Back to the boring mental masturbation, the army. Dad took me to the airport again, and I got myself into another tour around old city of Zadar, seeing the old places with unseeing eyes - really don't remember what was I doing all morning. Ate something and got on a bus to Šibenik, then walked the city until sunset. I may be bored, the outpost on the hill may be the best quiet hole in the whole vojska, it's still vojska. So I lingered, had a špricer somewhere facing the sea, and slowly walked up. Damn, it was so hot already. I started sweating halfway up the hill.
When I got there, I discovered that the order to stop wearing jackets was given three days ago. Visited Morkec and the guys in the transmission room, and we put the rakija I brought in our special safe. The safe was a drawer in the old airport transmitter, which was huge, size of an old cupboard. It was modular, and each module could be taken out as a drawer, once you unscrew the four 10mm bolts. Except the one with the two gauges and the bell, which was a door, not a drawer. It was rather empty behind it, as we discovered when we tried to unscrew it with bare fingers. With bare fingers? That meant it was screwed like that. The space there would take four bottles. Presently we had two, the whiskey Morkec brought and my brandy. And there was some pršut as well.
We took care never to get drunk. One drink or two was enough, just to make us feel normal. The boss (i.e. the senior corporal) never caught on.
Some time during the following week I was the guard. The boss was away, probably negotiating some extra supplies down in the garrison, and while I was making his bed in the morning I made sure the window was only looking closed and that the civilian line phone was plugged in and left close enough to the window.
Then, walking around with (someone's) M-72 (Zastava's clone of Kalašnjikov) on my shoulder and a helmet on my head, I lifted the mosquito net - the corner was torn at the edge - pried open the window and reached for the phone. Pulled the earphone out, got it in my left hand, and dialed through the window with my right, and „...nope, nobody's eavesdropping, this is a civilian line... ah, the sound, that's the headset banging against my helmet, I'm guard at the moment“. They're all fine at home, waiting for me to return.
Speaking of the boss, he finally bough a fića this spring, and would come to work with it at times. The aggregatist told me later, as he was in charge of the fuel reserves, not as much for campagnola [italian jeep] but for the little and big aggregate*, because we were considered an important enough hub to make sure we never run out of power. The little generator had a permanently spinning flywheel, which would clutch into the generator and motor whenever the power was lost, and it would supply the emergency power. The aggregatist would then have a minute or two to run down to the bunker where these were, and start the big one, actually huge one, whose motor was taken off some soviet caterpillar tractor. So, he told me that the boss seldom filled his fića at regular gas stations, he simply helped himself from the military tanks, it consumes very little, nobody will notice. I wouldn't be surprised if none of those hens ended up in our pot, but did in his. Had fresh eggs often, though...
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* taken as a noun, it means a combo of motor and power generator
15-XII-2012 - 23-VI-2026