain always ordered me to step out of the formation and do it. Well, as a matter of fact, finally Korcsak never detented anyone who got on the list. Despite of this fact everybody feared these morning quiz games, praying not to be pointed by the captain with one of these questions. As I said, Korcsak was a natural born commander. Other officers might only frightened the soldiers once or twice with such bullshit like this fake death list. Lieutenant Colonel Andrekovics was an old man. He had had cerebral haemorrhage recently, so he stuttered very badly, usually one couldn't understand a word of what he was saying. Most soldiers also thought he was stupid, but he was not. Actually he sometimes really had problems with recognizing things at his very eyes, he was a very absent-minded person. In fact it was Korcsak who led the battalion. Andrej had a regular saying that was so funny even soldiers used it: "gsdick!" This was intended to be said as "god's dick", but he always said like this, omitting some phonems, especially when he was upset. Andrej had sometimes perhaps been as good an officer as Capt. Korcsak, but now he was only an old man, just some years before the retirement. While Korcsak was at our battalion, we saw Andrej rather rarely. He was on a longer holiday when the August solders left. Slowly we got familiar with the other officers of the battalion and the company. Our commander, Captain Takacs was a thin, incredibly sharp nosed man. Two squadron commanders worked under his hands, both beginner lieutenants, just graduated: 2ndLt. Attila Mihalyi and 2ndLt. Balazs Kocsis. Mihalyi was a sporty, handsome young man, a black belt judo master, while Kocsis was the opposite, a lean, tall, huge eared little boy, who in fact more resembled a pole with a cap on it than an officer. Kocsis wasn't taking discipline too rigorously, but Mihalyi was the opposite, but while Kocsis knew how to handle the men, Mihalyi was a bad commander. Our sergeants, who were the commanders of the radio trucks, were: Sgt. Voros, the one who held our training, and Sgt. Margitai, the woman we'd met on our first maneuver - they were a couple. Sgt. Bekovics and Sgt. Csoszi have also been mentioned before, and there were two other young guys, Sgt. Andras Csutoras and Sgt. Otto Szatmari. All of them were in their early twenties. Plus, of course, Erno Racz, our favourite. The first I met from the other company was 1st Lieutenant Krisztian Bernhardt-Kupi, a freshly promoted young officer, the company commander, then Sgt. Maj. Antal Milos, the service chief, a rather patent, old officer, with some thirty years of military carreer behind. Milos was a very rigorous person, a true regular sergeant, as you imagine sergeants, and besides was a truly insidious man. The November soldiers' eyes opened just a few days after the August ones had left. One day I was doing some important work in the office, so when I left for lunch with the company, Korcsak told me not to work for the others to finish eating and march back in formation, just to come back as soon as I can. It happened that Szuhai was on internal duty that day, he led us to the restaurant. I munched the gempa - perhaps it was kotu, I don't remember - and told him that I should go. (The word "gempa" is meaningless, soldiers used it to name something that was served as food, but didn't even resemble it. "Kotu" is the same case. Sometimes they said, there was a choice for the soldier, menu A was gempa with kotu, menu B was kotu with gempa.) I stood up and headed to the kitchen window with the metal tray, while the November soldiers yelled out in anger as one:
- Heeey where're you going, bald !!
... and other gentleness. Szuhai tried to explain to them, he said that he had let me go, but he was a faint voice in the storm, his words were lost in space. Suddenly someone stood in my way. It was a peasant called Zsolt Krokos, a brutal faced, very agressive and dumb peasant from Borsod, who had already spent some years in prison for heavy bodily insult. He pushed his face in mine, as quarrelsome people do:
- Bald! A' said ya' sit back, ha!
Lying on the ground, in the company of a tray and some pastry, I was thinking about what to do with this overmuscled bastard. If I hit back, he would easily tie the tray on my head. If not, he'd molest me till the last day. I looked at my February mates. They kept silent. They weren't like helping me. The kitchen commander, Sgt. Voros, broke my hesitation.
- What are you doing down there?
Krokos was already sitting on his seat, building flaming eyes. - So, you've lost balance. OK, if you say so, let it be. I knew he witnessed the case. This can later work out, since finally I figured what to do with this bastard, which was far worse than beating him up. The sergeant helped me on foot, and gave a broom to clean up the food. The November guys left for a short leave during the afternoon, we didn't have to watch their faces till the evening. We sat in our room, some wrote letters, others read. The first sign of their return was a scared February driver, who rushed upstairs head over heels to warn us: - There is trouble coming! The November is back, but they're all drunk, and you can hear them yelling: February sucked in! We decided not to catch up with the drunken bastards, or better not to give an opportunity for them to catch up with us. Quickly everybody had gone to bed and switched the light off, as if it were retreat time. A few minutes of silence followed. Then we heard the November coming.
- Buuulls!! Where are you, bulls!!
The door suddenly been kicked in, the handle broke off and flew to the wall. A drunk November soldier stood on the doorstep, called Berkes, a half gypsy boy, he kicked the door. He shouted the top of his voice. - FEBRUARY SUCKED IN !! YOU'RE DEAD, BALDS !! All the others gathered to the room, switched the lights on, some started to push the beds over, along with the baldies lying on them, but fortunately the internal serviceman, Private Peter Forizs, arrived and tried to prevent blood splattering. Some November guys simply wanted to knife us, mostly Krokos, who always carried a knife. The outraged fury was halted by a sudden shouting: - February soldiers, fall-in on the corridor for boots cleaning! They liked it, fine, let's make the balds clean their boots. We quickly grabbed the shoe paste, the brush and the blue apron used for this purpose, and formed a line on the corridor. The November soldiers yelled on us like some bastards, without any point, they sweared, scolded the "goddamn balds", sometimes pushed some of my mates and kicked any furnitures they saw. We sat down on shtokis and started brushing the boots. Well, as a matter of fact my boots could really take some cleaning. I put some of the "Soldier" brand paste, exclusively manufactured for the army, when Berkes stepped to me. - Polgar! - he shouted. I looked up. He grabbed my face with his hands and yelled right between my eyes. - You SUCK IN! What the fuck you think you are, you come here the hell knows where from, and catch up with Krokos? My mate? YOU DO?! And you go to the hospital to shirk?! I looked to the right. Krokos was standing there, with the knife in his hand, and was really about to kill me. I felt better not to say a word. Berkes left to make someone else happy, but Krokos just stood there, staring at me like a psychopath which he probably really was. He was dumb and drunk enough to jump to me with that knife. So I just kept brushing my boot like I wouldn't even notice him. - He, Polgar - he said. I looked up. - THE FUCK YA' STARE !! - he yelled immediately and stepped towards me. Suddenly a short guy called Peter Froschl appeared and quickly dragged him away. I don't know what would have been to happen if he had not been here, perhaps I wouldn't write this report now. This bastard seriously thought about killing me. The boot cleaning continued. Meanwhile they had the idea that a boot is only clean if it falls on its sole when thrown in the air. So they threw everyone's ones. A conceited lance corporal named Schmidt came to me, he always thought he was someone with that one tiny star on his collars. He took my boot away and threw it in the air. It fell on the sole. Grumbling angrily he took it and threw up again. It fell on the sole again. - You lucky son of a bitch - he said, and gave another try. The boot fell on the sole the third time! - Get your fuckin' rookie ass back to the quarter and shut the fuck up! - he yelled on me, and I left. My mates who had also been released by the November were trying to build some order. There were some four of us, then slowly the others arrived one by one, except for Roland Kiss, and a driver called Attila Merenyi, because both of them always talked back. Finally they'd been let gone too, but some oldies also came into the room, led by LCorp. Zoltan Bajai, the company scribble. - Balds, you... - one of them started some drunken holy speech, a behemoth peasant called Zoltan Molnar. His tongue was blocked by alcohol. - From now... From now you shut up. From now... From now you will be polite to us... Polite! Got it?... You call us... SIR! And if an oldie enters your room... you all stand... still! Got it? Berkes and the others also entered, they kicked some shtokis up. The yelling kept going on for a short time, then they left and it ended, but we heard the oldies throwing a revelry in their room. One of them smuggled a can of cheap wine in. There was quiet in our room for some minutes, when the door opened again. It was LCorp. Bajai. He headed for Roland Kiss's bed. Bajai was a short, blond guy. In contrast to the others, he was not a primitive bastard. He was intelligent, and never molested those who did not deserve it. For example, he had only one rule for baldies: they always had to knock the door before entering his office, and ask for permission to be there. But after one asked for this permission two or three times exactly the way he demanded, Bajai usually let him step in without this ritual. He was a correct oldie, with a good sense of humour. - Roland Kiss - he said on a subdued, menacing voice - can you hear me? The way of intonation he said the name cannot be forgotten. He said it as one word: "rolandkiis". This later turned an adage among us, like Andrej's "gsdick". But now no one laughed, we just lied on our beds in silence. We hated Roland Kiss anyway. - Can you hear me, rolandkiis? Suddenly two other baldies entered and turned the light on. They noticed that the lance corporal was talking to Roland Kiss, so they rushed there, pushed him out of the bed to the floor. - He's talking to ya, asshole bald, stand attention! Roland Kiss frightenedly stood sniff. Bajai continued. - You lied to me, rolandkiis. I didn't really understand this. Some days later Bajai explained. Roland Kiss had gone to him several times, telling lies to ask the scribble to give him a long leave for weekend, instead of someone else. One week he had said that his mother had been dying, the next week he had lied that his girlfriend had aborted, and so on. Bajai, since he was a nice guy, had kept him away from weekend duties and gave him permissions to leave, but finally he had figured that our friend bullshitted him, and he had got a bit upset on this. - You lied, and I don't like this. Rolandkiis. I really don't like. Are you scared now, rolandkiis? Rolandkiis didn't say a word. He just stood there and simply shit in his pants. Bajai continued. - From now on, rolandkiis... you have less rights than a worm. Because that you are, a rat, a worm. A creep, a liar. Got it, rolandkiis? He stood close to him, staring in his face. The other two oldies went back to drink, turning the light back off. They stood in the darkness, facing each other, Roland Kiss and Bajai. - Now, hit me, rolandkiis! But Roland Kiss didn't hit him. Bajai waited for a while. - Scared, rolandkiis? The voice of the super-cool underground guy was like a little mouse on the bottom of a deep well.
- N... No... sir...
Roland Kiss, king of the underground, the heroic security guard. - So? This one-sided conversation kept on for some more minutes. I felt some strange kind of malicious joy, as I saw Roland Kiss burning, and the others felt the same. Bajai then set Roland Kiss's rights. He must not walk towards him on the corridor. He should salute all the oldies. He must ask for his permission for everything, including going to the toilet. And so on. Finally Bajai slowly turned and walked out. From the door he turned back for a question: - Anyone heard anything here? Deadly silence answered. No one gave a fuck to what happens with Roland Kiss. - That's correct. Just the way I expected - he said and closed the door. This is how the first such day ended, but it was not the last. The November soldiers kept being offensive, they yelled at us like animals, and they used every opportunity to turn our life to hell. They waked us up one hour earlier in the morning, in the night they didn't let us go to bed at retreat time. If they came back from a leave drunken, they made us clean their barf up. When in guard duty, they never let the baldies have a rest in their resting time, and they never let them take a radio or a book to the guard tower. Actually it's against the regulations anyway, but one who was a soldier probably knows how exciting it can be to sit in an empty tower for three hours, and stare at the trees behind the base. Bajai once went to the guard tower where Roland Kiss was on duty, kicked the bottom of the tower and threatened him, shouting that he didn't dare to shoot him, and Roland Kiss really didn't dare. Sgt.Maj. Racz was also doing the job, he never let me going home, not even Endez, who anyway deserved two weekends per month at home, because of his kid. When we moved out of the baldies' room, he placed us in other rooms to get everyone to the worst place. How accidental, I got in the same room with Krokos. The November soldiers found yelling like a herd of barbarians and enjoying their power quite funny, with only a few exceptions. These were Szuhai, Froschl and another guy called Gyorgy Lazar, who kept silent and never took part in their actions. This Chicago had been going on for two weeks or so, when Capt. Korcsak suddenly ordered me to his office. Racz came to me and said with a wide grin: - Go, Polgar, Korcsak has something to discuss with you! And he also came with me. He led me to the captain's room and closed the door. There was a smaller conference going on: Captain Takacs, 1st Lieutenant Bernhardt-Kupi were both there, now also Racz, and of course Captain Korcsak. He had some paper in his hand. - Polgar - he said and put the paper in my hand. - What is this? Explain! I was struck. It was my letter to my girlfriend, which I had already sent days ago! I had printed it on the office computer. It included some rather rude personal opinion about the captain, the sergeant-major, and the entire army at all. Racz kept on grinning. - I ask for explanation, sir, about how you come to open my letter! - I said, and pushed the letter on his desk. Now the officers were struck. None of them ever dared to talk to the dreaded captain ever. Silence covered them for some seconds. Then Racz broke it. - I brought the letter to the captain - he said. - And I received it from... uh... from one of your mates. So, that's the point. Robert Beres, the innocent faced mafiaguy, had opened the letter which I had given to him when he had left to the town for a short leave, to post it. I felt my blood pressure raising. I am not the kind of person who can be frightened with rank, but now I didn't give shit to the stars on the others' shoulders. I had to be strong not to yell at the officers. - See, captain, first, if I would be an officer, and one of my men would bring his mate's opened letter to me, I would kick him out of my office like a stinky rat. Second, I am not responsible for you, and neither anyone else for what I write in my private letters. If you wish, you can punish me for using the office computer to print this, you've got the right. But not for the contents of the letter! Korcsak was surprised. Probably he expected me to stutter and sink into the floor. He turned to the officers: - Get out. And close the door. The three officers left. Racz seemed a bit worried: won't this great plan work? Then the door closed, and I found myself alone with the captain. - See Polgar - he said - I have been working with conscripts for a decade. I used to be a company commander for years. And what I experienced is that violence helps keeping order. - Violence is the last shelter of the weak - I inserted Salvor Hardin's favourite epigram from Isaac Asimov's Foundation. - Really? How would you keep the order of a subordinate unit? He deranged me. He was not asking this sarcastically, but seriously. I didn't want to tell him what I honestly thought, that he molested the soldiers without a point. So I chose another saying, now from Bismarck. - Soils can be used for several purposes, except for sitting on them easily. The captain kept thinking on this for a second, then he asked:
- You know, the men fear me. But what do you think, what are they actually
fearing?
We kept talking for a while, mostly about leadership. He particularly agreed with me, violence is not always working. I also agreed that sometimes it is. He seemed happy to finally find someone on this broken base to talk with. Finally he stood up, opened the door and said: - Let's forget this stupid episode. Finish the training plan for tomorrow, and bring it to my desk till nine o'clock in the morning. I returned to upstairs, and headed right to Racz's office. I opened in without knocking, and didn't ask for a permission to speak. - Sergeant Major - I said - I thank for your gentleness. You're a perfect and honest gentleman. Do you know what postal secret is, and that is protected by law in our country? He didn't answer, and he had better not. Beres was also standing there, trying to disappear in the wall when I arrived. I turned to him. - About you, now you've proved that you're really a stinky fucking gypsy. I always hated gypsies, but I tried to give you a chance, as we have to live under the same cover. But now it's over. We still have six months to be here. I don't want you to talk to me during these six months, and so will I do. - But... - he tried to build his well-known charming grin, which was a permanent feature of his face, but I ignored and left the office without asking permission again. Racz still kept silence. Suprisingly I received a correct sized uniform at the next clothing change, but also a yellow colored bedsheet, which was the privilege of the oldies, baldies had white. Besides Racz, when he was in his office, never let the November soldiers bother us. But the war was just starting. We were woken up in the dawn almost every day, well before six o'clock, which was the regular wakeup time, sometimes it was only half past four. They let me in peace since Racz's failed attempt, except for Krokos, who, especially when he was drunk, thought that he was in the prison and he was the king of the jail. These times he yelled at everyone, including his own mates. Anyway he had a weird accent, he was a living caricature of the dumb peasants from Borsod county. He didn't use the letter E at all, he always used A instead, but still with a weird intonation. Like: - Faabruaray soldaa'z faa'-in aon tha caorridoa' fo' claanin' aop! - then he added: - Yeeeaaaa! - since he really enjoyed being the internal serviceman so he could give orders. This later also turned into another adage, I mean "claanin' aop - yeeeeaaa". (Translation from Borsodese: February soldiers, fall-in on the corridor for cleaning up." Endez, whose real name was Gabor Andras, was usually renamed to Andrasi by Krokos for some reason, or better, "Aondroaasi". The primary target of the fun was Roland Kiss and Merenyi. Merenyi was a thin, blond guy, rather turned off, he took the military service rather hard. He was ordered to guard duty two times, at the third he went to the company commander crying, saying he could't take this stress. This was when the November settled on him, which he complained to Racz, who handled it with his usual empathy. During cleaning the two had to wear gasmasks, and they usually had to clean the toilets with small brushes. The impudence of the oldies was limitless. There was an ugly, primitive dumbass called Sandor Dosztaly, his teeth missing on the front, who was a wooden palette assembler by profession. He had the fattest mouth. When someone tried to talk to him, he usually replied with weird grammatics, like: "It's shut up, no?!" or "What barkin'?" He even overshouted Berkes, since Berkes at least only yelled when he was drunk, anyway he could also be normal, while Dosztaly could not. Once he noticed that I was leaning against the door frame with my hand while cleaning the floor. He walked there and kicked the frame: - No leaning !! After a few such cases I got really fed up. Once he barked something to me downstairs, at my office, then I told him to talk to me normally or shut up. Of course this didn't lead to the wished result. He repeated what he had said in the evening, in the M3. Now this was the point when it was enough. I stepped to him, grabbed his collars and smashed him to the wall like a rat. He couldn't even move from the surprise. - Now listen, you goddamn tramp, you rotter - I said silently. - You're talking to a goddamn engineer, someone with a diploma. You should talk with me with respect, or I will break your ugly face, and you can go to complain anywhere you wish. Got it? I pushed him to the ground and walked away. He appeared some minutes later, sidled in to his room, and no one saw him during the day any more. He never dared to complain to anyone. My first internal service duty, when I was a vice serviceman, was a very boring one. I've welded at the service table during all the night - the chief serviceman of course went to sleep. There was some serious drinking at the company, the oldies drank some ten liters of wine together. Of course, there was some breaking and messing as usual. One of them came to the service desk and pissed on it. It was the fat Private Molnar, also known as Killer, who was anyway in the habit of urinating anywhere he felt so. He started talking with blocked tongue: - Ya k... know, Polgar, what... what was when the August was still here? T... Then we were the... Balds! And they d... did the same! Pissed on th... the desk. And what then? They picked the service phone up! The service phone was a white telephone on the desk. It was a direct line to the officer on duty, if one picked it up, it immediately rang in the officer's room, and if no one talked in it, the officer came to there. This meant that when the August oldies did this, the poor serviceman had some one minute to clean the urine up, and then he still had to explain what happened with the phone. - Gimme a cig... cigarette! Or I will pick the phone up! It was pure luck that some days before I'd found a piece of cigarette in the drawer of my desk in the office, which was still in my pocket. I gave it to him, so he didn't mess with the phone. I let the urinate dry: the hell wanted to touch it. Slowly the others got also fed up with the regular games of the November. They woke up us in the dawn, always yelled at everybody. They never let us sleep. Krokos tried to terrorize everybody. Some of us were close to breakdown. The tension was unbearable. However, our bunch got welded together by this, and sometimes such fights like mine with Dosztaly happened. Merenyi almost started a fistfight with Krokos, and later a lance corporal, Balazs Einvachter, who also tried to piss him off. On the top of the cake there was Racz, who really enjoyed his three stars on his shoulders. I was thinking about doing something against the oldies, but what? Racz would be responsible, but let's just forget him. Captain Takacs was a weak handed commander, who wouldn't do anything, and besides, most probably he knew about what's going on. Korcsak was not responsible for anything in the companies, his task was to control the officers' work. But what if I visited the human officer? The human officer, as they call him incorrectly, because the real human officer is in fact the human resources officer, can be found in every base, and one of his tasks is to prevent abusement of rank and position. I saw a name on a door right on the first day here, with the title "Human officer" written beneath it. I visited here, but my knocking was without answer, no one opened the door. I was standing there desperately, when a young woman, a military civil servant, came there, and asked who I was looking for. I told her about the situation at my company, and that I was looking for an officer who could do something. She nodded and said: - I think your man will be Major Hermann, the crime investigator officer. His office is in the Pentagon, the high command building. So she told me where I could find Major Sandor Hermann's office. I headed there immediately. Major Hermann was a friendly man in his fifties, with the face of a librarian behind his glasses. He was exactly as one would imagine a crime investigator officer, calm, precise, someone who can calm victims down, but frighten criminals with his simple outlook. His colleague, Major Zsolt Fulop, had similar charisma, but he rather looked like a typical police officer: a balding, moustached, thin man. Major Hermann always wore uniform, while Major Fulop worked in civilian clothes, a spotless suit. Major Hermann invited me to sit down, listened to me and nodded. - Yes, the third battalion again. It's not the first case, our cabinet is full with criminal documents about them. You know, it used to be a detention unit before, and now it's the shame of the corps. It's being led by officers from Ercsi, who were placed here when the base in Ercsi was closed and transformed to a backup base. You know, the Ercsi officers are hated by the Fehervar ones, who were originally here, because those Ercsi ones ruined the discipline of the base... He talked a bit about this, then returned to the subject. He told me to write a denunciation against the November soldiers, write everything that happened recently, and at least two people should sign this as witnesses. If there are two witnesses, that gives the possibility to start an investigation. Then he stood up and escorted me out, and I immediately headed to my office and wrote the document. Or better, I was trying to write, but I didn't have an idea what to write exactly. Finally I wrote separate paragraphs about different cases, and I asked everybody to sign the part that he was in. I wrote my part about Krokos, I wrote a paragraph about Bajai in the name of Roland Kiss, another one about Krokos for Merenyi. I touched upon the subject of the dawntime wakings, the regular humilations, and of course Racz's little actions. It took an hour to finalize it, but I was satisfied, if an officer gets it in his hand, some fat mouthed oldies will be surely grounded for weeks. I didn't overstate anything, but I also didn't leave anything out. I printed the document, hid it in a drawer and deleted the file. Now all that left was to ask the mates to sign it, the problem was: with whom? Of course only with those who wouldn't tell it to the November. I took serious jeopardy, as they would really beat me up if this thing came to light. Roland Kiss was at the ambulance barrack, due to nervous breakdown. It was easy to find him, and he immediately signed. Merenyi also didn't need too much agitation. Later many more baldies signed the paper, including some truck drivers too. Six names had been scribbled on it, including mine, and on the next Monday I delivered the denunciation to the major. He immediately interrogated me and some of my mates. They all confirmed the written statement. Then he questioned some baldies who didn't sign the document, and didn't know about the denunciation at all, and they also confirmed. Finally he invited the November ones for a friendly chat. First Private Forizs, who was the internal serviceman on the day of the first row, followed by Bajai, Krokos, Molnar, Berkes and the rest. That day the quarters were as silent as a prosecture. The oldies just lied low in their rooms, even Krokos shut up. The interrogations continued for some days, and the November guys behaved in a rather disgusting way. To cover their own ass in this small-time case, they ratted each other on. They told who smuggled booze in and how much, who broke the regulations during duty, who took a live bullet as a souvenir, and so on. This is how it happened that Forizs told to Major Fulop about Bajai threatening him with a knife not to call the officer on duty, when the first great row was going on. We also knew about this, but it was not in the denunciation, it was not our problem, and anyway, only Roland Kiss had trouble with Bajai. When someone else told that Bajai had once entered the guards' resting room - which was strictly forbidden, only the ones on guard duty were allowed to enter, and if the guard commander let someone in, that'd be a serious service crime - then it turned to a very serious case. Even the guard commander got involved this way, a November oldie from company 32/B. Finally Bajai got arrested and transported to Budapest, to military jail. We never saw him again any more. They kept him under investigatory arrestment till the next November, under the case of "attacking a serviceman on duty and committing other service crimes". This was what the November assholes did: they created a true crime story. Poor Bajai got jailed up because of his mates' creepiness. Sergeant-Major Racz also got his piece of the cake. It came to light that he had said to the oldies, before we arrived, the following: "Tomorrow the February bulls arrive. Give them a bad time, piss them off hard." For this reason Major Hermann ordered him to his office too. My interrogation was going on when his head appeared in the door:
- Ma... major, sir... Sergeant-Major Racz appeared on your request...
Racz turned red, white and green at the same time, so he was truly building a Hungarian face, while shrinking rather small. He squinted on me, I grinned back. He turned entirely red. Wow, now he's a communist! He quickly removed himself from the office and closed the door. From this day he feared me even more, and quitted everything malicious towards the February bunch. That day, after being interrogated, he sentenced the following to the company, moaning and groaning:
- I don't want to hear any more that only the February bunch is cleaning up!
Cleaning is a common task, regardless of the period!
Now, when life turned a bit easier, we started building friendships. The one-time "8th room", me and my seven mates, who had arrived first, already knew each other, but of course Roland Kiss and Robert Beres were not members of the community. As a matter of fact, in the beginning only I hated Beres. Merenyi was also disliked because of cowering all the duty, he never felt fit neither for guard duty, nor anything else. I was rarely on duty, I was on guard only twice during my scribble time. I was a vice serviceman for several occassions, but I spent my time in the office from morning to night, reading books, writing programs in Turbo Pascal to fight boredom. Now as Bajai had been taken, Padre became the chief company scribble, but he had several problems. The company's administration was not organized in such a precise system as the battalion's one under Captain Korcsak's supervision. Captain Takacs always rewrote everything, covered every table and document with corrections and arrows, he made them retyped a hundred times with his poor scribble, who had anyway never been trained to handle administration, since he had never had time to learn anything. Besides, he was on duty day after day. In every other company, the scribble was saved from duty, and had several extra rights, but not at company 31/A. This is why we renamed the company from the official "thirty-one Aladar" to "thirty-one the bird". (This is an untranslatable grammatic gag in Hungarian. The word "a madar", meaning "the bird", rhymes with the name "Aladar".) Even the oldies from company 32/B didn't dare to mess with me, after making it clear that I had some control over Korcsak's death list. Later, during my oldie days, we wrote many funny poems on the company's old typewriter with Andersen, then I made a little rhyme about my scribble job:
When I was in the Hungarian Army,
I cower all the work, not doing anything,
I gonna leave someday, for an entire weekend,
I don't climb to the tower, duty stinks for me,
Someday I leave forever, that will be the best,
Most of our fellow truck drivers were nice guys. The people from Borsod county, however, formed a separate block, with a separated world of thinking. There were some five of them. Only one of them, a guy from the city of Kazincbarcika, Zsolt Dicsak, or Dicsi, as we called him, was behaving normally, so he soon got added to the original bunch from "room 8". Private Karoly Viczko, who we sometimes called Vole, sometimes Titty, also joined us, along with Attila Pap, who lived only a corner away from my home in Budapest, and a little guy from the village of Ullo, close to Budapest, named Sandor Szucs, and some more. It was a nice gang. After our first victory over the primitive November oldies we agreed that when our balds - the May soldiers - arrive, we'll never be so mean towards them like the November were towards us. It took a while until Major Hermann completed all interrogations. The oldies got better and better turned off. It was silence and cadaverous smell. Krokos also kept silence, he was the most silent of all. No one ever yelled at us drunken, in fact we've never seen them drunk again. Life was going on. Once I was on guard duty. They all took a good look on me, since I was a rare guest in the guard room. Perhaps the mildest I can say about that place is that it was not a luxury hotel. Let's just stick to the short expression of "pigsty". Dirty, crumpled and dusty, with filthy berths, some battered steel lockers, walls covered with scribbles, a broken fridge and an electric heater, plus a clogged, scummy, awfully stinking toilet. Luckily the detention area had a common corridor with the guard room, and the jail's closet was clean, so at least we needn't walk the check to the quarters to obey nature's calling. Guard duty is a 24 hours duty. This means one starts the service in the morning, and he has to do it till the morning of the next day, when he's changed. Until then no one is allowed to leave the guard room. The guards are changed in the towers every two or three hours. It was a very boring duty, only the "chello", the kitchen duty was worse. One could not do anything in the tower, except to sit, hold that damned carbine and watch the big nothing. The wall scribbles can be all learnt during the first five minutes, the remaining 2:55 goes for boredom. The regulations say that the guard has to report every half hour on the phone, the "oriphone", but most guard commanders were not interested by the reports. I almost got bored to death during my first three hour long session, but I immediately figured what had been found by countless soldier generations before: the gasmask's bag is perfect to hide a book, a pocket radio or such extra equipment, and besides, there are poses in which one can sleep fine while sitting. They say a soldier can sleep anywhere, in any position, which is indeed true. However, I already had the necessary experience by regularly visiting demoparties. The oldies let us have peace during guard duty, some of them because half of Major Hermann's dossiers were filled with their files, others because they were not involved in the case, and didn't want to be. The oldies were not a community, they just formed two or three member small cliques. Some funny addition about guard duty. When the soldier leaves the guard room for the tower, he has to give his "spoon machine", his pocket cutlery set, to the guard commander. Why? I first thought that they try to prevent bored soldiers dismantling the tower with it. But it was not the reason. Actually they did so to prevent the soldier from committing suicide by cutting his veins with the knife! Congratulations. Who is that dumbass who starts hackling his wrist with a blunt blade, when he has an AK-63 automatic assault rifle with thirty live bullets in the magazine? I was on "chello", kitchen duty, only twice during my entire time. First at Szombathely, on the first weekend, volunteerly, which I did well, because there was much less work on Sunday, so we finished at six o'clock in the evening, besides my family visited me that day, so that was a perfect chance to shirk for several hours. The second occasion was here at Szekesfehervar, again on a weekend day. What do you think, who I was together with on duty? Robert Beres... There were only seven men on kitchen duty every day, since both the kitchen and the base were small; besides, it was Sunday, so there was not much to do. Anyway, this was too much for Beres. The kitchen chief was Sergeant Robert Lajos, nicknamed "Latyak" on that day, a huge, muscled, young officer. There was a rumour about him being gay. Well, it proved to be true. Soon a blond faggot pussy arrived to him, and they started smacking before everyone's eyes, in the middle of the base. We just stood and stared. In fact I have nothing against gays, but this was disgusting. Some one hour later the blond faggot left for home, and the sergeant returned to the kitchen. For some reason everybody kept distance, and no one dared to bow down for the potatoes that had fallen on the floor. Except for Beres! He found out that Latyak didn't eat the bullshit about his lumbago that prevented him from working, so he changed tactics. He lied on the grass behind the kitchen for a sunbath, with naked trunk. Well, as a matter of fact, as I already wrote, he was a muscled guy, and had a nicely developed body. The effect was instant. Latyak immediately started to philander him, with such sayings like:
- Erm, Robert, err, do you have a girlfriend? Well, if you do, tell her that
she's lucky...
I don't know what this flirt led to, but it's a fact that Beres didn't work any more that day. The kitchen adventures were not over yet. In the evening we placed a barrel of hogwash to the outside, behind the kitchen. I was brooming the concrete around, when I saw that a stoker, a civilian worker from the heating centre, was digging elbow deep in the barrel, collecting bones into a plastic bag. Seemed disgusting. Perhaps he has a dog, I thought, and he collects food for it. Suddenly the man grabbed a half digested chicken wing, built a happy grin, and started munching... FUCK YOU !! Never before had I chased anyone with a broom so angrily. Anyway, this old man was probably a wacko. Once I met him during one of my internal duties. I was a vice serviceman, as usual, and I got welded to the desk for the night. It was very late, and I was just thinking about dragging a bed mattress here to sleep on the floor, which is a common way of breaking the regulations - anyway also dangerous, because if the officer on duty comes for inspection, it usually ends with several weeks of detention. My train of thoughts were broken when I saw the hogwash man climbing the stairs, with a meek smile on his face.
- Good evening - said I a bit wondered, since I really didn't have any idea
about what to say.
He inspected it from all sides, then removed the door from the mail drawer, and turned back to the stairs. - I'll bring ze' back - he mumbled, and was about to leave, but I halted him. How the hell is it possible that a civilian appears at two o'clock in the night at my desk, and asks for a piece of this? I never knew all the regulations by heart, but I was suspicious about this. - Well - he explained - we're preparing some dinner at the boilers, and we don't have anything to chop onions on. And this is some fine piece of wood... ze' won't fall into pieces like scutch boards... I'll be back with ze' thing soon... I explained to him where he should cut his onions, and sent him to hell. It would have been somewhat sharp if I reported to the company commander in the morning: "Captain, Private Polgar reports that the door of the drawer had been taken by the stoker to be used as a cutting board!" I was also on gate sentry, with a young staff sergeant, who always played with his pistol. Two days later he successfully shot a hole in the window of the gate lodge. Later he became a guard commander, and was assigned to the external sentry, which guarded the ammunition dump some five kilometers from the base. He got bored also there, and again he started playing with the pistol, this time shooting at empty bottles. Finally he shot two of his toes apart. Yes, weapons are not toys. Old sub-officers told us urban legends from the past of the base. Once upon a time in the Alba, for example, the officer on duty went to check the guards in the middle of the night, along with the guard commander. They found one of the guards fucking the guard dog! Of course they immediately changed him, and jailed him up. When someone asked him how someone could be so disgusting, he replied offended: - I am not disgusting! I used a condom! They let him out after a month of jail, but it didn't take a week before they caught him in the act again. Now it turned to be a serious case, sodomy, animal torture, and so on. Torture, because this time he didn't have a condom, so he used a plastic bag. We also attended funerals. Well, not me, fortunately my job as a scribble kept me away from this dumbness, but almost every week there was a military funeral. Who knows why, retired officers perished rather quickly. There were days when everybody from the entire battalion went to parade on some funeral, even the two companies' internal services were unified to get two more men. Besides, we also gave the guards that day, and the usual chello, the TCP (Trespassing Checkpoint) guard, the fire truck driver, the depot serviceman and everything. I had a great place in Nagysanyi. Torzsok couldn't take the scribble work. Actually it was Captain Korcsak he couldn't take. He even went to Major Hermann and ratted on Korcsak for molesting him. He was lucky, since he couldn't know that Korcsak and Hermann were arch-enemies. Hermann had been struggling for years to punish Korcsak for his methods, while Korcsak had been proving the complete legality of his methods for years. Finally Major Hermann summoned Korcsak to appear in his office for interrogation. Korcsak yelled the major's hair off, like a sergeant does with the one day old rookie, sent him to warmer climate and left. This was because Major Hermann never dealt with conscripts, he had never been a troop officer, so he had no idea about keeping discipline and order, while Korcsak had. We talked a lot with the captain. He was particularly interested in computer sciences. I taught him a bit about Pascal programming, later I brought him some stuff, also a Gravis Ultrasound. The oldies were now confirmed that I was some semi-god, when they saw me sitting in the dreaded Korcsak's room in the armchair, chatting like friends, while they were only allowed to step in for receiving penalties, strictly standing still at the edge of the carpet. Someone with good fantasy figured that Korcsak in fact was my father. Not many believed this, but the rumour kept spreading. When Korcsak called for me, they said: - Your father wants to see you! We left for a night shooting practice in the beginning of June. It particularly excited me, since I wondered if the AK-63 assault rifle behaved differently than the AMD. We were embarked to a Zil-131 type truck, the driver had been provided by the "independent supply squadron", Latyak's subordinate unit. This squadron was a kind of general servant unit, they performed several tasks from keeping the roads of the base in order to repairing guard towers and buildings. The problems raised right at the beginning: the truck was too small for all of us, so some of us sat on the floor. They threw some R-107 brand radios among us, which exactly looked like military radios in movies: small, angular devices, weighing some ten kilograms each, with a same sized and shaped accumulator. These radios were needed because we were the shooting area perimeter guards too. It was around six o'clock in the afternoon when our battalion had its turn in shooting, then we boarded the truck again, and it detached us in pairs at different guard spots: at the edge of a forest, at a small lake, a road, and so on, and picked the ones from some other battalion standing there up. Nothing funny happened during the shooting practice, except that we all laughed on the poor Sgt. Margitai, who couldn't score a single hit from ten shots from five steps on the man-shaped and sized table. I was a bit disappointed at the AK-63D. The AMD was a much more tranquil weapon, and thanks to its rubbered butt, it didn't break my shoulder. And I didn't get my hands burnt when I fired the AMD. It was because there, at Fehervar, they always cleaned the weapons in the weapons workshop, to prevent the dumbass conscripts damaging the weapon, who knows, perhaps they hadn't received basic training, and to further decrease the chance of someone damaging a weapon, the entire corps fired the same single gun! One could hardly touch even the rifle's wooden handle, it was so hot. After the shooting, preambled with some quick security training and rubber grenade throwing, we were granted permission to eat the 1 (one) can of lizard meat we'd received as lunch, without any bread, of course, then we were packed on the Zil again, and left to change the guards. Our weapons were empty, they didn't want us to shoot some mushroom collecting old lady accidentally. The driver guy - he was from the general maintenance squad, the so-called commendant unit - really stepped on it, so the Zil rolled like a tank. It was a bit bumpy on the bare dirt road with 80 km/h, but that didn't matter. It was all nothing compared to what this cattle did later. He jumped in pits, jerked the steering left and right, braked suddenly without a reason, so he played truck rodeo. Not too dangerously yet, but he made us flying back there. We were enjoying it so far... The three hours of waiting at the edge of the forest with Endez passed fast. We discussed the beautiful, starry sky, and the Mir space station that passed right over our head. We listened to the crackling of the R-107. Post No. 5, which was at a small lake, told that he was now wearing his counter chemical warfare suit, because they had a terrible mosquito invasion. They never reported what the local peasants did when soldiers dressed in yellow chemical suits and gas masks, carrying machine guns stopped them. Then guard post No. 1. came in, that was the gate of the shooting field, two November oldies on sentry there.
- Errm, Csutto! - that's how they called the young Sgt. Csutoras - here is a
police patrol car, willing to enter the shooting field.
The sergeant rushed there with an UAZ jeep, and there were really two policemen, hands in the air, and these two dumbasses held them still with their rifles. They even made them throw their pistols, and one of the stupid cops tossed into the bushes, instead of simply throwing it on the ground. They searched it for an hour in the total darkness while they finally found it. Nothing happened at our place, of course. Our three hours has almost passed, when we heard some weird sound from behind a nearby hill. Like this: - Huuuuuuuuu! And: - Yaaaaaaaaa! Then: - Yaaaahuuuuuuu!! We looked at each other. What was this, aliens, ghosts, aerial attack? The voices kept closing, and now also some engine noise accompanied them. And suddenly a Zil blasted out of the darkness, with a slightly smashed radiator and only one working headlight, heading towards us with high speed. We didn't move. He could not be so stupid to overrun us! We stood still. Well, he was so stupid. We jumped. Survived. Even the radio. What a wonder. So, change was here! We climbed the truck and faced scared faces. The truck was pretty ruined, the boars broken, the sitting benches had disappeared. And then it started! The idiot at the steering wheel, who had been supposed to be able to drive, he actually believed that. He stepped on the throttle, and rushed with full speed. This was a rather nice achievement from a Zil even on good concrete road, but we were travelling on a very narrow mud road in the forest, in nighttime pitch black! Sometimes, when we reached a bump, the truck jumped in the air, this was when the already familiar "Huuuuu" and "Yaaahuuuu" were sounded. R-107 radios floated in the air like crazy butterflies, the accumulators slided on the floor, smashing each other. Sour smoke covered the air as acid spilled from one of them. Sparkles sprinkled as sometimes their contact poles touched each other. The car dashed into the forest, broke trees as it sometimes ran off the road. The canvas collapsed, it fell on us like a storm-ruffled tent. The rest of the sitting benches broke into pieces. Some soldiers dropped their weapons, it was a pure luck that neither fell out of the truck. Some primitive November guys didn't even realize that they were in lethal danger, they yelled like "Faster, man fasteeer!". The truck was about to turn over every second, or we could have smashed into a tree, which would have been pretty funny with forty-four people onboard. The platform got broken off from the carriage in a sharp curve, it slided sidewards, and it waved like a dog's tail from then on. It almost entirely broke off, but luckily the Russians had put good material in it. Needless to say, the surgery would have had a lot of work if this had happened. We rushed across a furzy bush deserving better faith, then we stopped to pick up the guards from post No. 7. But this was only a second of rest: the nightmare continued. I don't remember how we reached the main road in one piece, but we somehow did. The Zil welcomed the sleeping citizens of Szekesfehervar with loud bangs from the engine. Only some little excitement was left till the base: pedestrians almost ran over, civilian cars got pushed off from the road. We rolled in to the base and stopped. After disembarking I took a look at the truck: now it was sure that it wouldn't run for a while. Its engine also had a strange voice. Then the driver got off... or better, he was removed from the truck, because he was so drunk he couldn't stand on his own legs... Something weird happened one day in our room. Endez was standing at his locker, and Krokos couldn't get to his one from him. Our primitive friend took such things rather hard, usually he simply pushed the one in his way away, or perhaps groaned a polite "geddafuckawaa'". But that day he said the following: - Would you please let me get to my locker? Life had been suspended. Even the November soldiers were struck. There is no explanation for the case, since neither before, nor after had anyone heard the word "please" from Krokos, especially not without the usual "Ha!" proverb. Most of our mates never believed the story. A few days after the shooting practice we received news of a wide range inspection over the battalion, partly caused by our denunciation. For this reason the entire unit did nothing else but cleaning and practicing drill for more than a month. I managed to avoid taking part on it, you know, a scribble is a scribble. While the others performed on the field in the tropical heat, I was sitting in the cool office, emulating working mode. Well, as a matter of fact this way I missed some serious fun, namely Lt.Col. Andrekovics commanding the battalion. I think I've already told about the lieutenant colonel's "trade mark", the special Andrej kind of stammering, along with the well-know foot and sweat smell of the old fart, that could sometimes be felt from behind a closed door. The two companies, 31/A and 32/B formed their formations, and the good old Andrej tried to give the following order: "Company Thirty-one Aladar head right, company thirty-two Bela head left!" The result was the following: "Co-co-company thir-thirty o-o-one Ala-Aladar he-head ri-ri-right... Co-co- company th-thirty-two Be-Be-Bela head ri... right! Eh! Gs'dick! LEFT!" Fortunately when they had to perform live, overviewed by the high command of the base and a general from the Alba, he didn't blooper, and he could even give the following order, actually sweating rather bad: "Vice battalion commander step forwards twenty steps, company commanders fifteen steps, platoon commanders ten steps, squadron commanders five steps!" Of course this was not a piece of cake for the old guy, he lost around five kilograms of body weight till he succesfully finished. I don't know how much he practiced the sentence at home, facing the mirror. Anyway he was so red to the end of the sentence that we were worrying about him getting a heart attack and fall on the dust. The rest of the inspection was not too interesting. A sergeant-major arrived to check the mechanical state of our vehicles, but a bottle of booze quickly confirmed him about their perfection. They also checked the weapons, they found no problems there, since they were locked up in the armory as they arrived from the factory, never having been used. However, I don't know how they convinced the sanitary inspector that one single working toilet was enough for an entire battalion, and that the awful stink covering the entire first floor was in fact caused by the evil aliens. A little rest followed. Something happened every day, but in generally it was silent for almost a month. Rumours came up about Korcsak soon leaving the unit; he would be replaced by Captain Koronczai, who was currently absent. And it really happened. One day Korcsak packed up all his belongings, said goodbye to everyone, and moved to the Alba, where he became a member of some NATO committee. He did, because he was a well educated man, with three language proofs. But before Capt. Koronczai arrived, we were together with Lt.Col. Andrekovics. I don't wish this experience to anyone. Till that day the entire battalion had been commanded by Korcsak, while Andrej had only been a puppet, to let the world see that we actually had a commander. When Korcsak left, I became the only man who knew what the battalion diary looked like, how the officers were assigned to different duties, and so on. It was three hard weeks. Andrej knew nothing at all, but he always wanted to know it better. My desk was flooded with hand scribbled, thousand times corrected documents. Andrej did not have that kind of need for quality which Korcsak had. If he wanted to give me a task, he could never explain it. Once he dictated to me. Argh! And I had always thought my mother dictated in the most annoying way. Is it enough that I've been typing a two-page-report for four hours? Fortunately some changes happened when Captain Tibor Koronczai arrived, and Andrej could happily get rid of paperwork to his cost. Koronczai was another young officer, thirty years old, but he looked older. Seems every officer looks much older than he actually is. Also Andrej wasn't more than fifty, but he looked like seventy. Koronczai was just as educated as Korcsak was, had a high degree in German language and a mid-level one in English. He had just spent a half year in the German Bundeswehr as an observer. They were friends with Korcsak, but one could also notice the rivalisation between them. Anyway these two men were the youngest of the entire Hungarian Home Guard in such a high position. The captain immediately re-occupied his old office. He happened to be the same precise and demanding commander as Korcsak, only his views about leadership differed. While Korcsak used his raw charisma to frighten those in disorder, Koronczai used psychology, which however worked with the same effectiveness. As a November soldier said, when we asked him who this Koronczai was: - Just like Korcsak, but much gentler. We talked a lot with the captain. His methods of work were identical with Korcsak's, he finished that little work he had daily, then waited for the end of the day and left for home. He told me about the German army and their ways. Also Korcsak had told me about the Russian and the American armies, since he had met both, as he had finished both a Soviet and an American war college. According to their stories I can summarize that the Americans should be rather thankful for the Russians not attacking them, because they would probably have been losing within days. The American army, just as the German one, and all Western armies in general, are overspecialized, and largely depend on modern technology. For example the American artillery is using GPS to aim their batteries (Global Positioning System, a satellite network that's able to pinpoint a geographical coordinate anywhere on Earth by some centimeters precisely), so their officers never learn how to calculate firing coordinates on paper, without computers and satellites. But if the satellite link is severed, and it's enough to destroy a couple of satellites, the artillery is disabled. Another example: the American officers all have pocket calculators, while the Russians have slide rulers. Yes, of course calculators are faster and way more modern. But the calculator requires a battery, while the ruler does not, and besides the latter will not die from the electromagnetic impulse of a nuclear blast. This is the difference: winning a war does not depend on how cool the army is in peacetime, wars are fought on the battlefield. There is a huge difference between the Russian and the Western military colleges. In American war academies the cadets are lords. They don't receive exhausting sports training, support is perfect, everybody has his own computer, soft drinks are free, and so on. Captain Korcsak told that when he was in the US military school, they had a separate servant for every single task. For example a sub-officer was there just to fill the paper in the printers, to prevent the officers having to stand up and do with their own hands. Meanwhile the Russian college is almost the opposite. There officers are trained for war. It was -10 degrees in the room where they were learning, they had to wear thick "pufayka" coats and gloves, to get familiar with wartime conditions. They had been alerted in the middle of the night, got embarked in a jeep wearing chemical warfare suits, and headed to the frozen tayga, for a navigation exercise. They had to draw a red line on the map about the path where the jeep was going, and those who didn't have the correct result at the end, had to repeat the trip. The handling of all possible signals equipment had been drummed in their heads, from pocket radios and relay trucks to satellite listening equipment. They were on guard duty in the freezing Russian winter, they were on route-march in the tundra, and, besides, they had to learn and learn. But finally who passed this course really deserved the golden star on his shoulder, and not only received that for growing his butt in some classroom. The other problem with the Western armies is overspecialization, soldiers can only perform their own tasks, and nothing more. Once Captain Koronczai was on a maneuver with a German signals battalion. Of course that was not like our maneuvers, when they tow the wrecked trucks to the football field and that's all, but they packed everything and everyone up, and headed for the Harz Mountains for an entire week. But they had a little problem there: an antenna's interface connector had been broken. The Hungarian captain surprisedly saw the German soldiers shrugging their shoulder, then sitting in the grass and ignoring the connector. There's no radio without this, and the battalion sits on the top of the mountain without a point, hundreds of kilometres away from their base. He finally asked why they didn't do anything.
- We don't have a spare cable. The maintenance unit will soon arrive and
replace it - the German major said.
Koronczai then got fed up with this bullshit, and asked for some tool. They said they didn't have any. Not only the special tool required to remove the broken connector was missing, but they didn't have any tool at all, not even a screwdriver! Finally a private gave a Swiss army knife to the captain, who then fixed the connector with it in ten minutes, so the radio could finally work. The Germans were shocked. Neither of them knew how the connector worked, which wire went where, they'd only learnt how to control the work of the unit. NATO needs our country partly for this, the wide education of our officers. The other reason is the fact that the old picture about the Hungarian army still lives among Western people, that this is a finely trained, well equipped army, in quality equivalent to the Russian. Mostly Americans think this, so this is why they try to get us any possible way, and, besides, they expect to learn about some of the Russians' legendary secrets by us. Well, this secret is as easy as winking: the army is to be prepared for war, not for exercises and parade. The captain also told other stories. For example one which happened to him, while he was a cadet in the military college. He was a company scribble, and his superior was an old, little bit senile captain, somewhat like Andrekovics. Captain Koronczai, that time Cadet Koronczai, once received a day of requital holiday. He was rather glad, since he couldn't leave for home too often, so he asked for the same single day three occasions, thanks to the absent mind of the commander, who seemed to forgot that he had already been away before. Koronczai thought it was time for a fourth round, so he again went to the old captain, and proposed his request according to the regulations: - Sir, Cadet Koronczai requesting permission to use my one day of requital holiday tomorrow. The captain looked up from paperwork: - What? For the fourth time?! tomcat^grm |