Arrived in Split in the morning. Beautiful day, except it's the last one when I'll be wearing civilian clothes for a number of months. Found the port authority and got me a ticket to the ship to Vis. Vis is the second outer island, after Lastovo, to the italian maritime border. Nowadays you can see on Panoramio how many tunnels were dug, ready to accept whole ships. And I'll be in communications, a Morse code operator, which should mean I'm about to spend more time with the key in the classroom than outside with a pickaxe. The latter is reserved for the liners, the telephony guys who strap a spool of 200m of phone line on their back and unwind it, then wind it up later.
On the ship I meet a guy, over a mug of beer, whom I should know but never actually met. A relatively famous photographer from Novi, and I've seen his photos in catalogues and he knows of DC-99, and I heard an incredible rendition of
litl mala iz Obrenovaca / whacha doing kraj mojih ovaca / što im pušćaš. more, rolling stones / kad my ovce vole only shadows
(little little girl from Obrenovac / what are you doing by my sheep / why, oh, why are you playing rolling stones to them / when my sheep like only shadows)
Civilian life ends at the port of Vis. A tenner (the lowest rank, actually an ordinary soldier with a three or month course, one red chevron) greets us on the dock and takes us out of the village, somewhere in the mountain. I manage to charm the barber into believing that my hair is short enough, so he does just a few fake moves with his zero-mark cutter. We pack our civilian clothes into the pillowcases we brought, and get uniformed. The boots are good - didn't cause me any blisters ever, and generally stayed cool even in the summer. However, there's too much stuff that we get, and just carrying it to the dorm requires some help. First meal, military beans of course, they can't screw that, not too bad. I ate worse in the students' menza. Let it be noted that I weighed 74kg.
The older soldiers try to scare us lizards (the common name for rookies, as they still have the [civilian] tail behind them and the color fits just right) but somehow my age keeps me out of the way. Most of them are around 19, and I'm 26. We do nothing for the rest of the day, still waiting for the others. The beds aren't bad - the stuffed wool mattresses and the linen, same ones they use in hospitals, or what I had during those two vacations with obdanište. I pick the upper bunk, so I don't have to crouch or bend while tightening the sheet.
The only kind of toilet they have here is čučavac. Saw two soldiers scrubbing the stone floor (ground stone pressed into tiles with lime) with big brushes, pedalj long. Ouch.
15-XII-2012 - 16-VII-2026