AN ANTI-TANK gun exercise took place six weeks into my sentry duty.  There was some form of firing practice every month or two.  One might imagine conscripts would look forward to these trainings, if only for a change of scenery, but the only one interested in my outpost was me, and I was not even scheduled to go, since the military only trained three-month conscripts on rifles.  But my camp commander accepted my request to participate in the firing exercise, and so on the scheduled morning—a cold overcast one that prompted even more grumbling among those required to attend—I found myself jam-packed along with twenty-five other conscripts in the back of an army truck heading south-west of the capital.   

The training was in the mountains, a forty-minute drive from Nicosia.  It had been steadily drizzling there and the dirt roads leading up to the shooting arena on the peak had mudded over and made further driving impossible.  Instead we had to slog all the equipment and ammunition by hand a half kilometer uphill through the rain and sucking mud. 

Moments after we had assembled several of the guns and weighted the bases down with sandbags, the wind and downpour began.  We crammed under one of the shelters, shivering and soaked through, as most of had neglected to bring a rain jacket.  Beyond the slanting sheets of rain the sky was a uniform shade of gray and the hard patter on the aluminum rooftop was not letting off.  I at least had some whiskey in my water bottle (a strategy for making frigid night shifts more tolerable) and though it was no substitution for a rain jacket, it was the next best thing.   

After a half hour it was decided to call the exercise off and so we began lugging all the crates of ammunition that we had just hauled up back down again.  We had transported most of them to the trucks when the rain abruptly stopped and it was announced that the exercise would resume.  To a mutinous outcry, this was followed by the Sisyphean order that we had to carry the crates back up the hill again.

Training exercises generally involved hours of waiting around and then several minutes of actual target practice.  It was no exception with the anti-tank gun, which I handled for thirty seconds at most.  Because of the rain interruptions, only four of the guns had been assembled.  The officers—which included my outpost’s camp commander, colonel and brigadier—were lined up imperiously on an elevation immediately behind the firing range. 

I collected a belt link of ten rounds and waited my turn.  Eventually the directing officer called me up.  There was a conscript officer beside each gun who then took the belt clip and loaded it.  The directing officer, who was delivering his orders through a megaphone, then told me to bend down so that the other conscript could place the ear muffs over my head.  There were hundreds of 50mm shells scattered about the base of the gun—shells that dwarfed the standard 7.62mm assault rifle shells, shells that, with the ends sawed off, would make a fine slide for bottleneck guitar.  I realized that if I wanted a memento this would be my only chance.  So while leaning over I snatched a shell up from the mud and slipped it into my pocket.

There seemed to be a long moment of silence, broken finally by an order from the megaphone that may as well have been a slap across the face: “Take the shell out of his pocket…”

I didn’t want the conscript groping through my pockets so I retrieved the shell myself and handed it over.  “You think you’re real smart don’t you?” came the megaphone voice.

I turned around and looked up at the tribunal of officers staring down severely at me.  I shook my head.  Having just tried to sneak a shell under the direct scrutiny of a half dozen members of the stars and stripes club, I wasn’t feeling particularly clever.  There was nothing else for me to do but turn back around towards the gun and await my ejection from the training.  But instead he gave the order for me to aim and fire at the targets on the opposite peak.  To my surprise, he even made a muted comment of approval when I hit the center in my final burst of rounds.   

As I was leaving, my camp commander called out my name.  I walked up to him.  “Why did you do that?” he asked, without giving me a chance to respond.  “For a souvenir?” 

I nodded. 

“Well then next time, ask, don’t take.”  He then held up a shell and threw it at the feet of one of the conscript officers nearby.  “Give it to him,” he told the conscript and then walked off.      

A few days later a conscript from another army camp was sent to our outpost to assist with manpower for a few weeks.  It was the first time I had seen someone go to pieces in the army.  At boot camp I had witnessed a few episodes of kids losing it (screaming fits, weeping, hurling themselves against lockers) but it always blew over.  His case was less dramatic but more unsettling: he arrived garrulous and upbeat but after two weeks had sunk into a deep silent funk; I remember days when he seemed perpetually on his back in his bed, usually awake, grimly staring at the underside of the bunk bed mattress above him.

“Man, I can’t take it anymore,” he would murmur.  It seemed to be the only thing he would ever say anymore.  “And all these guns everywhere…  I’m losing it in this place.” 

The deciding moment that broke his spirit was when all his furloughs were annulled for a week after an inspecting officer noticed an empty beer can in the trash.  He had simply not bothered to conceal the can under the other garbage.  It was just a run-of-the-mill punishment, but he had gotten used to slack living at his other station—medic barracks—where he used to be on leave four times a week and where a night’s sleep was never interrupted. 

It surprised me to hear that our outpost was among the strictest in the National Guard.  Another of the conscripts who was at the end of his two-year term and who had been re-stationed here after ten months away told me that a year ago it was rare for anyone to actually go out and man the sentry posts and unheard of for anyone to wake up for the two am or four am shift.  That all had changed with the new camp commander. 

“Not that I mind it so much,” he said.  “We used to just sit around, bored as hell, all day in front of the TV.  At least now you’ve got something to do.”

As for the depressed conscript, he returned again to his old station about the same time that I was discharged.  His cloudscape of glum gradually lifted as the time neared, resembling the steady return to health of a man emerging from an illness.  Despite the apparent authenticity of his misery, no one had much sympathy for him, first of all because he never had to do any sentry duty (there were ways of securing yourself a medical classification that rendered you “unfit” to carry a gun).  His only duty was to sit in the living room for a set number of hours per night as the outpost guard, which really involved nothing more than vegetating in front of the television and waking the others up fifteen minutes before their shift, something he was rarely able to do, since he usually dozed off.    

It isn’t strictly correct to say that conscripts are discharged from the army at the end of their term, because even though army life ends, one is still obliged—up until the age of fifty, I believe—to return as a reservist once or twice a year for a firing range session and an occasional nighttime sentry duty.  Our camp commander began sending us one or two reservists on an almost nightly basis.  An army truck would drop them off at our outpost at about seven pm and return to pick them up at the same hour the next morning.  Each reservist would have to do a two-hour night shift—usually the 12 to 2 shift or the 2 to 4 shift—so that the rest of us had a six-hour interlude (instead of four hours) between our late night sentry shifts.  A few times our outpost numbers were high enough so that, with the bonus boost of two reservists, we had the delicious luxury of eight hours between night shifts.      

The reservists, especially the older ones who had been conscripts over a decade ago, were always amused at how cushy the army had become.  For example, it used to be common practice for officers to beat the conscripts.  My cousin, who had been in the army over two decades ago, once described how one of the conscript officers had punched him several dozen times in the stomach because he had refused to insult himself in front of his peers.  The conscripts too had been of a more savage bent.  One of them, my cousin told me, once put an Agama lizard (known on the island as a “kourkouta”), which can grow up to a foot long, between two slices of white bread and ate it raw.  Another used to go around sticking his penis in the mouths of others conscripts as they were sleeping.

Sexual deviance and misconduct was perhaps one of the only aspects of army life that had remained constant over the last few decades.  Just over a year before I conscripted, a video clip began circulating on mobile phones depicting ten soldiers in a Nicosia outpost lined up behind their officer taking turns at sex with an older woman (married, with three children) on a bunk bed.  And while I was in boot camp, two teenagers in the second company gained notoriety after someone filmed one of them blowing the other in the barracks in front of several other conscripts.  The one had apparently taken the pillow of the other and said he would only return it if he gave him a blowjob.

According to the reservists, one of the most significant improvements in the army was the quality of the food.  Every day at around one pm and then again at six pm, a truck would drop off several pots of hot food—dishes like squid and potatoes, pasta and beef sauce, roast lamb, etc.  I couldn’t imagine better army food, and yet to my—and to the reservists’—astonishment, the conscripts never touched it; instead they would order expensive takeaway (at a risk, since it was prohibited) or would fry up nasty preservative-laden frozen burger patties. 

Their argument for tossing the rations was that the insulated stainless steel pots were disgusting.  That was true, but there was a way to manage this problem: wash the pots.  So the first day I dumped the food and scrubbed the pots with soap and bleach and from that day on I had all the hot grub I could manage. 

The other conscripts looked on with horror when they first saw me serve myself a plate of army food.  I was the butt of their jokes for several days, but I didn’t back down.  In turn I called them fools for needlessly spending money on inferior takeaway and frozen patties.  It had an effect on them.  I noticed that as time went on they began gazing upon my lunches and dinners with appraising interest.

It was after about ten days—when the pots were delivered with spaghetti and two boiled chickens—when the first of them succumbed to temptation. “That looks good,” he confessed to me as I carved out several moist slabs of chicken breast. 

I extended my fork with one of the tenders impaled on it to him. “Try it,” I urged him.   

He paused, obviously wracked with inner conflict.  Then, after casting a furtive glance about him, he reached for the piece and bit off half of it.  “My God,” he whispered, chewing slowly with a guilty ecstasy.  “It’s delicious.”  He ate the rest and then attacked the chicken, tearing off strips of it with his fingers.  “Don’t tell anyone,” he pleaded.

Within two weeks about half of the conscripts were eating regularly from the pots.  Every few days another conscript would yield to the steaming appeal of the rations despite admonitions from those remaining few who remained steadfastly opposed to even sampling the food, still citing their groundless arguments that the pots were filthy and disease-transmissible.  “But look at Markides,” the soon-to-be convert would say.  “Nothing’s happened to him yet.”

It wasn’t until about two weeks before I left the outpost that the leader of the opposition movement—the most outspoken reviler and disparager of army food—finally gave in.  I saw him one evening in the kitchen, serving himself from the pot.  Our eyes met briefly but neither of us said anything.      

The army did not provide hot meals on Sundays, but a woman began driving up to our outpost every Sunday evening with jumbo containers of roasted chicken, pork and lamb, as well as beans, potatoes, rice, etc.  Her son owned a restaurant nearby and always had excess food on the weekends.  One of the inspecting officers came by one evening while we were eating in the kitchen. 

“Where did you all get this?” he demanded, peering into the containers.  We explained.    

The officer then launched into a brief sermon on how we should not accept food from strangers.  “There are some good people who bring us food and other things we need, but we should be aware that there are others who may want to harm us,” he stated solemnly (reinforcing Rule #7 under the “Sentry Guidelines” posted at both guardhouses: “Do not trust anyone”). 

We all nodded through his paternalistic advice with full mouths.  He milled about in the kitchen until most of the others had gone into the living room and then again peered into one of the containers.  “Is that chicken?” he asked me. 

“Pork,” I said.  “Help yourself.”

He nodded with an averted gaze and reached for a plate.   

I don’t recall anyone in my outpost ever getting caught eating takeaway food, but I know that some officers would occasionally amuse themselves by using imaginative tactics to catch conscripts in the act.  I had heard stories how one captain once intercepted a kebab delivery boy, garbed his jacket and helmet, and rode the moped to the outpost, where he promptly doled out punishments along with the kebabs to the hungry money-in-hand conscripts.  Another captain, who had also intercepted the delivery boy, inserted a signed slip of paper with the message “Five Days Jail” inside each of the kebabs. 

Ordering takeaway food in the outposts was generally tolerated (no kebab owners lobby exists, as far as I know, but I would not be surprised if some informal deal making took place between owners and officers seeing that conscripts are among the most dependable takeaway customers).  The only thing that was not tolerated—at least in my outpost—was absconding from sentry duty or leaving the outpost.   

One of the reservists told me that his captain had once dressed up in black as an old lady, and came over to his outpost, stooped and hobbling, to catch him, literally, off guard.  That time he had been lucky and was not reading a magazine or playing a video game.  But he was less fortunate a few days later when he abandoned his sentry post for a drink at the bar down the street.  While he was having his beer his mobile rang, with the Caller ID listing the sentry post phone number.  When he answered, his captain was on the other line. 

One night I snuck off for about an hour between my sentry shifts to a bar in downtown Nicosia to meet a friend who was leaving the next day for India.  I was surprised to find out later that, had an officer come by and counted the sleeping bodies, I would have likely been court-marshalled and punished with twenty days jail time (even a brief truancy carries a greater penalty than skipping sentry duty) because the reduction in force numbers endangers the outpost, and by projection the neighborhood.  Of course, war would have to break out—out of the blue, after a 33-year-interlude—for the charge to possess any real meaning but, never mind the real world, our job was to act out the lines given us, their job to ensure the show went on.       

All things considered, I had it damn well.  I was getting out of the army two, sometimes three, times a week.  I had even been given a bunk bed in the chief sentry’s room, so my sleep was never disturbed by late night hooting or by the perpetual turning on and off of lights.  The captain had not objected to me bringing my laptop in and I even had a desk to work on in my free time.  I was eating better than ever, had no expenses, and was even given a monthly allowance of seventy pounds (whorehouse stipend for some). 

Even my sentry duty—tedious as it could be—was in reality nothing more than a period of tech-free solitude and contemplation in a verdant setting.  There are two ways of seeing the world: one is by traveling widely, and the other is by staying put.  I stood sentry for two months in the same two posts, but the landscape was never the same.  Each hour of the day had its own peculiar set design and actors: a white crane looping across the late afternoon marshes; a strange owl considering me from its midnight perch; the call to prayer echoing in time lag from different directions five times per day; the big dipper angling certain nights over the Turkish spotlight; the Sunday afternoon bursts of uproar from the nearby racetrack as the gamblers urged their horses on; the cone-shaped pirouetting of strobe lights and the distant thud of club music on Friday and Saturday nights; the orchestral peeper frogs performing their daily matinee before sunset; the morning ululation of the Turkish sentry; the crisp clarity of the Kyrenia mountains after a rain; the olive trees emerging in beatific illumination under the climbing morning sun, inducing an expansion of spirit that no sprawl of development can ever effect; the bees that had made a subterranean nest inside the dirt-filled camouflage barrels, emerging in the spring during the midday hours and buzzing around my head, their maddening offensive sometimes so persistent and in my face that I would finally lash out with a sideswipe which, if on mark, was always followed by a pang of guilt as I watched the stunned insect crawl about on the ground, gathering its dazed senses, before flying off with a receding drone.    

But sentry duty would not have seemed such a lark had my time not been so brief.  The anachronism and sheer stupidity of a two-year conscription, especially in its present decrepit castrated form, would have driven me mad.  It was this pervading sense of absurdity in the Cypriot army that generated such cynicism and ennui among the conscripts. 

I often wearied of the constant complaints of my housemates, their shrill daily squabbles with the chief sentry (who organized the furlough schedule) over who was to get on what days.  I wearied of their torpor, their refusal to do the few chores demanded of them, which would have made life easier for everyone.  But then again, who was I, with my amusing three-month excursion in the army, to judge them when they had to give themselves over for two years—the last of their teen years, the period when one is most desirous of cutting loose from the world? 

It was all fine and well for me: I had come into the army willfully, more or less at my own initiative, with much the same zest as an anthropologist might have heading out into the bush.  But for the rest of them their stint in the army was senseless coercion and servitude.  I was little more than a voyeur who had slipped into their world long enough to peek around and then step out again. 

I think of them often, the ones I knew and the ones I did not know, all of them trudging to and from their sentry post several times a day.  They are there at this very moment, standing and sitting, alert for approaching officers, oblivious to the Dead Zone, waiting for that second hour to pass, counting down the minutes, counting down the months.   

Constantine Markides

One of my outposts on the Nicosia Green Line

CONSECUTIVE DAYS of sentry duty took their toll, especially when the shifts were every four hours.  For days on end you might not get much more than three hours of continuous sleep.  You were also punished if you were caught sleeping before ten pm or after six am.  Although there was a designated midday “rest period” between one and four, it was generally only good for a short nap: unless you had the ten-to-noon shift, both lunch and sentry duty fell within those hours.  This restrictive sleeping schedule combined with the many hours of being on foot all day ensured you were never fully rested.  I assume the idea was to accustom soldiers to the sleep deprivation conditions of war, but the only thing the soldiers acclimatized to was the capacity to sleep through anything.  I am sure that if a grenade had exploded outside our window, only half of us would have awoken; the other half would have required a direct strike. 

It was near impossible rousing most of the conscripts, especially for the two or four am shifts.  One conscript in particular was notorious for the death-state of his sleep and it would take several minutes of violent shaking and yelling in his ear to wake him up.  A friend of mine who finished his conscription a decade ago told me that one night while he was making the rounds of the sentry posts (he had been a conscript officer) he came across a sentry standing perfectly upright, holding his rifle like a staff at his side, fast asleep.  Another time a group in his outpost decided to have some fun by carrying one of the bunk beds, along with its sleeping corpse, out of the building; when the soldier opened his eyes the next morning, he found himself in the middle of a soccer field.

Some of the conscripts may have been innately deep sleepers, but even so, whoever requires a quarter hour of prodding to get out of bed simply doesn’t give a damn either about the in-house guard on duty trying to wake him or about the sentry waiting to be relieved.  Initially I didn’t mind waiting an extra five or ten minutes on the sentry post, but it soon became apparent that the ones who kept you waiting longest were often the ones quickest to complain whenever they had to wait.  It was startling just how abruptly your drowsiness could escalate into a seething resentment upon the conclusion of your two a.m. shift when you had to stay up there in the cold waiting for some bastard who once again was not budging from the warm nest of his bed.   

Sometimes the sentry never came at all.  He would eventually simply mumble to the in-house guard to sign the Change of Sentry sheet on his behalf.  Upon doing so, the guard would then ring the other sentry and tell him to return to the outpost.  The signature was important because if the officer on duty came by and found an unmanned post, he could only punish the soldier scheduled for that shift, since the previous sentry, who must never leave a post unguarded, could claim that his compatriot had relieved him (as demonstrated by the signature).  After all, it wasn’t your fault if the sentry who took over then ditched his post and returned to the outpost to sleep.  Of course it was a sham claim, and all the officers knew it, but they had no proof with which to nail you. 

Absurd as our sentry duty was, I resisted the first time I was told to come down from the rooftop post, balking at the idea of leaving a station unmanned.  But I soon realized that either I climbed down or I would shiver up there for another two-hour shift.  After fifteen minutes of depleting willpower, I eventually abandoned the post, although I did take the ammunition box to console myself that my dereliction of duty was done responsibly.

Two weeks after my arrival a patrolling officer caught one of the conscripts at three a.m. sleeping in his bunk bed when he should have been on the sentry post.  Later that morning, when we were all awake, a conscript at a neighboring outpost phoned to tell us that the camp commander was on his way (the outposts in our company had developed an efficient monitoring and information sharing network regarding the patrolling officers).  At once there was a flurry of activity as everyone began rushing around, tidying, making beds, shining boots, yelling for shaving cream, etc.  There was of course an easy way of avoiding such neurosis: just shave, shine your boots and tidy up in the morning so that you are always prepared for the unexpected visit.  But it was not surprising that they preferred this chicken-with-its-head-cut-off approach: resentful as they were at their imposed two-year service, they wanted to be upstanding soldiers as infrequently as possible.

The commander arrived minutes later.  He was in good spirits, though that did not keep him from punishing the delinquent sentry by canceling all his furloughs for the next ten days.  He moved horizontally down the line, addressing each of us personally (“Show me your nails, Petrou…  How many times have I told you to cut them? You could till the fields with those things!”  “Shakola, you’re a good looking boy, but you’re getting fat. Don’t you know you can’t order takeaway in the army…”).  When he reached me I stomped to attention and stated my name and rank.  He paused and then, before moving on to the next conscript, he uttered what was without doubt the oddest and unlikeliest thing I heard in all my three months in the military, a sentence which, coming from a high-ranking military man, I include with warped and sardonic pride for posterity’s sake: “I never had any doubts about you, Markides.” 

Our commander, as well as our captain, had been making impromptu visits to our outpost with increased frequency to prepare us for the much trumpeted brigadier’s biannual inspection.  The inspection took place on a Friday morning.  We were lined up on the sidewalk in front of our house and the commander was in the midst of running us through a practice round when the brigadier arrived with a small entourage of lower-ranking officers. 

After the usual formalities of stomps and salutes, the brigadier announced that he wanted us to enact a state of emergency, which would involve assuming our assigned positions in our bunkers along the Green Line armed with our rifles and with any other weapons that had been allotted to each of us (i.e. machine gun, grenade launcher, rocket launcher, etc.).  But just as the brigadier was about to issue the order, our commander gingerly reminded him that a fiasco might ensue if we conducted such a drill without first informing the U.N.

Clearly in an inspired G.I. Joe mood, the brigadier paused, pained by this reminder that we were still, technically speaking, in a state of conflict and that rushing to take combat positions under the gaze of the Turkish soldiers might lead to complications.  But he would not be entirely dissuaded.  As a compromise, he ordered us to collect from the outpost our weapons and ammunition, as if we were in a state of alarm, and to bring them all outside to our present location. 

There were probably only a handful of us who had ever seen the inside of the weapons room, which was adjacent to the kitchen.  It took two minutes just to unlock the barred door.  Once we finally got it open, there was a frantic rush for the ammunition, although no one seemed to know what was what: “Are these G3 bullets or MG3?” “Hell, would you just hand that box over!” “Hurry up, you asshole!  Hurry up!” “What the hell is wrong with you, these are rockets not grenades!”

A full ten minutes must have passed until we were all again lined up outside, our weapons propped up against the porch railing and the ammunition spread out on the road.  We had been told that our outpost was the ‘lock and key of the neighborhood,’ the security of the surrounding area, but I suspect some of the neighbors had other feelings about the house of rowdy teens at the end of their road, especially after seeing the cornucopia of explosives and firepower in our possession. 

The brigadier passed down the line, asking each of us questions about our weapons and the state of emergency procedures.  It was not long before he was thundering at us, while several younger officers at his heels were scribbling away in their notebooks.  But I could not blame him for the tantrum.  The chief sentry didn’t know how to work the walkie-talkie and one of the conscripts (the same one who had slept through his sentry shift) was unable to clip his cartridge onto his rifle after being ordered to take apart and reassemble his gun. 

“It’s not going in,” he mumbled. “I think it’s broken.” 

“That’s cause you’re putting it on backwards!” roared the brigadier, who came up to the conscript’s shoulder.  They were quite a duo.  The string in the left hem of the brigadier’s military pants had come loose and the fabric was hanging ignobly down over his boot.  The conscript still wasn’t able to get the cartridge on, and at one point, he even flipped it over and tried to jam it in upside down. 

The brigadier turned to our commander.  “The Turks are gonna kill this one!  How are we going to protect this area when the Turks nail him with the first shot?”

“He was serving coffee at Headquarters before this,” our commander said.  “It seems they kept him there too long.”

The commander was in fact doing his diplomatic best to excuse our shortcomings to the brigadier.  The colonel, meanwhile, who was one rank above the camp commander but one rank below the brigadier, took it upon himself to berate the commander, as if trying to impress the brigadier with his intolerance for any slack leadership under him.  It was all part of the ritual and show, of course, but even so it is an ugly thing to see an older man being hollered at, especially by a craven mousy-eyed opportunist who milks everything he can out of a few stripes on his shoulder.  That said, the commander to his credit refused to pass the abuse on down the line to the captain or to make any obsequious concessions to the colonel, and he steadfastly remained on our side, defending our deficiencies and assuring the brigadier that all necessary changes would be implemented as soon as possible. 

I assumed that we were going to be collectively punished with a five-day denial of furlough at the very least, but I was only partially correct.  After warning us about the dangers of drunk driving, drugs and speeding, the brigadier congratulated us on the improvements that we had made and awarded everyone in our outpost (and in our entire company, it turned out) with five complimentary days of leave.  After boot camp, it was naïve of me to have expected anything less.

It was a good thing for the brigadier that he had heeded the commander’s warning against ordering a combat positions drill; shortly after we had retrieved all of our weapons and ammunition, a U.N. helicopter passed directly over us.  The U.N. flew along the length of the Green Line several times a day, but this time they made a loop, passing over us twice before continuing on.  Obviously the open crates of rockets and grenades on the sidewalk, along with the rocket launchers and machine guns, had provoked their interest, but it was surely far less interesting to them than if we had all been armed and hunkered down along the Green Line, facing the Turkish sentries.      

There was a good deal of hostility towards the U.N. in the National Guard, both among conscripts and officers.  One afternoon while we were cleaning our guns, one of the soldiers referred to the U.N. as the “second occupying power in Cyprus.”  I had heard this allegation a number of times, although no one ever followed that through by saying the U.N. should pack up and go.  So I suggested to him that he tell them to leave, but as I expected he did not respond. 

Not that there are no grounds to criticize the U.N.’s handling of the Cyprus conflict.  A good case can be made that in trying to play the fair broker, the U.N. has in effect treated the invader and the invaded as moral equals, which has contributed towards solidifying the division.  But much of the enmity in Cyprus towards the U.N. (the hostility is not only within the National Guard) is of the knee-jerk variety, with roots in the much cherished sport of deflecting blame from oneself onto others. 

U.N. soldiers often jogged or drove by our sentry posts.  They passed directly in front of the ground-level station, and though most would merely wave or nod in greeting as they went by, there were a number who regularly stopped to exchange a few words with me, as they rarely encountered a Cypriot soldier fluent in English. 

Next to other peacekeeping missions, Cyprus is a kind of holiday resort for U.N. troops, but many of the younger soldiers, especially those with bowdlerized notions of war, were craving to be stationed where the bullets were flying.  One nineteen-year old who was with the British Armed Forces but presently under U.N. command told me he had recently been “RPG’d” (fired at by a rocket propelled grenade launcher) in Iraq.  He described the incident with the flush of pride you might expect from an adolescent detailing how he had just lost his virginity.   

The captain of our company, who was generally friendly and civil with me as he was only one year my senior, once happened to drive by while I was talking to a pair of U.N. soldiers in a jeep.  I knew I was not permitted to interact with them, but I always found the prohibition brainless and even detrimental.  By the time he stopped the car and came storming over, the U.N. soldiers had already driven off, but he leaned out over the barrels and sandbags and called them back.   

“Why were you talking to them?” he asked me with irritation, still staring down the road at the jeep, which was backing up towards us.  “What did they say to you?”

“Nothing.  Small talk.  They just asked how much longer I had left on my shift.”

He looked back at me.  “And what did you say.”

“Another half hour or so.”

He gave a sharp sardonic exhale and shook his head, as if I had betrayed essential information to spies.  The jeep with its blue fluttering flag pulled up next to him. 

“What were you saying to my OP?” he demanded. 

“Just being friendly,” the driver said.  He shut the engine off and he and the other soldier got out of the vehicle.  The captain instantly stiffened up and saluted them as they stepped out but they just came over to him and shook his hand amiably.  The handshake and smile seemed to dispel much of the captain’s suspicion.  Maintaining a hostile stance was simply no longer possible.  It is no surprise that armies limit chummy interaction between soldiers and officers: maintaining the authoritarian structure requires everyone to keep a cold distance from one another, and one way to do so is through carefully scripted official codes of conduct like saluting, stomping, and responding in a “brisk and lively manner.”    

I found such formalities and military protocols to be the most challenging part of army life, not because they were difficult but because they were idiotic.  Anytime you were on sentry duty during the day and an officer came by, you had to stomp and then shout your name and rank followed by “I report to you, Mr. X, that I am serving as sentry on post X of outpost X.  I report to you that during the duration of my duty… [here you would generally just state ‘all is well’].” If the officer happened to be the camp commander or anyone of a higher rank, you then had to continue the spiel: “My mission at the outpost is to execute the duties of the sentry-observer for the surveillance, both day and night, of the terrestrial and aerial space from X to X, to collect every type of information, and to observe and report enemy activities.  In the case of an alarm I will… [yadda yadda, etc.]” 

Now unless you imagine that you are an actor of some kind, it is impossible to stomp and shout any of this without feeling like a jackass.  The formalized style also hinders communication.  For example, one afternoon while I was on the rooftop post, Turkish troops began shooting at a nearby firing range.  Shortly afterwards an officer came by and so I recited my assigned mantra.  Since my role was to ‘observe and report enemy activities’ I was naturally supposed to mention that Turkish soldiers were firing at the range, but because I was so preoccupied with getting my script right, I forgot its alleged purpose, which was to report on what I had observed.  So instead of saying “the Turks started shooting a half hour ago” I merely said “all is well” (meanwhile, gunshots were popping in the distance).  If the officer had from the beginning just asked me if there was any activity in the north, I would have told him the facts without wasting both of our time with an elaborate recital of bullshit. 

There was, however, one of these formalities that I enjoyed.  After sundown and until sunrise, you never had to recite anything, since you were theoretically unable to see who was approaching your sentry post.  You merely had to point your rifle at the visitor and call out ‘αλτ τισ ει’ which translates to “stop, who goes there” in ancient Greek (a curious way of querying since few people understand ancient Greek: it is like a travel agent asking someone who wants to book a ticket, “whither goest thou?”).  To give the person permission to approach your sentry post he then had to correctly provide you with the two passwords that had been issued to your outpost earlier that day. During this process you kept your gun aimed at him and would order him several times to halt and then proceed. 

After a day of stomping to attention and belting your mission to every man of high rank who came by, there was something redemptive in having the opportunity to train your gun on those same officers and to subject them—in a cathartic reversal of fortune—to a comical string of commands as if they were school kids playing Red Light Green Light.

The final part of Manning the Dead Zone will be posted on November 4.

My rooftop outpost on the Nicosia Green Line

THE OTHER CONSCRIPTS in my outpost, many of whom had been stationed on the Green Line months before I arrived and who would be there months after I left, were understandably blasé about the pristine surroundings. 

“When I first came I was always staring out there, moving the spotlight around every time I heard a sound,” one of the conscripts told me as he motioned towards the Buffer Zone.  “Now I don’t even look over there anymore.  There’s nothing there.  That’s why it’s called the Dead Zone.” 

No doubt the boogeyman notion that elite Turkish forces might anytime come crawling over, knives clenched in teeth, in the first midnight wave of another invasion was ludicrous under current conditions.  The only human activity in the buffer zone was the UN van that would drive by on patrol every few hours with the blue flag fluttering off the back and the occasional UN soldiers in blue tracksuits enjoying a morning jog. 

But contrary to the conscript’s claim, the Dead Zone was very much alive.  Both sentry posts, but especially the one on the rooftop, were fine spots from which to observe birdlife.  Considering that our mission was to ‘monitor and report all enemy activity over land and airspace,’ it’s obvious that each sentry post should have been outfitted with a pair of high-powered binoculars.  But not surprisingly, there were none, and so I soon began bringing my own personal pair.  Though my binoculars were handy for identifying the various types of Turkish helicopters that occasionally flew along the Kyrenia mountain range (we were supposed to phone in all Turkish military activity to army camp headquarters) I primarily used them to watch kestrels, hooded crows, and the other abundant smaller birds like flycatchers, buntings, and sparrows.      

The snakes were still hibernating, but hedgehogs, hares, foxes, and Agama lizards were a common sight, and in the evenings, before the bats and owls emerged, the peeper frogs performed in the neighboring marsh.  The Green Line was also the roaming ground for countless stray cats and dogs, which accounted for the unsettling sounds of snapping twigs that occasionally pierced the night silence.  Now and then you might even see a kill.  It was no African safari, but I did witness a number of cats stalk and successfully pounce upon hapless songbirds that had made the mistake of leaving the safety of their treetop perches. 

But by far the most abundant Green Line visitors and inhabitants were the dogs.  Several conscripts in my outpost had taken quite a liking to a stray retriever and would toss her the uneaten army rations and bring her up with them on their rooftop sentry duty.  This soon developed into quite a problem with the camp commander since dogs were forbidden on the sentry posts or near the outposts.  The conscripts protested to the commander that they never fed her and claimed that they even threw rocks at her to send her away, but the truth was obvious enough. 

Eventually an officer came by, loaded the retriever up in a van, and dropped her off a dozen or so miles away.  A few days later she was back.  A week later they dropped her off over a hundred miles away in the Troodos mountain range.  As far as I know she never returned.  It really was too bad.  Soldiers all too often torture animals (just last year a number of conscripts set a puppy on fire and filmed its yelping death-throes on their cell phones) and it seemed a shame that the conscripts in my outpost had to be reprimanded for showing some affection to a stray dog.   

But the retriever may in the end have found itself a better life after the relocation.  She was the only bitch in the neighborhood, and all the other dogs were constantly mounting her, or trying, to like the friendly terrier that never gave up despite the fact that without a stepladder he was attempting a physical impossibility.  The terrier was harmless enough and offered comic relief for the sentries, but there was a large aggressive mutt in the neighborhood that was constantly offending our adopted friend.  One day while I was standing guard on the ground-level sentry post, the mongrel mounted her on the UN road.  Anyone who has ever witnessed dogs mating knows that the male cannot withdraw immediately after ejaculation: his member swells up and a period of time must pass for it to contract.  But this mutt seemed to think otherwise.  Upon finishing, he turned around to leave, but of course could not.  The two dogs were now facing opposite directions but still attached at the critical point.  The mutt tried yanking forward a few times, which was not only ineffective but also surely painful to both of them.  Finally, and I will never forget this sight, the mutt tore off at a sprint down the path, towing behind him the poor bitch, who helplessly clawed at the dirt, yelping, as she was dragged several hundred yards by his swollen penis.  In my two months on the Green Line, I was never more tempted to use my gun.  I was only sorry I had not pegged him with a rock, although he was the sort of dog that may well have lunged at me if I had. 

It was tedious standing in one place for two hours, and often cold, especially during those February night shifts, and I soon improvised an anaerobic exercise routine.  There were no weights available so I made do with the equipment on hand.  The bullet proof vest, which was hanging on an iron coat hanger, was handy for curls and front raises.  The ammunition box sufficed for triceps kickbacks and lateral raises, while the helmet was fine for triceps extensions.  Shouldering the vest in one hand and the ammo box in the other was handy for shrugs and made for tolerable squats, though it was more effective for lunges.  The pushups and calf raises were best done at night when one was weighed done with multiple layers of clothing.  But the greatest challenge proved to be exercising the back since there was no bar or ledge anywhere on which to do pull ups, so I resorted to high repetition sets of one-arm bent over rows with the bullet proof vest.  Despite the crude makeshift nature of this gym, I ended up putting on more muscle during sentry duty than I had during boot camp. 

I would also frequently pace along the rooftop or the yard (depending on the sentry post), which would sometimes prompt one of the Turkish sentries to train his binoculars on me.  They were very unabashed about it and would keep the binoculars on me even when I was looking directly back at them.  My initial reaction, which now appears absurd to me, was indignation at their impropriety: perhaps we belonged to enemy armies, but one should not forget one’s manners.  I too would often train my binoculars on them but initially tried to be discreet about it.  If they looked over at me, I would instantly lower them or shift my magnified gaze elsewhere.  It was of course ridiculous to behave as if I were spying on a woman undressing—after all, we both had the same job: to watch each other—but I could not get over the peeping tom feel of it.  It took a week or two, but eventually I overcame any self-consciousness and it was not long before I was staring openly back at them through my binoculars without the slightest shame or resentment. 

Soldiers standing guard on a ceasefire line suffer from boredom more than anything else and so any movement or activity among the enemy sentries is always a subject of great interest.  One morning while standing sentry on the ground level post I noticed that a couple of military jeeps and a black Mercedes with a small Turkish flag attached to the hood had pulled up alongside the Turkish sentry post.  The two sentries were up on their feet and bellowing out what I have no doubt was their name, rank and mission. It was astonishing just how loud they could yell.  We too had the same procedure, but none of us ever hollered out our mission at the top of our lungs as the Turkish sentries did.  The no-nonsense nature of the Turkish army—and this does not include the Turkish Cypriot forces, which from what I’ve heard share laxness with the Greek Cypriots—would manifest in all its grim severity at times like these, although I suspect this disciplined barking was exaggerated along the Green Line to intimidate those of us who were watching. 

It was obvious that a high-ranking officer—perhaps a brigadier—had arrived on an inspection.  It was of course a welcome break in the monotony for me and after phoning in the inspection to headquarters, I leaned against the sandbags to more comfortably enjoy the show through my binoculars.  After the sentries had finished yelling, a group of four officers climbed up onto the guard post.  It was clear by the red insignias on the collar and shoulder of one of them that he was the top officer. A man with a red clipboard was accompanying him.  The two sentries meanwhile were facing my direction, cradling their guns, and hollering out answers to questions that the officer was posing them, presumably about the landmarks and army posts south of the Green Line.  It was all very theatrical and silly, as army protocol always is. 

A few olive tree branches were partially blocking my view so I decided to walk out into the yard for a better view.  The only problem was that they too now had an unobstructed view of me from there.  It was not long before the inspecting officer saw me staring at him through the binoculars, and he immediately darted behind a wall. He would not come out again into the open, so I again returned to my sandbagged post.  Eventually he did emerge for a brief period, but he could tell I was still spying on him and he again took cover.  He remained up there, hiding himself away for another fifteen minutes or so before he and the others finally drove off.  It proved to be my most satisfying sentry duty.  I may not have warded off an attack, but I had at least disrupted an inspection and forced a senior military Turkish officer to cower away like a jittery criminal for a good fifteen minutes.         

As much I loathed the Turkish military presence on the island, I never felt any hatred for the Turkish sentries.  The only essential difference between them and the Cypriot conscripts is that they happened to be born in Turkey.  Like us, they too were doing their mandatory service.  It has always astonished me how so many otherwise decent and reasonable people can glibly resent and blanket-condemn millions of others simply because they happen to have been born on a different chunk of land than they were.  It is only a sensible prejudice if, like Hitler or the Rwandan genocidaires, one holds the view that there is some vile national trait (in this case “Turkish barbarism”) which is inherited by an entire people at birth and which of course stands in stark opposition to the shining national trait of one’s own beleaguered clan.   

I had heard many stories of rock throwing across the Green Line, including cases of spotlights being smashed out and sentries being knocked unconscious by rocks (I was told that one Turkish sentry within the walled city was paralyzed after falling from his post when a rock struck him in the head).  I also knew there had been stone-throwing across the Green Line from and at our ground-level post.  But I never had any such belligerent exchanges with the Turkish sentries.  The most hostile thing any Turkish soldier did while I was sentry was to wave and yell “Good Day” in Greek to me one sunny morning.   

But relations were not always so warm.  One afternoon, when one of the conscripts came to relieve me at the end of my shift, the Turkish sentries began to curse at him in Greek.  “It’s because they recognize me,” he said as he raised his middle finger at them.  “Faggot Turk!” he then shouted back, also in Greek.  “Fuck your mother!” 

About three or four of the sentries, himself included, had a habit of regularly cursing the Turkish soldiers, which would generally ignite a volley of insults.  The Turks always cursed in Greek, and though the Greek Cypriots had also learned a few curses in Turkish (“Fuck your mother” was beloved by both sides), they were far less proficient in bilingual cursing so they generally stuck to Greek.  The insults also took non-verbal forms.  One sentry in particular took pleasure in clambering up onto the sandbags that bordered the Dead Zone and urinating in direct view of the Turkish sentries.  I have a photo of this, although unfortunately the picture is not what it could have been because the Turkish soldiers had turned their backs by the time I got my camera out. 

Usually the cursing was harmless enough—being only slightly more malicious than the invective that was bandied about between companies at boot camp—and one almost sensed that it was more for entertainment than out of spite.  But of course, one cannot get around the fact that everyone had a gun and plenty of ammunition on hand.  One late afternoon while I was sentry on the rooftop, I heard a loud explosion to my right that sounded like a rifle shot.  The Turkish soldiers were staring intently at our ground level post through their binoculars.  I was later told that the other sentry on duty—I will refer to him as Marios for convenience—had fired a bullet.  I questioned him about it afterwards, but he denied firing a round, claiming the sound had been a car tire blowing out. 

It was not as easy for us to fire a bullet as one might expect.  Unlike the Turkish soldiers, who carried their guns loaded, we were not permitted to have the magazine clipped into the firearm; instead, the magazine was kept within arm’s distance and the loading compartment was taped over with plastic so that the only way you could clip the magazine onto the rifle was by removing the seal (the same was true for the other magazines stored in the ammunition box).  And even after that, you could not shoot unless you were fired upon or unless you received clearance from higher-ups.  Of course all this was very impractical from a combat perspective and, before conscripting, I considered the no-magazine-attached policy a ridiculous handicap.  But it did not take many encounters with my fellow conscripts before I changed my mind.  Eighteen-year-olds are prone to remarkable lapses of judgment and it only takes a couple of hotheads to start playing cops and robbers across the Green Line for an ugly situation to escalate.  The buffoon behavior of some of the sentries surely constitutes the greatest present-day threat of renewed conflict along the Green Line.   

That following morning I was scheduled for guard duty on the ground floor post and so I checked the magazine.  It was obvious by the sloppy condition of the seal that the tape had been removed and then hastily slapped back in place.   I knew this happened on occasion, as some of the conscripts would load the rifle and point it at the Turkish sentries just for kicks.  But I had never heard of anyone firing a round.  As it had already been tampered with, I decided out of curiosity to remove the tape and count the bullets.  There were none missing.  It is of course possible that he had an extra bullet on hand and had replaced it but I suspect he never did fire a bullet.  I believe this only because the Turkish sentries barely reacted to the explosion.  If a real bullet had been fired (assuming of course they had seen him fire it) they would have grabbed for something else besides a pair of binoculars.

A few weeks later I happened to again be on the rooftop post while Marios was on the other post.  Although the two posts are only about 100 or so yards apart, the sentries cannot see each other as the ground level post is sheltered under a concrete overhang.  But at one point I glanced over and saw that Marios was pacing about on the rooftop above his post while talking on a cell phone.  If an officer on patrol came by, he would doubly punish him—for talking on a cell phone and for being on the roof unauthorized—but Marios did not seem in the slightest concerned.  He must have been on the phone for ten minutes, and I had returned my attention to a kestrel on a nearby treetop, when I heard shouting between him and the two Turkish sentries. 

Marios had put the phone away and was now cursing at the Turkish sentries.  He picked up a piece of rubber hose that had been lying on the rooftop and, clutching it between his legs, he began to mock-masturbate while facing them. 

“Pezevenki!” the Turkish sentries yelled back, which translates to something between pimp and son-of-a-bitch.

“Come eat my cock!” Marios yelled.

“Pezevengi!  Fuck your mother!”

“And my balls too!”

“Come over here, why don’t you!”

The exchange went like this for several minutes.  On the rooftop was a flagpole from which the Greek flag and the Cypriot flag flew side by side.  Marios suddenly rushed over to the cement base and lowered the Cypriot flag, unclipping it from the halyard.  He then held the flag out before the Turkish sentries and, still yelling, began to shake it violently at them.  I was somewhat surprised he had not lowered the Greek flag instead of the Cypriot: chest-thumping jingoist displays in Cyprus normally come wrapped only in Greek or Turkish colors.

After some time Marios reattached the flag and, upon raising it back up, he climbed down the metal stairs and returned to his post.  The yelling, however, continued.  I could not see Marios, but I knew that he was up to something, because the Turkish conscripts had suddenly grown very animated and they were gesticulating angrily at him.  Suddenly I heard a loud yell and I saw them duck.  Moments later one of them popped up with his rifle and aimed it at Marios.

At that particular moment, I was standing on the northeastern corner of the rooftop, where I had the best view of the Turkish conscripts.  With no war going on, it was very easy to forget there was ever any potential for conflict along the Green Line.  But when somebody pulls a gun out, you quickly remember where you are.  Of course, I had not participated in the row and the gun was aimed at Marios not me, but I suddenly became very conscious of my lack of coverage.  I briskly made my way back to the guard house, where I had a more comfortable view of the unfolding events. 

But nothing more unfolded.  Eventually the rifle was lowered and the yelling came to an end.  Later that evening at the kitchen table I asked Marios why they had trained the gun on him.  “Because I loaded mine and aimed it at them,” he answered nonchalantly between bites of souvlakia, as if he had only been doing his job.

Marios then began to tease another one of the conscripts who I learned had been keeping him company down at the sentry post when he had pulled the gun on the Turkish sentry. His friend had apparently ducked away when the Turkish sentry turned the rifle on them. 

“You went hiding away like a girl,” Marios mumbled through a mouthful of kebab. 

“I didn’t want to get shot.”

Marios swallowed forcefully and slammed the rest of his pita down.  “And so what if you were shot.  If God wants you to die, then you’ll die.  It’s not up to you.  So why worry about it.”

Religious fatalism was of course a convenient excuse for his antics, but I had no doubt of his sincerity.  Unlike Turkish Cypriots, Greek Cypriots are very religious.  Though much of their outward Orthodoxness is often no more than hypocritical posing or herd-behavior—the by-products of organized religion found in every country—Greek Cypriots still as a rule have a strong inward belief in God.  At boot camp the only time the conscripts were well-behaved was during prayers, and it was not uncommon anytime we were traveling in the army trucks to see a conscript cross himself silently each time we drove past a church.  It was also not unusual for conscripts to greet each other on Easter Day with the words “Christ has risen,” although I admit I was not expecting to hear it at two a.m. on Easter morning while relieving one of the conscripts from his midnight shift.      

It would be wrong to give the impression that Green Line sentry duty was dangerous. The last Buffer-Zone related killing was on August 14, 1996, when a Greek Cypriot was shot dead while climbing a Turkish flagpole to pull down the flag.  His death came a few days after the Turkish nationalist group Grey Wolves had clubbed to death his cousin during a controversial demonstration in the Green Line.  That was a bad year along the Green Line, as a Greek Cypriot sentry had also been killed earlier in June when he crossed the Green Line to talk to a Turkish Cypriot soldier (unconfirmed reports say it was to exchange army caps) and another soldier shot him.  There had been a few other similar cases throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s in which Greek Cypriot soldiers who had befriended Turkish Cypriot soldiers entered no man’s land to deliver a gift of brandy or cigarettes and were shot down on the way by other soldiers, who obviously did not trust any gift-bearing Greeks.  There was plenty of suspicion to go around.  There was even a sign in our outpost with the black and white photographs of seven sentries who had been killed in the Green Zone or on their posts, under which was a warning that we should not be deceived by friendly gestures because the Turks had evil intentions.

The possibility for a fresh incident was always there, but the days of Green Line violence seemed to be over and the fracases were now all hot air.  Not that that was any great consolation to the residents whose homes lay on the Green Line and who still had to endure daily exchanges of obscene yelling and cursing.  I often felt sorry for them, but there was one time I was tempted to contribute to the daily disturbance of the peace.  The Turkish army maintained another sentry post that was only thirty yards away from our ground level post, although it was always unmanned.  One afternoon while I was on sentry duty, I saw that four Turkish soldiers had climbed onto the roof.  It was not long before I realized that they were trying to free the Turkish flag, which the wind had tangled in the halyards.  They shook and pulled on the halyards for some time but the flag remained knotted stubbornly around both ropes.  Finally they had no choice but to push over the flagpole, which was anchored in a barrel of cement, and untangle the flag by hand.            

I was sure that the soldiers thought nothing of what they were doing—after all, it was routine procedure for untangling flags—and neither did I, but at the very moment they had successfully pushed the Turkish flagpole over to a horizontal position I was overcome by an urge to start wildly clapping and cheering.  But I did not, partly out of respect for the frail old man who lived down the road and who had come over to our outpost just the day before, shaking with anger for having been roused from his nap by all the yelling and obscenities, and partly out of concern that some of those soldiers, who were quite literally a stone’s throw distance away, might consider any jocular disrespect of their flag as an act of war against them. 

In retrospect, though I did the sensible thing by keeping quiet, I regret that I did not at least shout out a bravo.  It is not often that a Cypriot is given the opportunity to applaud Turkish soldiers for toppling a Turkish flag on the Green Line. 

Manning the Dead Zone is continued in the October 4 entry.

IN THE CYPRIOT National Guard, all of the conscripts except those serving a reduced three-month term undergo a one-month training after boot camp known as ‘combat school.’  Combat school is where, as my training camp company commander put it, “you learn what it means to be a soldier—to run from morning to night, to go on treks, to go shooting.”  Since their service time is so short, three-monthers bypass combat school and are instead sent directly to their assigned army camps after basic training. 

Few of the conscripts in my boot camp actually wanted to attend combat school.  It is only natural that conscripted soldiers—who are compelled to enlist by law not choice—will generally be averse to training of any kind.  Eastern Mediterranean peoples also as a rule avoid physical exercise as much as possible, possibly a genetic leaning that evolved out of the draining heat.  But since I was in the army, I felt I may as well, in the commander’s words, “learn what it means to be a soldier” and so I requested—along with four other zealous three-monthers—to stay on and attend combat school. 

The request was eventually granted, although once the training started, some of us began regretting the decision.  On the first day, our cadet officer had my platoon form two parallel lines, one on each side of the training camp’s main road, where we all assumed we were going to practice scrambling into the ditch in the case of an approaching enemy helicopter; instead he told us to start walking at a slow pace and pick up all the trash in sight.  It was constructive activity for a change but nevertheless an uninspiring way to begin a school of combat.  Our training in the afternoon consisted of scrubbing the barracks walls.  Either our officers had been recently inspired watching The Karate Kid or combat school was to follow in the same surrealist vein as boot camp.    

Most of the next day was spent at the firing range, or rather idling away the hours in the shelters over the range.  We each shot a total of twenty bullets—ten in the morning and ten after dark—and spent the rest of the time lounging in the tall grass and against the shelter walls.  When I descended for my nighttime firing practice I could faintly see the illumined target but my rifle sight and barrel were indistinguishable in the pitch darkness.  No one had told us that you had to shine a flashlight onto the sight for the yellow dot to glow.  Instead the only advice the sergeant gave me was to “just send ’em” so there was nothing to do but shoot blindly into the mountainside.

The following morning a corporal told me that National Guard Headquarters had sent an order that we five three-monthers were to leave combat school that same day and go directly to our assigned army camps.  No reason was given.  The corporal speculated that one of our soon-to-be commanding officers who was pressed for manpower had complained to headquarters.  But I knew that the Defense Ministry Spokesman had recently found out, due to a blunder of mine, that I was now in the army.  Although we were not on bad terms I suspected that he did not want any journalists snooping around in combat school and so he simply yanked me out of there (along with the others so that the intervention would be less obvious).  Whether or not this was true, I wasn’t especially incensed by the relocation.  Of the little I had seen of so-called combat school, I wouldn’t miss much.

I had been assigned to infantry and my army camp was located in the capital, Nicosia, a 90-minute drive from the Paphos training camp.  The army camp itself was not located on the Green Line (also known as the Buffer Zone, Demilitarized Zone, or Dead Zone), but it staffed and oversaw three companies and dozens of sentry posts along several miles of the Green Line in the Nicosia center.  The army commander had left for the day by the time I was dropped off there, and so the deputy commander signed me an overnight furlough and told me to return at seven the next morning. 

The morning meeting with the camp commander was brief.  When I walked in he told me I should stomp to attention and state my name.  I did, although like a true arphas I for some reason stomped with my left foot instead of the right.  He did not seem to notice. 

“Bravo,” he said.  “I’m going to put you on the Green Line for sentry duty.  One of the soldiers there is afraid of the Turks so I’m sending you on over to take his place.  Okay?” 

I replied that it was fine and he nodded approvingly, as if he had expected objections.  “When will I go?” I asked.  I had been told that infantrymen fresh out of boot camp always spent a week or two at their army camp before being assigned to a Green Line outpost.

“Today.  They’ll come pick you up in the next hour or so.” 

They came six hours later.  I passed the morning waiting in the office, talking to several 18- and 19-year old conscript officers. 

“You’re 30!” one of them exclaimed.  “The commander shouldn’t be sending you to the Green Line!”  He pursed his lips and shook his head.  “You should be here, in an office in headquarters, coming in from seven [am] to one-thirty [pm] and then going home.” 

But I was pleased enough.  I dreaded the office as much as most of the others craved it.  Sentry duty on the Green Line seemed a far more appealing way to pass my remaining two months.

Many of the high-ranking permanent officers there seemed to have nothing better to do than harass the conscripts.  “Do you know what scalping is?” one large permanent officer growled in the face of one of the corporals as I sat waiting for my ride to arrive.  He grabbed the conscript and made as if he were scalping him.  “Like this, that’s how we’ll treat the Turks… Indian style.”  It seemed to give him great pleasure to play the genocidaire.  “If I find a Turkish commander, you know what I’ll do to him?”  With thumb and folded forefinger he pulled on the right cheek of the 18-year-old conscript, who was laughing uncomfortably. “I’m going to take his skin and start shaving it off slice by slice.”  It was obvious that the martial spirit was alive and well in him, especially in the presence of defenseless acquiescent teenagers. 

My ride finally came at around two pm and the two conscripts who came to pick me up drove me to my outpost after a minor detour so that they could gawk at high school girls spilling out of school in their stockings and skirts.

The outpost was a small house in a residential neighborhood at the end of a dead-end road that ran flush along the Buffer Zone.  Twelve conscripts had been stationed there prior to my arrival; since the conscript I was meant to replace did not in the end leave for several weeks, the outpost force rose to thirteen with my presence.  They were glad to have me there because the larger force strength decreased the frequency of their sentry shifts and increased their number of monthly furloughs.   

But I later found out that the prospect of a 30-year-old in their midst initially left them uneasy.  All twelve of them were between the ages of eighteen and twenty.  Was I going to be a stern father figure, all frowning admonishments and disapproval? At thirty, I was a dinosaur to them.  I remember when I was eighteen all twentysomethings appeared irrevocably old, all thirtysomethings downright geriatric.  Of course, it is only when you approach your thirties that you realize that, aside from the inevitable maturing that comes from a decade of drifting, botched relationships, unrequited dreams and wounded ambitions, your spirit has not aged any, and if you do feel older in some essential way it is only because you have resigned yourself to the implacable effect of time’s passage on the body or confused responsibility with respectability.   

The army camp commander certainly hoped there was a disciplinarian in me.  He made that clear later that afternoon during a surprise visit to our outpost.  “This man is thirty years old,” he said to the others who were lined up against the wall on each side of me.  He paused as if that fact was something they needed to dwell upon deeply. 

“Mr. Markides,” he continued, now addressing me personally.  “I am going to give you my mobile number and if they do anything stupid—if they’re shouting at the Turks, making trouble, anything—you call me, okay?”  In the end he never did give me his phone number, probably because he knew from the start how futile it was to ask me to be a snitch.  He merely wanted to impress upon them the notion that there was an adult in their midst who would not tolerate their customary delinquency.

For a day or two my presence did have a subduing effect on them.  I was particularly struck by how differently conscript officers treated me.  In boot camp there had been little differentiation between those of us who were in our late twenties or thirties and the teenage conscripts.  But here many of the conscript officers, at least at first, addressed me in the plural (comparable to the Spanish ‘usted’ or the French ‘vous’) and went out of their way to accommodate me.  But I did not want any courtesy or special treatment and it was not long before the other conscripts, both officers and regulars, all realized I could be just as foulmouthed and juvenile as the rest of them.  From that point on all niceties were dropped and like equals we communicated exclusively through insults and curses. 

I had come straight from the austere environment of the training camp barracks so I was surprised at how cozy the house was.  Instead of toilet stalls with holes in the ground there was a proper bathroom with a sit-down toilet and a bathtub; there was a kitchen with a stovetop oven and a refrigerator stocked with food; and there was a living room with couches and a TV.  Aside from the sleeping quarters—you could not call it a bedroom—which consisted of lockers and a row of identical bunk beds, and aside from the fact that we harbored twelve fully automatic assault rifles (soon to be thirteen), several machine guns, grenade launchers, rocket launchers and enough munitions to blow up the neighborhood, the house looked like it was a college student rental.

But there were also a few other subtler indications it was not a college rental.  First of all, the house was tidy, due to a daily chores list, which if violated could result in denial of furlough. Second, VCRs and video game consoles were prohibited from all outposts because the camp commander recognized that conscripts had as much potential for sloth as for squalor; instead, the commander furnished every outpost with a foldable ping-pong table.  There was almost always a game going, and if a day went by without a ping-pong being crushed, lost, or split open, it was a noteworthy day.  There was also a backyard in which we planted ten trees along the perimeter on my first afternoon there, again on the orders of the army camp commander.  For a high-ranking officer, he had remarkably good taste.    

View across Green Line of Turkish sentry post

Our outpost was responsible for two sentry posts, one on the rooftop of an abandoned building directly across the road from our quarters and the other a two-minute walk down the road in another abandoned house.  This second post, however, was not on the roof but on the back porch, which had been fortified by sandbags and barrels.  The Turkish military sentry post was only sixty meters away from this ground level position—just a little over the length of an Olympic size swimming pool.  This was by far the most unpopular of the two among the sentries, partly because it was so secluded from our quarters and so close to the Turkish sentry post, which was manned by two soldiers, but mostly because it was on ground level on the backside of a gutted sandbagged house and therefore offered no view of the road and, more to the point, of officers on duty who might be approaching for an inspection.

I soon realized that for all the sentries, the real threat was not the Turkish soldier on the other side of the Dead Zone but the officer on duty who could punish them with a five-day denial of furlough upon catching them reading a magazine or snoozing.  In fact, I was the only one who actually faced the Buffer Zone from the rooftop sentry post. Everyone else stood—or more often, sat—with their backs to the Dead Zone and instead faced south, keeping a wary eye for any approaching officers in vehicle or on foot who might be making the rounds to check that all the sentries were properly keeping lookout over the Green Line and the occupation troops. 

This pseudo-sentry duty was not just taking place at my outpost.  It was the norm along the entire 300 kilometers of the Buffer Zone, and not without reason.  The military situation had not altered since 1974, and with Cyprus now in the EU and Turkey vying to enter, any further aggression at the state level anytime soon was inconceivable.  This military impasse minute after minute, day after day, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, had eroded any sense among the conscripts that there was any sense to their sentry duty.  And the opening of several crossing points along the Dead Zone in 2004 had only introduced a new absurdist dimension.  Although Turkish soldiers and settlers could not cross, Turkish Cypriot conscripts and Greek Cypriot conscripts could now cross at will, which meant that on Tuesday you could be staring out behind camouflaged barrels and sandbags into the Demilitarized Zone with your fully automatic assault rifle and five loaded magazines and on Wednesday be standing on the other side with a digital camera in shorts and flip flops.   

All sentry shifts were two hours long and you would either get four or six hours off between shifts depending on how many conscripts were on furlough that day.  In addition to the sentry post hours, each day you also had to do an additional two-hour shift as a guard over the weapons cages in the outpost (it involved nothing more than being present in the living room and keeping the area tidy) as well as morning and afternoon exercises and weapons training, which often involved nothing more than pulling out the rocket launchers or machine guns onto a tarp and then sitting around them in pretend training. 

Occasionally the camp commander would assign our outpost a project, which might range from weeding and planting flowers along the perimeter of the front porch to building up a defensive U-shaped barrier of sandbags outside the front door.  It was fine for role-playing.  In the morning, as you gently lowered a geranium into the flower bed, you might imagine you were a cheerful homesteader, while in the afternoon, as you crouched experimentally behind the sandbags you had filled and then stacked a half meter from that very same geranium, you might think you were under threat of imminent assault.  And since this was Cyprus, the schizophrenic combination was nothing unusual.   

It was mandatory to keep your G3 assault rifle hanging diagonally across your chest at all times during sentry duty, but no one ever did.  Only when the officer on duty neared would the sentry lift up the rifle, which was resting against the sentry box, and strap it over himself.  The other conscripts would often shake their heads at me because I kept the gun draped about me most of the time during sentry duty, at least for the first few weeks.  It seemed too much work to be constantly on the lookout for patrolling officers.  I preferred to pace about the rooftop, looking off into the greenery of the Buffer Zone with a wandering mind rather than back at the roads and residential areas.  I grew lazier with time, but at the beginning at least, I did not mind shouldering the ten-pound G3.   

Despite the chores, weapons training, and occasional morning exercises at company headquarters, our only relatively taxing responsibility was the outdoor sentry duty.  It was the monotony that made it taxing.  When you must stand guard over a field of olive trees for two hours on, four hours off, around the clock, the novelty of being an armed soldier on a UN-monitored ceasefire line eventually wears off. 

There were ways of course to combat the monotony; some of the conscripts took spank magazines or crossword puzzles, which they would shove under a rock or toss onto the guardhouse roof anytime a permanent officer approached.  Portable PlayStations were also popular among sentries, although if caught with one you would get a minimum of ten days “jail time.” 

“Jail time” meant you lost your furlough for x number of days and additionally that you had to serve that same number of days in the army once your conscription term expired (those serving two years were allowed up to thirty grace days of jail time before accruing additional days).  Conscripts who were court-martialed for especially severe offenses usually faced a minimum of 25 days jail time. 

For the first few weeks of sentry duty I merely took with me a few loose sheets of paper for taking notes.  I later grew bolder and began taking pocket-sized books of poetry.  I briefly attempted to work my way through a novel but that did not last long.  Poetry, which can be ingested a few lines at a time, is much better suited for illicit reading.  During my second month I took advantage of the endless hours to edit the manuscript of a novel I had recently finished.  I only took a few sheets at a time with me so that I could fold them up and stuff them in my pocket if need be; consequently, it turned out to be the most thorough editing the manuscript had ever received.

I also always had a harmonica on hand and I spent an hour or two each day either playing or singing.  Some of the Turkish soldiers also passed their time in similar fashion (I could tell by their badges that they were Turkish, not Turkish Cypriot, although I also recently heard that Turkish Cypriots adopted the Turkish uniform some time ago).  One of them was an especially talented vocalist whose mournful Phrygian melodies drifting across the Dead Zone perfectly complemented the abandoned garrisoned landscape. 

There is something inherently depressing about barriers of any kind, especially when they bisect cities and divide people.  But as far as separation barriers go, the Green Line must rank as one of the world’s most beautiful.  One of the consequences of the military impasse subsequent to the 1974 coup and invasion is that developers have not been able to get their hands on numerous sizeable parcels of land throughout the island.  And there is no larger stretch of inaccessible terrain than the UN-monitored Green Line, which is 300 km long and up to several kilometers wide in places.  There has been no construction there for more than three decades, which explains why you can be a mere five-minute drive from the city center and yet feel like you are in the countryside.  The rest of the olive groves and lemon orchards in Nicosia have been bulldozed and replaced with cement. 

The Dead Zone has consequently become a well-guarded (though not for preservation reasons) relic of what the topography of Cyprus looked like three decades ago.  For example, unlike the rest of Nicosia, on the stretch of the Green Line I was stationed on there was breathing space between the homes: fruit orchards, olive groves, extensive yards in which the chickens would roam, and so on.  Of course, cities must grow along with their populations and there is no point in pining over a past that cannot exist in the present.  But at the same time, just as every building needs a concrete mixer, so too does every city dweller need a green refuge in which to occasionally escape from the tedious bustle of city life. 

Since the concept of a central city park has not yet made it into Cypriot consciousness, the Green Line is now the closest thing Nicosia has to a centrally located green space (not open to the public perhaps, but at least mine-free as of last year, which is surely a safe step in the right direction). In every bad situation one can find some good, and although it is scant consolation for the displaced residents, it is still worth remembering that the barbed wire has also kept town planners out. 

It is for this reason ‘Green Line’ is a fitting name for this verdant swath of land, especially if one considers it from a bird’s eye point of view, although it was not foresight but a stroke of chance that it was not called something else like the Red Line or the Blue Line.  The name ‘Green Line’ originated soon after the intercommunal fighting of 1963 when a British General drew a line across a map of Nicosia to delineate the boundary between the Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, who had already segregated within Nicosia at that point.  He happened to use a green pencil.   

Manning the Dead Zone is continued on September 4.

8. THE LAMP

THE EPICENTER of the training camp was a vast plaza roughly the size of a football pitch where all parades and ceremonies took place.  The paved plaza was empty save for two buildings. On the far end, overlooking the Mediterranean, was the training camp headquarters building.  And in the middle of the plaza, rising up out of the center of this vast concrete plain, was the church.  It was one-fifth the size of the headquarters building and was essentially no more than an altar and sanctum designed for outdoor services, but its focal location sent the clear message that the activities of the training camp were dedicated and beholden to the house of God, who was after all the best general the army had ever known since He was the only superior who commanded the respect of almost all the soldiers.  He was so effective at infusing discipline and elevating morale among army ranks that no other officer had ever raised the tender and controversial matter of His beard, although a few officers did secretly nurse the hope that He might one day be reconceived as a clean-shaven Lord, or at least a mustached one.   

The officers marched us from our barracks down to the plaza, where we all lined up before the church.  A priest soon arrived with briefcase in hand and, after lighting the candles, proceeded with the chants and service.  There were no interruptions, although the presence of a curvy black-haired female officer who was normally hidden away from the conscripts’ view in the headquarters building did disrupt the atmosphere of ecclesiastical solemnity by sending the congregation into a nerve-jangling, tooth-gritting ecstatic torment of a most unspiritual variety.   

After sprinkling us with holy tapwater, the priest then lectured us on our Hellenic roots and on how we were unraveling as a people because we had begun to embrace the dissolute culture and customs of the West.  However, it was not the materialism or consumerism that the church was opposed to but rather the erosion of its cherished millennia-old tradition of sexual repression and patriarchy. These admonitions and diagnoses had already been given to us on our first day in the KEN via a four-page Orthodox pamphlet titled The Lamp.  There had in fact even been a section in the pamphlet dedicated to “The Western Way of Life” warning us about the “phenomena of anarchism, crime, drugs, lewd sex, and homosexuality observed in the communities of the West.” 

The Lamp also urged abstinence until marriage and quoted the “wise professor of psychiatry” at Zurich University A. Forel who according to the pamphlet claimed that “chastity and abstinence until marriage not only does not hurt a youth but actually helps tremendously with his health.”  All ‘prophylactics’ (the word was always in quotes) were “half-measures and a dangerous temptation.”  It then condemned those “unscrupulous doctors and antichrist hawkers of sexuality who recommend the use of ‘prophylactics’ for illegal relationships.”

The pamphlet would highlight in bold certain lines or phrases that it considered particularly valuable, like the following metaphor to describe those who promote the use of condoms: “It is like telling thieves that they can freely commit the injustice of theft and robbery, but should take all the necessary protective measures to avoid arrest from the police. Hey, people, wake up!!!”

There was distinctive advice for the youth of each gender.  Under the subheading “Man or Rascal?” The Lamp informed that a “man can never be that wild long-haired hippie with the varicolored shirts, the tight pants and the earring. With his comic appearance he plays the stud, the man, and he boasts about his sexual conquests. In fact he is not a man but a squirt, not a person but a shrimp.”

“The Future Mothers,” meanwhile, offered concrete dos and don’ts in the hope that all female readers might live long oppressive lives:  “Girls need to prepare appropriately so that they can responsibly and worthily take on the role of the mother.  They must learn to be modest and obedient so that they can be good wives and affectionate mothers… [The young woman] does not go to discos, dances, or to parties and sinful entertainments. She does not drink alcohol. She does not smoke and she does not play cards… and she maintains the principle of chastity as the apple of her eye.”

The priest had no time to delve upon subjects of deeper philosophical and spiritual complexity like Christian love since we still had to go get our assault rifles, and so he concluded his sermon with a tribute to the glories of Hellenism. The blessing was now complete.  The officers lined up before the priest, one by one bowing down to kiss his hand, and then marched us off to the firearms storage room. 

9. THE ZASTAVA

The Yugoslavian-made Zastava semi-automatic assault rifles that were assigned to us had wooden stocks and without the cartridge clipped in place looked more like jacked-up BB guns than army weapons. But the gun was surprisingly capable.  It had a maximum effective range of 600 meters and a maximum range of 3,500.  Nevertheless, the arphades treated it like a water gun.  The procedure began in an orderly manner: seated in rows by platoon, we went up one by one as our names were called to receive our issued rifle and then returned to our seated positions.  But it was not long before everyone was up, milling about, fiddling with the new toys. The harsh metallic sound of sliding bolts and clicking hammers filled the air as conscripts cocked their guns and depressed the triggers with a ceaseless repetitive zest.  No matter where you stood, the end of a barrel was pointed at you. Guns were deliberately turned upon one another. Mock executions were performed.  One grinning arphas put his mouth over the end of the barrel and pulled the trigger.  Another jabbed the muzzle of his Zastava into the stomach of his unperturbed friend, who was aiming his own gun at a truck driving by while puffing on an unsupported cigarette.

Of course, we had not been issued any cartridges yet and the chambers of the guns had assumedly all been checked, but a small oversight would have sufficed to create a big mess. Just one overlooked bullet, one 7.62mm that had jammed in the barrel, one numbskull prank, and we would be attending another sort of service. 

I had handled guns before but had never seen them treated so casually.  I would step aside anytime I found myself in the trajectory of a rifle’s line of fire only to find myself staring down the mouth of another barrel.  It was just something to get used to.  The conscript officers occasionally barked that we should not cock the guns or turn them upon one another, but they never did anything about it.  Later that day our company commander threatened punishment and delivered a stern warning that goofing around with firearms had cost the lives of many soldiers.  The words had no impact.  It was only when the guns had lost their novelty that the sound of sliding bolts and the sight of mock killings came to an end.

The next few days were spent on the Zastava, memorizing its specifications and range, disassembling and reassembling it, maintaining it, and learning to respond to commands like Shoulder Arms, Present Arms, Port Arms and Order Arms.  It would be another two weeks until we fired them, and even then we would only shoot a total of twenty bullets: ten during daytime target practice and ten at night.  The targets were situated 100 meters away against the carved out wall of a mountain and considering the puffs of raised dust and shattered earth that exploded upon the rock face as high as ten or fifteen meters over the targets every time the command to fire was given, the results may well have been comparable if the target practice had also involved blindfolds.  The training, as our daily rest periods were called, consisted of workshops on anything from rocket launchers to compasses to fire and movement.  These sometimes included hands-on schooling, which once even became head-on during the camouflage-cover-and-concealment exercise when three conscripts rushing with their guns for shelter under imaginary enemy fire collided into one another, with the result that one three-monther had to go to the hospital for x-rays.

Now and then we would hike up to the shelters after dark for nighttime seminars, like how to crawl on one one’s belly and ambush sentries.  The highlight was a ten-minute seminar on how to silently kill an enemy guard by sneaking up behind him and cupping a hand over his mouth while sinking a knife to the hilt into his second rib and then driving the blade upwards.  The cadet officer demonstrated on an accommodating friend who pretended to be murdered with little fuss.  We all watched with great interest, confident that after this brief demonstration we would have no problems getting ourselves killed if we ever attempted to silently knife a sentry.

The other memorable moment in the shelters was when one of the National Guard helicopters came flying low overhead one afternoon.  One of the conscripts (known simply as Brains) ran out of his shelter and, aiming his Zastava at the helicopter, followed its path while making the tat-a-tat stuttering sound that boys make when imitating machine-gun fire.  There was no conscript officer there at the time, but Chewbacca suddenly rounded the corner of the shelter and blasted Brains with a bellow that the helicopter pilot may well have heard over the chopping roar of the blades.    

The shelters were in the rolling foothills of the Troodos mountain range and made a fine place to idle away a morning or afternoon.  With a few exceptions like Chewbacca, the conscript officers who led the training were highly unmotivated, so often we just loafed and napped in the sunshine until someone spotted one of the permanent officers coming to inspect the training.  Even the most unabashed softies and whiners had to admit that as far as boot camps went, we had it good.

“If you could screw now and then, it wouldn’t be bad,” said one three-monther as we lounged on the grass with our backs against the outer wall of the shelter.   

“Well they screw you, you can’t have everything,” another replied.

“I hear if you get raped in here you’re discharged.”

“Yeah, and the guy who porks you gets all your months on top of whatever he’s got left.”

There was a brief pause.  “Boys, I’m a good-lucking guy.  What’s another three months on top of twenty-five?  What do you say?”

Later that week we were told that if we behaved well, we would get a two-night leave over the weekend.  As Friday approached there was an undeniable improvement of behavior and we went from atrocious to merely awful. On Friday morning Grivas delivered a Don’t Drink and Drive and Just Say No to Drugs lecture (“Don’t accept offerings from strangers, because whoever offers you grass today, will be selling you cocaine or heroine tomorrow”) and then let us go after we satisfactorily chanted for him where we were going to have coffee, where we were going to light a candle, and where we were going for a swim.

We were supposed to leave in what was now referred to as civilian clothing but about a third of the conscripts nonetheless remained in army uniforms.  They crowded around the giant mirrors in the lobby of the barracks to adjust their berets before the buses arrived.  Now that they were leaving the army camp, they had transformed into proud soldiers. 

Even after a paltry ten days in the camp, one felt awash in a wave of liberation upon leaving those barbed wire gates and finally turning out onto the highway, the shimmering sea whizzing by to the right, the Eye of the Tiger playing over the bus speakers.  The sight of females when we rolled down the main avenue of Nicosia sent all the seventeen-year-olds into a whistling, window-knocking frenzy.  One teenager blew a lipsticked kiss back at the bus, prompting a rapturous cheering uproar so deafening that the bus driver threatened to kick us all off the bus.   

“So did you get a girl?” one of the younger conscripts, upon our return to the camp, asked one of the six-monthers who had been especially vocal about his plans for a different woman each night.   

“Two,” he replied, grinning.

“Two!”

He raised both hands. “Maria,” he says, nodding to his left hand, “and Ioanna,” he added, motioning to the right. 

10. THE GORILLA

The weekend furlough was continually dangled over our heads in hopes of bribing or threatening good behavior out of us and it consistently never worked.  Conscripts were denied upcoming leaves as punishment but on the night before the departure day our captain would say that the camp commander had granted a universal amnesty.   There would be no such reprieves again, he assured us on a weekly basis.

There was however one disciplinary measure that was upheld in the training camp—the jail cell.  It was a severe punishment, dramatically out of place in the lax environment of the training camp considering the absence of other disciplinary measures.  To get jail time you generally had to commit some serious infraction like beat someone up or spray paint insults on army property, although even then you might merely get a scolding.  In the jail you were stripped of all your belongings and locked into a three-by-five-meter cell containing a bed frame and a small barred window up by the ceiling. You stayed in there alone for as many days as they saw fit, usually three or four although it could be as many as ten.  Three times a day you were let out to an adjacent room where you had a half hour to eat and smoke a cigarette, again in solitude.   

The military police administered the prison.  The man in charge of the military police at the training camp was a big man close to two meters tall with long thick arms that on a man of average Cypriot height would have trailed along the ground behind him as he walked.  He came to be known simply as Gorilla.  Whenever there were troubles he would arrive in his Gorillamobile, the light flashing on the roof, and make the rounds of each company, roaring threats.

“No, and I mean NO favors to any recruits,” he bawled the day before they brought in the sniffer dogs for a random drug search. “I know there will be some who’ll say, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it…’ Well, my nutsac he didn’t!  The devil can take him!  I’ll step on his neck!  No, and I mean NO, favors to any recruits!” 

He was in fact a friendly hardworking man who under different conditions could have easily been a cheerful restaurant owner or a compassionate family doctor but he was the head of the military police at the training camp and so he had to act up to his size and play the chest-pounding gorilla. 

11. THE PARADE

Every day over the two weeks preceding the swearing-in ceremony we practiced marching for the parade.  It could have been learnt in a half hour but we spent hours on it each day.  We marched after breakfast; we marched at sunset; we marched in rain; we marched in icy winds; we marched until our shoulders throbbed and the heel of our left boot soles had worn away.

“I want to hear that left heel clip the ground!” Chewbacca would roar.  “I don’t hear anything!  That’s better!  One-two, hep-two, hep-two, One!  The elbows should be locked. The wrist locked down and the thumb pointed upwards! Your hand should swing up to eye level! One-two, hep-two, hep-two, One!”

After several days they positioned us in our parade formations, which were arranged by platoon and by height.  I was in the first platoon and, being the tallest conscript in my platoon, I was therefore in the first line.  I had hoped to be tucked away somewhere within the company formation as I was not keen on having thousands of people watch me march by like the Nutcracker.  But there was no escaping it.  It in fact turned out to be even worse than I expected because I also happened to be located in the row facing the audience during the swearing-in ceremony.  By a stroke of misfortune I happened to be the only conscript with the privilege of being perpetually in full view of the audience.   

Grivas would occasionally emerge from the headquarters building to examine our progress.  He always stood in the same place, a mere arm’s length away from our marching line, with the look of beetle-browed engrossment common to professional coaches.  One of the enduring images from boot camp that has retained all of its vividness is the sight of my right arm swinging up and down like a windmill blade over a growing and nearing Grivas, who would be standing statue-like on the other side of the painted white line that I was marching along, his hands folded at his back, his sunglasses perched over his conspiratorial mustache, his impenetrable elevated face gazing motionlessly down upon us as the sun slid down behind him into the Mediterranean under a magnolia sky.  Grivas reveled in the marching.  The sight of all those young uniformed men in a regimented parade elevated his spirit with manly passion and sent coursing through his shuddering flesh all those Hellenic aspirations and yearnings that gave meaning to his life as a training camp commander.         

There was no slacking when it came to marching. Neither hail, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of Grivas’ sight stayed us from the dreary completion of our appointed rounds.  The crucial thing in this boot camp seemed to be that we learned to march well.  That was how you defended your country: you marched gloriously. We never did.  Either the arphades were trying to sabotage Grivas’ dreams or they simply didn’t give a damn.   

“You should be looking up when you march!” Grivas would lecture us.  “Only women look down! Your eyes should be looking up, where the eagles fly.”  The wind would often come whipping across the plaza and we would stand there shivering as he tried to inspire us.  “In hard times, you should raise your head and say ‘I will struggle.’  To win the medal.  Tomorrow it may be a small race.  The day after tomorrow a marathon.”

“Up yours,” the kid next to me said.

“Who said that?” he screamed. “Tramp!  Scumbag!  Who told you to talk?”  Grivas became increasingly unstable with the approach of the swearing-in ceremony.  “Lift your left knee high when I say attention or I’ll cut your legs off!” he bawled.  “And don’t scratch yourselves!”  His curses also grew increasingly obscene as boot camp progressed, filled with bizarre, often incomprehensible, references to genitalia.

On our last weekend furlough before the swearing-in ceremony Grivas made a round of the barracks rooms for an inspection.  As usual we had been threatened that if he was dissatisfied we would spend the weekend inside the camp. We spent most of Friday morning sweeping, mopping, scrubbing walls, washing windows, wiping the dust from the top of the ceiling fan blades, shining our boots, and stretching our blankets so tight that you could bounce a coin off the beds.

“He’s coming! He’s coming!” our barracks room captain cried, running into the room. We all stood at attention by our beds.  We could hear him ranting in the room next to us.  I later found out that he had opened a locker and found the words “Fuck the commander” scribbled all over the inside of the door.  He did not even glance at our room when he walked in.  He went straight to the lockers and opened the first one.  No one had expected he would check the lockers.  The conscript responsible for the locked stomped to attention and reported his name. 

“Magazines… food…” Grivas murmured with disgust, tossing the magazine and the packet of chips onto the bed next to him.

He went to the next locker. “Dirty socks,” he said, tossing them behind him.  He opened another locker and a soda tumbled out and spilled at his feet.  He then opened my locker and began rummaging through my folded underpants, under which lay a plastic water bottle filled with the clear Cypriot spirit zivania. “Look at this, a bottle of water amidst the underwear.  Couldn’t these be in a bag?”

“They’re clean,” I said.

He paused and then his eyes darted over at me as if I had no right to speak.  “If you come to my room in headquarters you’ll see I keep all of my underwear and socks in bags.”  He shut the locker door and moved on to the next one.

12. THE SWEARING-IN CEREMONY

 “Tomorrow will be your day,” Grivas told us the day before the swearing-in ceremony.  “Tomorrow is a day for your parents and siblings and girlfriends to admire you.  There is no other KEN training camp in operation right now so all the stations will be showing you.  You have a chance to be seen by the whole world.”

And so it was that the whole world–or at least friends and family–witnessed the making of these 350 or so recruits into hardened soldiers trained to defend the homeland and withstand the rigors of war.  During the ceremony a conscript fainted and had to be carried away on a stretcher.  As usual we were told that the National Guard Chief of Staff would grant us an additional day of honorary furlough if we marched well and as usual it was given to us despite our resemblance to circus performers specializing in military satire. 

And it may as well have been a circus.  It was a lucrative act, with ticket sales on a national scale.  The essential thing was to keep the applause going by giving the appearance of a disciplined, trained army.  Like circus showmen, we spent weeks practicing for several minutes of performance.  It was no different from the island’s political arena: all hot air and humbug.  We were too busy puffing our chests out and raising our chins for anything else.   

The day after returning from our furlough—one of the last days in boot camp—we went on a “mountain trek,” which amounted to a mild three-hour hike, rest stops included, through the surrounding hills. On the way back, we passed through a neighboring village. Before we entered it we were taught one last chant, with the opening line “we are tough and disciplined.”  We practiced it a few times and then set off stomping into the village, bellowing out the self-promotional chant.  Two octogenarians applauded us from their porches as we stomped through; a few squawking chickens raced in fright across the road in front of us; and a dozen schoolchildren rushed in our direction upon sighting us and threw themselves against the chain link fence of their playground, pointing at us and laughing. 

Constantine Markides

*The entry Manning the Dead Zone, about guard duty on the UN-monitored Green Line, picks up where this piece ends.*

3 GRIVAS

AFTER ROLL CALL at morning lineup, a corporal announced that those who wished to see a doctor should go line up by the wall. Twenty-three of the seventy-three conscripts with apparently obscure ailments that manifested no external symptoms at once buoyantly made their way to the wall where they waited, their grinning faces radiating health and well-being.

An officer from headquarters then took the place of the corporal. He glared down silently upon us through his red-tinted sunglasses.

“Somebody discharged in the showers,” he finally said. “Obviously whoever did it learned it at home. His old man taught him. That’s the only excuse for that.”

The toilets consisted of holes in the porcelain floor over which you squatted and some of the conscripts tried avoiding them entirely. But one could only stave off biology for so long and eventually the deed had to be done, although thankfully it never again occurred in the shower. It was astonishing just how long some of them waited. Occasionally one would find a monstrous blasphemy perched on the edge of the hole of such girth that a human origin seemed impossible. These would become the subject of countless photos and lewd jokes and would remain etched in the collective memory of the conscripts long after it had been hosed down the hole with a high-powered blast of water.

After the officer had finished his scolding and walked off, one of the sergeants began to pace up and down the lineup. “So you shit in the showers?” he jeered, scowling with narrowed eyes at each of us in passing as if we had all offered individual scatological contributions to the mislaid heap that was still curled up in one of the shower stalls. “Aren’t you ashamed?”

But it was not until later that day when we were being congratulated by one of the corporals that we were ashamed. It was the third and final day of conscription and, as we had finished early in the equipment room, we were sent off to a black beret corporal to learn how to stomp to attention and execute a left- and right-turn and an about-turn. The first lesson involved how to react to the command “Men!” We were to inhale deeply and puff out our chests so that we looked proud. He gave the command and our chests at once swelled out and our chins and gazes went up. We were a model group and we looked so proud that we were ashamed.

But it was not so with the thirty or so conscripts from the neighboring company who were approaching our barracks in what was supposed to be a group march. They came huffing and misstepping along in the setting sunlight like a piece of weird performance art, their heads swiveling about in every direction, their boots ringing upon the concrete in a dissonant clatter, their bent arms flailing in perfect untimed disorganization, some of them even simultaneously swinging in zombie-style the same arm and leg instead of the opposing ones. They were an officer’s nightmare, an inerasable military failure, an insult to martial order and discipline, and the pride was visible on their faces as they lurched by.

That evening in the dining hall the training camp commander spoke to all 350 or so of us from the three companies. He had a bushy mustache and glasses with orange-tinted lenses. He was always pacing about with his arms folded behind at his lower back, taking long slow strides as if he were in profound contemplation, although between the tinted lenses and the dark complex growth on his upper lip it looked more as if he were perpetually in the grip of some intricate conspiratorial scheme. When he spoke before groups of soldiers he always accented the last syllable of every sentence to ensure we grasped its triviality. He was a diligent suspicious man who kept his socks and underwear neatly organized in bags and was never relaxed unless he was restlessly prowling the grounds of his training camp, guarding against instances of insubordination and slovenliness. He had a habit of running the edge of his finger up along your cheek to see when you had last shaven and he would change the station on the cafeteria television whenever Euronews came on as he felt conscripts would be better off exposed to mushy Greek soap operas than Anglo-American propaganda. The soldiers all addressed him as Mr. Commander but amongst themselves they called him Grivas because of his striking visual resemblance to the EOKA general, with whom he also shared ideological ground.

“We are all Greeks,” he would later tell all of us three-and six-monthers, most of who had grown up abroad. “Some of us are Greeks of Cyprus. Others are Greeks of Greece. Some are Greeks of England. Or Greeks of America. Or Greeks of Australia. But we are all Greeks.” On the other side of the Green Line, Turkish Cypriot commanders were telling Turkish Cypriot conscripts much of the same, except they pronounced them Turks instead of Greeks. It was unfortunate that Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot officers were doing such a good job at keeping the island divided on ethnic lines because they would have surely enjoyed celebrating together over raki and ouzo their nationalist love of another country and their mutual aversion for Cypriot identity.

But the topic of our Hellenic Spirit was not broached during that first welcome speech. A lower-ranking officer saluted Grivas and then snapped out the force numbers with that cheerless inhuman martial formality that is referred to as a “brisk and lively manner.” One of the conscripts made a farting noise but it was ignored. Grivas then saluted the officer off and turned to us.

“Men!” he called out. But he did not continue with the command for attention. He glared at us. “Haven’t you learned that the head should be thrown back and your cap should fly back fifteen meters?” He paused. “Invalid.”

“Men!” he called again. We puffed out our chests and threw our heads back, although our caps did not go flying into the back wall. “Attention!” We raised our left leg and stomped so that it landed by our right foot while simultaneously extending our arms—which had been folded at our back—to our side. “At ease!” We stomped back to the ‘at ease’ position.

“That was your first attention to me,” he said. “When in a week I give a command I want you to be excellent.” One of the conscripts was murmuring. Grivas looked in his direction. “I ask that you shut your mouth. Your head is swiveling. Look in front of you.” He paused. “Today the 2007 conscription of the January series ended. I welcome you to the KEN Paphos and the ranks of the National Guard. I hope that your service, whether it is twenty-five months or a reduced three months, is pleasant and will be a sweet good memory.” A number of conscripts were whispering and sniggering. “I asked that you do not murmur. And when you are at ease, you do not move.” He paused. “You are far from your family here. Your family will be calmer and more pleasant when you tell them over the phone that you are doing well.”

The National Guard desperately wanted its soldiers’ families to be calm and pleasant, especially the soldiers’ mothers. The National Guard had softened significantly in the last decade, and it was not long after the arrival of cell phones in Cyprus that soldiers were permitted to bring their mobiles into boot camp, which only eroded away the remnants of army discipline. Conscripts in boot camp were no longer isolated from the outside world and so there were far fewer opportunities for officers to break them down and rewire them in their martial image. Anytime a conscript was punished he could immediately place a call and protest about his abused human rights to his mother, who would then call National Guard headquarters or the media and protest that those men who had seized her son from her and declared absolute custody over him for the next two years were violating his human rights because they were not imposing their militaristic existence upon him in a courteous and respectful manner. The conscripts gallantly upheld human rights standards on army camps and outposts and made sure to be as discourteous and disrespectful as possible to the officers, since officers were far less likely to complain to their mothers.

In short, the National Guard had turned into damage control for spoiled delinquent teenagers. “We don’t use our knives to carve our name and series into the dining tables,” Grivas said, in case any conscript had mistaken notions on why the National Guard had issued each of them a pocketknife. “The tables hurt.” He paused, impressed with this poetic turn of phrase that had unexpectedly risen from him. “And we hurt too.”

But despite a decline in disciplinary standards, the National Guard had not relented in its efforts to infuse a patriotic spirit when it came to the issue of the island’s division and occupation. It had been so unrelenting that it had become ineffective. “When I say, where will we light a candle, you will say Apostolos Andreas,” Grivas told us. “When I say where will we go for coffee, you say Kyrenia. And when I say where will we go for a swim, Famagusta.”

“Where are we going to light a candle?” Grivas demanded.

“Apostolos Andreas!” the room boomed.

“Where will we go for coffee?”

“Kyrenia!”

“And where will we go for a swim?”

“Famagusta!”

The enthusiastic Q&A may have made sense before the crossings had opened three years ago, but it now either seemed like a blasphemous proposal by a military commander for a daytrip to the north or an anachronism in serious need of updating since it only emphasized with self-defeating irony the reality that that every day Greek Cypriots were making such trips.

It was not so different with the chants, probably written in late 1974, that our corporals and sergeants and cadet officers had us yell out that same night before prayer while marching in place in front of our barracks. Our company hollered into the offended night about how blood had been spilled in villages in the north, about eagles and freedom, about how Cyprus is Greek and so is Macedonia, and then we were told to turn to face the second company and then, as if in competition with them, holler out a final chant with the unforgettable one-liner “unfaithful Turkish dog, you killed a Greek.”

“You should feel this when you say it!” one corporal screamed. “How many of you don’t feel it?” I was neither feeling it nor saying it, and in fact the only thing I felt was an urge to club the silly corporal upside the head. It is one thing to go through the motions of the idiotic things you are ordered to do and another to take them to heart. The younger conscripts in my company, however, did not seem to object, not because they found the lyrics stirring, but because it was an opportunity to taunt and roar at the other conscripts in the second company who may as well have been the unfaithful dogs for all they cared.

4. THE ARPHADES

Every year there are two conscription dates for the National Guard: one in January, the other in July. As a rule, those attending college after the army enter in July. The rest go in January and are nicknamed the ‘arphades’ (pronounced ärf’äes) because they are in the ‘A’ or ‘alpha’ series. The arphades are far fewer in number and have over the years acquired a tarnished reputation. Just as the word ‘idiot’ can no longer be used to refer to people with mental impairments without an accompanying insult, so too is it impossible to refer to someone as an ‘arphas’ (the singular of arphades) without slamming his intelligence. Even arphades use the word ‘arphas’ to put down one another (“You’re a total arphas”) and actually pride themselves on the title, which to the July conscripts further demonstrates their collective stupidity. But in fact the only reason arphades are so astoundingly stupid is because they are clever.

Arphades live up to their reputation as jackasses because if they did not they wouldn’t be able to get away with nearly as much as they do. They are in a misfit category that brings with it special treatment and privileges. With more or less impunity they raise hell after lights-out, ignore wakeup calls, evade chores, jabber through roll call and sleep through sentry duty. The officers threaten them incessantly but do nothing, instead writing off their baboon antics as the inevitable result of irreversible malignant genetic and environmental influences.

It was often hard to tell whether they were acting or serious. One of the arphades once saluted a cadet officer with his left hand instead of the right. “No, the other side,” the cadet officer scolded him. Without cracking a grin, the arphas promptly crossed his hand across his face, so that his left hand was aimed at his right temple.

The arphades took pleasure in defying every aspect of the training program. Every night four conscripts from each platoon were assigned to stand as sentries for two-hour shifts on a rotating basis in the hallway outside their barracks rooms to watch over the sleepers and the locked gun rack. An additional four conscripts per night from the entire company were scheduled to stand guard over the toilets and showers (we referred to this position as Shit Guardian since it was the only explanation for standing guard over a bathroom). This pseudo-sentry duty was presumably to acclimatize us to the idea of waking up in the middle of the night for a guard shift. It might have worked had the repercussions for missing one’s shift involved anything more than hot air; on average, between the hours of twelve am and six am, only one in four sentries got out of bed.

The only time arphades excelled at guard duty was whenever they smuggled in kebabs and beer. They then took turns of their own initiative, standing by the barracks room door while the others ate their food in bed. Anytime an officer approached, the Kebab Guardian would warn those who were dining to hide the food under the covers and spray cologne about to mask the smell of charbroiled meat.

Morning exercise never lasted more than a half hour and consisted of light jogging to bawdy chants, stretches, and exercises like crunches, back extensions and pushups; it was undemanding, enjoyable and beneficial and most of the arphades did everything to avoid it. Every morning three in four weaseled their way out of it and of those twenty-five per cent who did participate, about half of them would drop out partway through. The arphades would instead work on depleting their energy reserves during the night by thrashing about and howling for hours until they had exhausted themselves to sleep. A corporal or a sergeant would make a round of the barracks rooms at ten, shutting the lights off with a stern warning that anyone who made a noise would be punished. As soon as he departed, the arphades would switch the lights back on and begin shrieking, opening and slamming locker doors, swinging from the fan, doing pushups with the bunk beds, wrestling, and even dragging bunk beds out into the hallways, with or without sleepers.

My barracks room was an exception because seven out of the twenty of us happened to be older conscripts like myself and we secured a tolerable degree of quiet during the night by putting up a united bristling front against any violations of the peace. But other older conscripts were not so lucky and sometimes there were only one or two of them in a roomful of rioting fiends. “I can’t take it anymore,” said one frazzled 26-year-old from a neighboring room. “I can’t get more than twenty minutes of sleep at a time. I want to kill them.”

There were times I wished he did kill them. Roll call would often take a half hour instead of five minutes because many of the arphades simply could not be bothered to get out of bed. In the mornings, those of us who went out on time would have to wait shivering in the 6:15 am cold for fifteen minutes while the corporal bellowed at the others until they finally emerged, bootlaces untied, unshaven, their mucus-encrusted eyes looking out amusedly at the exasperated hypothermic lot of us. If they were especially long in materializing the conscript officers would make the rest of us do about-turns while shouting “we are waiting for you!” And then when they finally did all line up, they would yap, smoke, and play music or porn videos on their cell phones so that a five-minute roll call instead took another fifteen minutes and like misbehaving nursery children we would again be ordered to do continuous about-turns until it was quiet. The worst of the arphades tossed their cigarette butts and trash on the floor, smeared shit on the walls of the toilet stalls, sprayed shaving cream graffiti all over the bathroom mirror, and expected everyone else to clean up the mess.

It was astonishing how much some of them got away with. One of them, when ordered by the company commander to clean the toilets for the day as punishment for a slew of misdeeds, promptly replied, “You clean them.” He never did clean them and he never was punished.

Other arphades found subtler ways of disrespecting the high-ranking officers, like the time when Grivas was reproaching us after the first inspection of the barracks: “The barracks are filthy,” he said. “Non-smokers don’t want to have to pick up the cigarette butts of every asshole smoker.” A murmur went up through the company. “I have to speak openly to you because you don’t understan— Who farted?” Grivas paused. “Who farted?” he demanded.

“I did. It slipped out.”

“It slipped out? What’s your name?”

“Syradiotis, Kostas.”

“Who?” he demanded.

“Syradiotis, Kostas.”

“Aren’t you a soldier?”

“Yes.”

“Then say it.”

“Soldier Syradiotis, Kostas.”

Grivas paused. “Say ‘I’m sorry’.”

“I’m sorry.”

Unlike Grivas, our company commander was a coolheaded capable orator in his early thirties who would lecture us in an authoritative tone about team spirit and group unity, about respecting and depending upon the soldier at your side. “Adjust your course,” he would tell us. “You came to the KEN and you think you’re on vacation. Forget it. I repeat, recruits, adjust your course.” He was one of those rare officers who had managed to climb the military hierarchy without the usual corrosion of character that comes with authority. Everyone liked him and no one ever adjusted his course.

He was the kind of decent reasonable army man that any recruit would be lucky to have as his commanding officer and I desperately wanted him to hulk out into the kind of unreasonable blockheaded brute that I would despise. I yearned for a bully of violent unreasoning action to crush some spirits and bones. A few arphades in particular would send my nerves squirming and my teeth into a clench-up, and graphic visions would possess me of a fist going through their heads, splintering out the backside in a blissful eruption of skull and brain. I prayed with an inward feverishness for the officers to drop the paternal talk and threats and instead take up the bludgeon, to flog them with rusty chain, pull out toenails, electrocute testicles, shatter kneecaps, or just execute them against a wall, why not, the world will go on spinning, where are the fascists when you need them?

The arphades were so maddeningly aggravating that I soon grew incredibly fond of them. You could not help but respect their boundless disrespect and lawlessness. They had managed to turn boot camp into a bizarre state-funded kinderarmy for the delinquent. But that said, the bulk of the finest and most generous Cypriots also come from their ranks. In these so-called uneducated peasants one can still find that mellow earthy warmth and fierce devotion that are becoming endangered traits due to the materialist rave that over the last two decades has been sweeping the island with the frenzy and destructive power of a locust plague.

As I too was an arphas, I soon learned to adapt myself to the arpha way. In the afternoons, when ‘free time’ ended, I would remain in bed when the first call for lineup was bellowed out. On the twelfth or thirteenth call I might consider putting my boots on. I once counted them yell “Lineup!” thirty-five times. But I was never quite able to cultivate their knack for insubordination and disregard of duties, which was their way of rebelling against the conscription system. The arphades understood perfectly well the magnitude of the gulf dividing conscript officers, who were merely completing their two-year service (in increasing order of rank: corporal, sergeant, and cadet officer) and ‘permanents,’ who were career army men (warrant officer, company commander, camp commander, colonel, brigadier, etc). It was not until I left the KEN and was sent for sentry duty on the Green Line that I came to fully recognize this distinction (one of ‘us’ versus ‘them’). That is why they paid little to no attention to the 19- and 20-year-old corporals, sergeants, and cadet officers, who had absolutely no power to do anything to them but refer them to the commanding officer, who for all practical purposes had been stripped of disciplinary power thanks to the advent of mobile phones, human rights rhetoric, and pro-active mothers.

There was only one conscript officer who commanded their respect and could silence and still an entire lineup of rioting arphades with a few deep barks. And he happened to be my platoon leader.

5. CHEWBACCA

Chewbacca was a muscular, fit, disciplined, capable, and dutiful young man despite having spent almost two years in the army. He was a 19-year-old green beret and a cadet officer but appeared a decade older due to his commanding presence and the deep booming timbre of his voice, which seemed to emerge from the primordial bowels of the earth. One could not ignore a Chewbaccan bellow any more than trespassers could ignore the bark of Cerberus or philistines the apocalyptic denunciations of an Old Testament prophet.

The arphades had so much fearful respect of Chewbacca that they would ambush him at any opportunity. He formed an insurmountable physical challenge and brawny arphades tested their manhood by pouncing upon him in gangs of three or four at a time. I remember watching during one of my two am sentry shifts as four conscripts tackled Chewbacca in the main hall of the barracks and tried unsuccessfully to wrestle him to the ground. Chewbacca never objected to such attacks and instead humored them by putting them in headlocks and squashing their faces against the floor.

There were however two scraggly arphades in my platoon—Satan and Wig—that knew how to get a rise out of Chewbacca. Satan was a ruffian with enthusiastic acne and eyes that for no apparent reason would often goggle from his sockets as if he had just experienced a flashback of some infernal past torment. Satan was always finding new and creative ways of irritating cadet officers. When his phone would ring in the middle of lineup and the cadet officer would sternly warn him to shut it off, he would promptly reply that he didn’t know how.

Satan’s partner-in-delinquency, Wig, was a restless windbag who slouched about like a slinking alley cat with skinny arms that hung limp at his sides and a head that was always craning forward and to the side like a turtle taking stock of its surroundings after a long hibernation inside its shell. Wig was always raising his arm during training seminars with the word “Permission?” Dozens of times a day he would ask for permission to ask a question. His questions were consistently ridiculous and four out of five times the answer was no. He would then merely lower his hand and raise it again a few moments later, requesting permission to ask a question. None of us knew who had first called him Wig or why, but the name had stuck.

Both Satan and Wig took boundless pleasure in repeating the same jokes, or what they saw as jokes, countless times per day. Wig would often count “one, two, three” and then he, Satan, and some of their groupies would yell out “Patrida! [Country]” at the top of their lungs. No one knew why Wig and Satan yelled this and they probably didn’t either.

In lineup they would do anything to disrupt roll call and make a scene. “Permission?” Wig once said, raising his arm. “I’ve gotta piss. Can I go? No? Then I’m gonna pull it out right here.” He started to unbutton himself, which sparked yelling from the conscript officers. “Well what do you want me to do? Piss all over myself? I can’t hold it.” They let him go and he slunk indoors, grinning back at the rest of us.

During one of the training seminars that were held in the hills on the army camp’s perimeter, Chewbacca was explaining to us how to orient oneself without a compass. “If it’s a cloudy day, you can look for physical landmarks. In Cyprus trees usually bend towards the south because the winds generally blow—”

“Permission?” Wig asked, thrusting up his hand.

“No,” Chewbacca said. “Because the winds generally blow from the north. You can also look for anthills. Ants build the north side of their anthills slightly higher to block—“

“Permission?” Wig asked, again raising his hand.

“Don’t interrupt! Ants build the northern side higher to block the wind. You can also orient yourself if a graveyard is nearby. Tombstones all look to the east so that when the dead rise they face east.”

After a moment of silence, Wig raised his hand. “Permission?”

“Yes.”

“How can they rise if they’re dead?”

6. THE BRIGADIER

The highest-ranking officer who came to the army camp on a regular basis was the brigadier. He was a towering man with a great curling mustache that was all the rage in the 1950s. He was often in buoyant spirits but could storm over as instantly and ferociously as a Greco-Turkish dogfight over the Aegean. The army camp was a fine place for him to indulge his mood swings, which in any other work environment would have been compassionately treated with pills. When he yelled at someone he would thrust his open paw out in front of him as if demanding alms for the disgraceful state of the camp. Without retracting his extended arm and before an answer was given, he would launch into another question with an emphatic twirl of his hand that would have also been effective for spinning basketballs.

But it was not the recruits whom he yelled at. In fact he was full of advice for them. “When you walk, you keep your head tall. You are slaves of no one,” he told us one afternoon after a corporal had bossed us out of out of our barrack rooms during rest period and ordered us to hastily line up outside.

Rather it was the conscript officers who suffered his foul moods. The brigadier would come stomping through the camp bellowing out questions and twirling his interrogative hand at every corporal, sergeant and cadet officer he encountered. Grivas would always be at his side, docile as a lamb, relinquishing all authority in his superior’s presence. The army hierarchy and the dictatorial privileges conferred upon every officer in relation to those under him ensured that ever officer, although a slave driver to many, was also a slave to some. It was like a family tree of abuse—the father mistreating his sons who in turn mistreated their sons, on down through the generations—although unlike the family tree, the relatives never died. It was a very democratic totalitarian structure and an educational one, as it cultivated an existential awareness of the variable and absurd nature of the human condition.

News of the brigadier’s approach would always send the officers into a state of panic, like on the first Saturday afternoon when a corporal came rushing into our barracks room.

“The brigadier is coming for an inspection!” he hissed. “Stand by your beds!” We all hastily took our positions. “If he looks at you directly, say your name!” The corporal rushed out of the room.

Moments later a sergeant rushed in. “Why are you all standing by your beds? You’re not supposed to know the brigadier is coming. Look like you’re talking!” We all fell back onto our beds and started pretending to talk.

The brigadier soon walked in and we all stood up. “What are you all doing here?” he demanded. “Why are you inside? Well? It’s not prohibited to be outside, you know. Do you know that?”

“We know,” a three-monther replied. “We’re relaxing. Discussing.”

“Discussing what? How to solve the Cyprus problem?” The brigadier grinned, evidently pleased with his joke, and walked out into the other barracks room across the hall.

A sergeant came into our room moments after the brigadier had left the company barracks. “Go outside,” he urged. “It’s still free time. The brigadier should see you relaxing out there.” We went outside. The brigadier’s car was gone. “Oh, I guess he’s gone,” the sergeant said. “You can go back inside if you want.”

7. THE CAFETERIA PRAYER

The next day during dinner Grivas lectured us on how we must respond to his call for attention when sitting at the cafeteria tables:

“When I say ‘Camp’ you stomp your fists once upon the table at shoulder width distance apart and leave them there.”  Grivas paused. “CAMP!”

We slammed our fists down onto the table, knocking the cups over. “You stay in this position with your heads straight forward and without moving until I tell you otherwise,” he said while pacing across the cafeteria floor.  “I said don’t move!” he snapped.

After a pause, he resumed in a slow, measured tone.  “I hear some of you have complained about the food. I eat the same food as you. If you spit in it, then I will eat it.”

“That’s how much of a shithead you are,” a conscript at my table murmured.

“Keep quiet! Don’t murmur!” Grivas barked. “It’s easy to be a critic, but it’s not easy to dance to the orchestra in front of everyone.” He paused so that the incomprehensible force of his metaphor could sink in. Someone raised his hand. “Don’t raise your hand!”  He continued to rant for some time as we sat there with our fists on the table, as if each of us were clutching the invisible bars of a cage. When he finished, he silently paced about for some time with his hands folded at his back.

“Everyone say the Lord’s Prayer together,” he finally ordered. The air at once filled with the bowed murmurings of the Lord’s Prayer and the synchronized motion of hundreds of right hands with bundled fingertips grazing over the four points on one’s body—forehead, belly, right nipple, left nipple—whose traced weave represents the Orthodox cross. The prayer ended. “You are free,” Grivas said.

There was no pretence in the Cypriot army about separation of church and state. As far as most of the permanent officers were concerned, the Lord’s staff was an assault rifle. The army apparently wanted to ensure that the warrior spirit was built upon the Christian foundations of the love-thy-enemy, turn-thy-other-cheek teachings of Jesus so that, in the case of war, an atmosphere of brotherly love and compassion would prevail after the smoke and screams had subsided and the charred dismembered bodies had been tossed into their unmarked graves.

There was prayer before and after every meal and prayer before bed. But there were also occasions of greater consequence that demanded more than a brief prayer. For such events a blessing was in order.

“You are now going to go to the church for a blessing,” an officer told us during lineup on Monday morning after breakfast. “And then you are going to get your guns.”

The final entry of The Way of the Arpha will be on July 4.

arphas (ärf’äs) 1. a Cypriot male who conscripts in the January “alpha” series of National Guard basic training   2. (derogatory) a jackass (pl. arphades)

1 THE CONSCRIPTION OFFICER

THE CONSCRIPTION OFFICER did not look up from his desk when I entered his office. Nor did he look up when I handed him the copy of my birth certificate proving I was over the age of twenty-six or the consul’s letter from a Cyprus embassy in the U.S. confirming I had spent most of my life outside of Cyprus.

He glanced at the consul’s document. “Why isn’t this in Greek!” he muttered in a voice without a trace of Cypriot dialect. “They want to make us all Amerikanakia!” He slowly and disgustedly shook his head at this diplomatic betrayal of the ethnic struggle. It was deplorable because the National Guard had been trying for close to a half century to make us Cypriots all Greeks.

He then looked at my birth certificate, frowned, and handed back both documents, telling me to return on Monday after I had them translated at the Press and Information Office. It was clear the conscription officer was a man infused with the spirit of non-discrimination. Why should a Cypriot born in, say, Lithuania have to get his birth certificate translated into Greek just because the relevant officials can’t read Lithuanian while one born in the U.S. does not have to translate it just because the officials are able to read English? It was far more democratic when the bureaucratic proceeding was equally laborious for all barbarians of foreign tongues.

He maintained a severe expression throughout the encounter and did not once look up at me from his papers. But I took no offense: I had observed earlier from the waiting room that he was considerate enough to be equally dismissive and unsmiling towards everyone. He was a tall gangly man with glasses and carefully combed hair parted down the middle of his head, and he carried himself with equal measures of detachment and disdain. His egalitarian indifference to those under him was not only admirable but also forgivable because had he not been a stern army officer he would have risked being a geek.

It was however irritating that no one had told me my documents needed to be in Greek when I had called the office several months ago. But then I tried to put myself in their boots and my resentment subsided as I recognized how challenging it must be to unnecessarily complicate life for others. So with the translated, officially stamped documents in hand I returned on Monday morning to the office and was given my conscription papers; on Tuesday night I buzzed my hair off; and on Wednesday at noon I walked through the main gate of the Paphos KEN, the Recruit Training Camp, for my first day at boot camp.

Any expectations I had of thick-necked red-faced sergeants bellowing at trembling conscripts soon vanished. It was often the reverse. Two teenagers with ponytails halfway down their back were jeering rebelliously at two sergeants, claiming they were going to get deferment. Another group of conscripts jabbered and hooted through a ten-minute National Guard video (“Ah, come on, put a porno on!”) that was meant to inspire recruits for the forthcoming army training by depicting tanks and helicopters firing missiles to a soundtrack of military drumming

Army men and politicians in Cyprus cite lack of manpower as the reason why conscription must be twenty-five months. It is estimated close to a third of the recruits defer their twenty-five-month conscription term by claiming mental instability. Were conscription shortened to twelve or fourteen months, most of the recruits would not likely try to evade it since exemption often carries repercussions (exclusion from government jobs, denial of driver’s license, etc). The army would then have the extra forces that it claims to need.

But reducing the military term would be a seditious betrayal of the high-ranking patriots whose redundant jobs depend on a bloated military budget. It would potentially also lead to a loss of that martial spirit for which Cypriots are so unrenowned. By instead making it easy to allege mental instability, the National Guard remains safely hard-pressed for those essential force numbers that are no longer necessary under present day political conditions.

Some of the more accommodating doctors even oblige the recruit or soldier by asking him to choose his desired mental illness from a list. Nonetheless, deferment is not always granted right away. A conscript who looked like he was fourteen threw a tantrum when he was not given immediate deferment.

“Wait till you see what I’ll do when I’m in tonight!” he yelped at the cadet officers. “No one is going to sleep!” He was a yapping Chihuahua with dangling knobby limbs and seemed to have no concern that everyone there could have smeared his face across the pavement. No one touched him. He stayed a few days and then was released. The idea was to put on a show that you were unhinged and a danger to others. One of the conscripts threw a rock through the window of the psychologist’s office and another pulled a pocketknife on her. They were both awarded deferment for their striving efforts while the others who behaved well were punished with two-year terms.

After handing over our conscription forms in a building strung with innumerable small Greek and Cypriot flags, we each had to strip to our underwear and stand before a panel of moribund health professionals with dark sagging pouches under their eyes who rated us on our physical well being. Anything we did involved hours of waiting so it was twilight by the time we finally arrived at the equipment distribution room where we were issued our army gear.

After dropping off our new possessions at the barracks we went straight to the mess hall. We were served trays of fried squid rings, boiled potatoes, and salad, along with baskets of bread, bowls of oranges and bottles of olive oil and vinegar. Due to unfounded rumors, I had prepared myself for meals more along the lines of diced lizard or stewed goat hooves. But in fact, except for breakfast, which was usually just tea and bread, all the meals were consistently very good, and over the following weeks everyone consistently complained about them, many instead smuggling in inferior take-away or curbing their appetite with packaged chocolate-crème-filled pastries from the canteen. It was very considerate of them to be so ungrateful for the quality meals and I nodded in agreement with them that the food was unacceptable as I helped myself to their untouched trays.

I was in the first company barracks, a two-story cream peach building with rooms of ten bunk beds and twenty lockers. On the vast concrete lot there were two other buildings—the second and third companies. All three equidistant barracks were on the same parallel. Hewn into unnatural cliffs, the mountain loomed to our sides and behind us in a semicircle; the entire concrete expanse had been carved out of the mountain slope and then paved over. The three buildings were identical in rectangular shape and differed only in their pastel coloring. Leading up to the main entrance of each building was a series of steps that were perpetually littered with cigarette butts and stained with vending machine hot chocolate despite diligent daily efforts of the assigned soldiers to sweep and mop them as infrequently as possible.

That night we all lined up outside our respective buildings. To my right was the second company barracks and, beyond that, the third. At the top of the steps of each building stood an officer, illuminated in ghastly white fluorescence by a single exterior light over the main entrance. The conscripts were all lined up before him. A row of tall streetlamps flanked the lot and each cast a pale pinkish fluorescent cone-shaped glow upon the concrete. Conscripts would still be arriving for two more days but to even just look through one’s billowing plumes of breath at the 200 or so recruits who were already there, lined up in three clusters, each cluster made up of eight ordered rows of conscripts standing in front of a giant oppressive edifice where a single illuminated officer addressed them from his perch, all this taking place in a vast concrete lot, empty but for some sinister streetlamps, the carved walls of a mountain rising along the perimeter and ringed above by barbed wire… to look through one’s breath at all this one could not help but think of prison or concentration camp. It would prove to have more in common with a nursery school, but it did make a forbidding impression during that first chilly January night.

At one point a vehicle drove up and an officer emerged to inform us that this was a “different environment” and that we best therefore do our utmost to acclimatize to it. “There’s no Filipinos or blacks here so you’ll have to do the cleaning up,” he said and then returned to his vehicle and drove off to his home, which probably could have served for us as an exemplar of spotless sanitation and domestic devotion thanks to the conscientious efforts of his wife or Sri Lankan maid. Moments later we were ordered to turn to the east and remove our caps. The Lord’s Prayer was recited. Then we were ordered to go to bed.

2 THE EQUIPMENT OFFICER

The next morning after a breakfast of frosted flakes, warm milk and group prayer, which came standard with every meal, a corporal pulled aside from our company all the three-monthers and six-monthers, as those of us with reduced conscription terms were referred to, and led us in a line of pairs to the equipment distribution room.

Our job would be to issue the army gear to the arriving conscripts. We were each assigned a position next to an article of clothing. I was on underwear duty and was to deliver to every conscript three olive tank tops and three tighty-greenies. The first group did not show up for several hours so we passed the morning lounging in the sun and playing foosball in the neighboring canteen.

The equipment officer was a man of medium height who looked taller because of his long neck, which looked even longer because he buzzed the hair most of the way up the back of his narrow head, which looked even narrower because of the shape and position of the flat-billed army cap that sat high over his prominent forehead, which looked even more prominent when the veins stood out upon it. He ranted, hollered, and cursed at his temporary staff to keep himself in good spirits. The more he shouted, the more his blood-engorged vessels bulged out on his forehead, and the more he was at peace. After an especially cantankerous spew of invective he bore about him an aura of serene equanimity. But it was not solely for calmness of mind that he screamed like a madman. He also saw himself as the most recent manifestation of a long vibrant military tradition of officers berating and hollering at subordinates, a noble line of great screaming men that has throughout history ensured that the vitality of army life remains untainted by the energy-sapping soft-spoken niceties of the civilian world. It was hard work to yell all day long, especially as he was already burdened by the countless headaches of inventory counts, backorders, storage procedures, and requests for exchanges, but he selflessly took it upon himself to bitch at everyone without a murmur of complaint. He shrieked, fulminated and bellowed as if he despised all of us and we all took an instant liking to him.

Before the first group came in, he told us to stay calm and not to lose our tempers. “What the hell are you waiting for, the Holy Spirit?” he later hollered at one of the six-monthers who was lost in a reverie, causing a back-up in the delivery line. Another six-monther was shuffling through a box to find the right jacket size for the conscript. “Hurry up,” the equipment officer yelled at him. “We’re not choosing grooms here!”

“Didn’t I tell you not to smoke in here?” he roared at the far end of the room, chopping his hand in the air. “Hell, what do I have to do in here to keep some order?”

But he kept his fondest cursing for his long-term staff. When he wanted the attention of one of his helpers in the neighboring storage room, he would yell until the escalating decibels penetrated the building walls. “Christo! CHRISTO! CHRISTOOO! Fuck my race! Where in hell is he?”

“The socks!” he ranted when one of his assistants told him one of the boxes was missing. “Can you please tell me where in hell they went? I told you where the socks were and they went to anathema again. I’m gonna tear you apart! What kind of bullshit in this you’re telling me now? We’ll see when the devil comes to take you!” His helpers delighted in his abuse, often mimicking his words and tone to his face, and he would merely glower back at them wordlessly.

Several dozen conscripts returned in mass to the equipment room to exchange some of the gear, which had proven either too large or too small. The equipment officer seemed to relish such group returns because it gave him a chance to tower colossally above them with clipboard in hand and storm at them like a clean-shaven Ahab. He would have them all sit cross legged on the concrete in rows and then would rip through them one by one.

“You, what size? No, not the size you’re holding! Bring it up for the size you want! Over there, you keep quiet! Hurry up! What do you want? Fuck my history!”

There was often a great deal of confusion and the equipment officer would sometimes reassess how he might remedy this lack of communication between himself and the conscript, who was only growing more bewildered with every curse and question. As the equipment officer was an enthusiastic practitioner of the verbal arts, he always found imaginative ways around the problem.

“I have one simple question for you and I want one clear and lucid answer,” he once said in a strong rising voice that yearned to break loose into a passionate harangue. He paused to give the conscript time to prepare himself for the question. “What size are you?”

In between yelling bouts he either languidly chatted with whomever was around, freely dispensing the fruits of his reflection on the subject at hand, or he repeatedly sang the refrain “Se Birovolo” (“I shoot you”) with impassioned musicality.

Like the conscription officer, he too was a democratic man, and he swore with equal non-discriminatory vehemence at everyone of a lower rank than him. But he did not want to give the impression that superiors were untouchables. That’s why he gave us all a brief pep talk before the head of the National Guard visited the equipment room on his tour of the training camp.

“He’s a man, just like us, with feelings,” he noted philosophically. “But he deserves some respect of course.”

The National Guard Chief of Staff came in just long enough to say a few words of encouragement to us in front of the cameraman trailing him. He was in a buoyant mood and stopped to talk with one of the younger conscripts whom he congratulated and then expressed his approval of by delivering to the back of his neck a warm-hearted slap that rang throughout the equipment room.

At the end of the day the equipment officer had us all line up outside. The veins had all settled invisibly back into his forehead and his face, aglow with the warm light of the setting sun, emanated tranquility and self-possession. “Is there anyone who doesn’t want to do this tomorrow?” No one wanted to miss out on another day of rollicking verbal abuse and diatribe. “Okay good, then all of you return at the same time tomorrow. Nice job. The conscription couldn’t have taken place without you.”

He paused and then, as if he felt the compliment needed qualification to be strictly correct, added, “Though they would have found others to do the job, of course.”

*The Way of the Arpha is continued on June 4

PICK AT RANDOM a young man living in a nation that does not maintain conscription and, even if he is averse to violence and authoritarianism, chances are at some point he has entertained the thought of joining the military. There are any number of reasons: sheer curiosity and a desire to see something of the world outside of one’s hometown, a guaranteed income and future university funding, naïve reveries about the heroisms and glories of combat, and of course the desire to serve one’s country, which although much trumpeted is usually more bluster than patriotism, especially if the home team has a recent history of waging wars, not suffering them.

Most of those young men will not sign up. Those who do are probably either so fired up about being soldiers or so short on other career options that they will tolerate more discipline and hardship than will their peers in other countries who face mandatory military service. Assuming a country is large enough to be able to supply enough recruits, a volunteer army – which usually amounts to a mercenary army of the poor – is more reliable than a conscript army. Drafted soldiers are less tolerant of privation and more prone to desertion than volunteers because their ranks also include the middle class and, though less so, the upper class.

The insubordination among American troops in Vietnam was in part due to the privileged economic position, at least when compared to volunteer soldiers, of many of the draftees. It is no surprise then that, despite overstretched forces in Iraq, there is barely any support by high-ranking U.S. military or political leaders to reinstate the draft. Conscripts are even more unruly when they feel that there is no justifiable reason for their service, or at least for its length. In this regard, the Cypriot National Guard makes for a particularly interesting case study.

The 1960 Constitution established a Cypriot army consisting of both Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot contingents. But as the Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots were not integrated from the start, the army soon split on ethnic lines into two separate forces. After the 1963 hostilities between the two ethnic groups, the Cypriot National Guard – a purely Greek Cypriot military – was formed.

Conscription in the Cypriot National Guard currently stands at 25 months, among the longest in the world along with countries like Iran, Egypt, Singapore, South Korea and Israel (North Korea is in a league of its own). Though the island presently remains under occupation, there has been no resumption of hostilities, aside from infrequent and isolated killings on the Green Line, since the summer of 1974 when Turkey invaded after the Greek coup.

Though I had spent five years of my boyhood in Cyprus, I was living in New York City when I turned of enlistment age (anyone with a Greek Cypriot father is obliged to serve). I visited Cyprus several times over the following decade but it was not until I moved to the island two summers ago that I was required by law to enlist within a two-year period. As I had spent most of my life in the U.S. and was over the age of 26, I would only have to serve for three months instead of 25. In comparison to other Greek Cypriot conscripts my army term would be a weekend jaunt.

I enlisted on January 10, 2007. As of this writing I have one week left before I receive my discharge papers. I then return to that undisciplined state of dissolution known as civilian life where one need not shave every morning, shine one’s boots, sleep according to a timetable, stomp to attention, or report in a “brisk and vivacious manner” to one’s superiors, as those who have been making a life out of stomping and saluting are referred to. But then again, the whole point of conscription is that military duty does not end with your discharge papers (and in fact despite widespread use of “discharge papers,” the release documents you receive at the end of your conscription term are actually more like marching orders because you remain a reservist). Until the age of 50 you are called up several times a year to button yourself back into uniform and go to firing practice or to sentry duty on the Green Line or to training on cover and concealment, which might include a nap under an olive tree somewhere.

This piece cannot by any stretch be considered an essay; nonetheless, I am letting it stand on its own for this month’s posting as a brief preface to the following months’ essays on boot camp and on guard duty on the Green Line, both of which will draw upon my three-month conscription. I have decided to do so for three reasons:

One, I am by nature a lazy essayist and always have an eye out for good procrastination excuses, especially ones that invoke noble-sounding military obligations (“It is with great regret that I cannot post this month’s essay, but I am presently serving in the line of duty…”). Two, I have received a number of complaints from readers who do not or cannot print the Fourth Night essays that my postings are often too long for online reading. This one sets a new record in brevity. And three, I am taking the advice of several concerned friends and family members who urged that I wait until I have my release papers in hand before writing anything army-related. I originally dismissed the idea but the colorful – for lack of a better adjective – experiences of the last three months have led me to change my mind.

Many repatriated Cypriots evade their military duty, and I could have done so myself. It is easy enough due to the absence of any bureaucratic coordination in the National Guard Headquarters: just play dumb, don’t ever sign up, and if an official ever asks say that you only recently arrived. But I saw no good reason to avoid enlistment. I had no ethical qualms about it; Cyprus may technically still be at a state of war (and in one of the longest ceasefires in modern history) but I was sure I had better odds of killing somebody or getting killed on a weekend drive to the beach than while in the army. As for willingly subjecting myself to the commands and whims of any halfwit with a few stars and bars on his collar, as Melville’s Ishmael said, “Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that.”

And finally I would have missed out on all the fun, to take a broad interpretation of the word. A life without occasional degradation is a life not worth living.

Constantine Markides