Generalized update
Nov. 21st, 2008 08:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bktheirregularIt's Friday, November 21. My discharge day is in 37 days, so call today D-Day minus 37.
I started scribbling in a little block notepad while I was at the base at Mesologi; various musings about life as a conscript. Not sure it's worthwhile to transcribe them here; most of the time they got interrupted anyway.
One thing about the army that I really don't like, that really tired me out over the first week: the sense that I've got to be constantly on alert, never knowing how long I can stand down and relax. You've got to jump when they say "frog", but there are punks in the platoon and probably throughout the battalion who keep shouting "platoon, atten-TION!" just for kicks. Which leaves me in the position of one of the old men who kept running when the boy cried "wolf", only I don't have the luxury of ignoring the cry.
Punishment for infractions isn't so much time in the stockade, as extra duty added to the time you have to serve - time during which your countdown to discharge is stopped. Example: bring a cell phone with a camera on base, and you get twenty days extra duty. For some kids, that may sound like a small risk across an entire year, but me, I'm a short-timer - forty-five days' service and out - so twenty days is a major bite out of my hide.
On a four-day pass now, given after swearing-in - there's another whole story about that. I think only three conscripts out of the entire battalion of over six hundred aren't Greek Orthodox, so we got sworn in separately. Church and state are badly tangled together here, to the point where they don't even seem to understand the difference between "agnostic" and "atheist". It's a cultural thing, I guess; indoctrination into the Orthodox church happens alongside their alphabet lessons and their two-plus-twos.
My bunk-mate collided with that wall when trying to get me to explain my beliefs. Starting from "obviously, someone created the world. So who was it?" I don't have the language to discuss stellar accretion, primordial soup, evolution, and all that. My answer at that point was "who knows? Maybe it was a committee."
"More than one God?"
"Could be a million of them out there, for all I know."
"But one of them would have to be in charge, right?"
I shudder to think what would have happened if I'd been on the books as a Wiccan. I did make some headway with explaining that there's something like a thousand different churches and other religions and what-have-you in the United States, so if the government had to start choosing to support one church over another, the arguments would never stop.
...where was I?
Eh. Anyway, one other thing that really bothers me is the pervasive attitude that one should only look out for oneself, and only do the minimum necessary to get by; the place looks like a garbage pit half the time, from all the cigarette butts and empty drink cans and water bottles thrown around. Every day, different squads and platoons get assigned to police different areas of the base, and I keep getting funny looks because I keep picking up trash and looking for a can to toss it into.
In a perverse way, I think it might be a streak of selfishness that compels me to keep doing this: I don't care if nobody else is doing their job; I want to do my job and get out of that chicken outfit free and clear.
One thing that scares me, though, is that I might have no choice but to start looking for ways to gold-brick everywhere, out of pure self-defense, and that I'll end up carrying some of those habits back to the real world. And in the process, I'll lose a part of myself that I didn't really realize I had, a bit of pride I have in myself that I didn't know I had until I took a good hard look on the parade grounds, surrounded by other boots loafing around.
The word I learned for it in Greek classes over the summer was "νοοτροπια" - "nootropia", or "way of thinking". And to the kids surrounding me, my way of thinking isn't just foreign, it's flat-out alien. Combination of being a foreigner, and being an old man, I suppose, but more than one person has told me that I need to change how I go about things.
OK, in some respects they've got a point. I've also discovered that I spend way too much time wound tighter than a watch spring, and that can't be good for me; but for me to just walk by the strewn-around garbage when I'm on clean-up detail ... it rubs me the wrong way, badly. And I don't think I'd like the person I'd be if that changed.
Maybe, in addition to the old man's perspective (how many of those kids have had to maintain a home, or even a simple apartment, on their own?), it's a short-timer's perspective. Some of the kids are looking at how to endure for a year, which seems like an eternity in their young lives; I've seen two years for every one of theirs, and I'm at D-Day minus 37.
On a minor bright note, at least the drill instructors understand that I've got trouble with the language. More than once, a non-com (or maybe an officer; I can't tell who's what rank yet) has told me not to worry.
*sigh* Time flies. A third of my leave is already gone. And I've spent way too long on this entry.
I started scribbling in a little block notepad while I was at the base at Mesologi; various musings about life as a conscript. Not sure it's worthwhile to transcribe them here; most of the time they got interrupted anyway.
One thing about the army that I really don't like, that really tired me out over the first week: the sense that I've got to be constantly on alert, never knowing how long I can stand down and relax. You've got to jump when they say "frog", but there are punks in the platoon and probably throughout the battalion who keep shouting "platoon, atten-TION!" just for kicks. Which leaves me in the position of one of the old men who kept running when the boy cried "wolf", only I don't have the luxury of ignoring the cry.
Punishment for infractions isn't so much time in the stockade, as extra duty added to the time you have to serve - time during which your countdown to discharge is stopped. Example: bring a cell phone with a camera on base, and you get twenty days extra duty. For some kids, that may sound like a small risk across an entire year, but me, I'm a short-timer - forty-five days' service and out - so twenty days is a major bite out of my hide.
On a four-day pass now, given after swearing-in - there's another whole story about that. I think only three conscripts out of the entire battalion of over six hundred aren't Greek Orthodox, so we got sworn in separately. Church and state are badly tangled together here, to the point where they don't even seem to understand the difference between "agnostic" and "atheist". It's a cultural thing, I guess; indoctrination into the Orthodox church happens alongside their alphabet lessons and their two-plus-twos.
My bunk-mate collided with that wall when trying to get me to explain my beliefs. Starting from "obviously, someone created the world. So who was it?" I don't have the language to discuss stellar accretion, primordial soup, evolution, and all that. My answer at that point was "who knows? Maybe it was a committee."
"More than one God?"
"Could be a million of them out there, for all I know."
"But one of them would have to be in charge, right?"
I shudder to think what would have happened if I'd been on the books as a Wiccan. I did make some headway with explaining that there's something like a thousand different churches and other religions and what-have-you in the United States, so if the government had to start choosing to support one church over another, the arguments would never stop.
...where was I?
Eh. Anyway, one other thing that really bothers me is the pervasive attitude that one should only look out for oneself, and only do the minimum necessary to get by; the place looks like a garbage pit half the time, from all the cigarette butts and empty drink cans and water bottles thrown around. Every day, different squads and platoons get assigned to police different areas of the base, and I keep getting funny looks because I keep picking up trash and looking for a can to toss it into.
In a perverse way, I think it might be a streak of selfishness that compels me to keep doing this: I don't care if nobody else is doing their job; I want to do my job and get out of that chicken outfit free and clear.
One thing that scares me, though, is that I might have no choice but to start looking for ways to gold-brick everywhere, out of pure self-defense, and that I'll end up carrying some of those habits back to the real world. And in the process, I'll lose a part of myself that I didn't really realize I had, a bit of pride I have in myself that I didn't know I had until I took a good hard look on the parade grounds, surrounded by other boots loafing around.
The word I learned for it in Greek classes over the summer was "νοοτροπια" - "nootropia", or "way of thinking". And to the kids surrounding me, my way of thinking isn't just foreign, it's flat-out alien. Combination of being a foreigner, and being an old man, I suppose, but more than one person has told me that I need to change how I go about things.
OK, in some respects they've got a point. I've also discovered that I spend way too much time wound tighter than a watch spring, and that can't be good for me; but for me to just walk by the strewn-around garbage when I'm on clean-up detail ... it rubs me the wrong way, badly. And I don't think I'd like the person I'd be if that changed.
Maybe, in addition to the old man's perspective (how many of those kids have had to maintain a home, or even a simple apartment, on their own?), it's a short-timer's perspective. Some of the kids are looking at how to endure for a year, which seems like an eternity in their young lives; I've seen two years for every one of theirs, and I'm at D-Day minus 37.
On a minor bright note, at least the drill instructors understand that I've got trouble with the language. More than once, a non-com (or maybe an officer; I can't tell who's what rank yet) has told me not to worry.
*sigh* Time flies. A third of my leave is already gone. And I've spent way too long on this entry.
