Oct
4
2007
Manning the Dead Zone (Part III)
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Part I of this piece is the August 4 entry
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.
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