Back when I joined ...

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I recently found an old diary of mine. It encompasses more than a year, pages full of codes for repetitive stuff that I did all the time. And kind of miss doing.

The last day in the diary isn't on the last page, by far. It reads

8:50 - 12:00 DB, Ankunft in der Kaserne,

It was the day I left for military service (DB = Deutsch Bahn, railway / Ankunft in der Kaserne = arrival at the barracks). My young days had ended abruptly.

I'm sure I forgot most of the first weeks and months in the Luftwaffe, but I didn't forget the first day. I arrived among the first six recruits that day, and the consequence was we were told to go into a room where three bunk beds were standing. Then we had to wait, for hours. The basic training was - like just about every other education or training I ever had - a thorough disappointment. We learned almost nothing, but this was already more than some could digest. 

One draftee was 2.06 metres tall and angry he hadn't told his draft official that he's 2.10 m, for then he wouldn't have been drafted away from girlfriend, own apartment and full time job. The recruitment office had no means to measure past 2 metres length, he could have fooled them.

He got a sweat suit and running shoes within days, and nothing else for the first three weeks or so. His supersized clothes and boots were simply not available in the barracks themselves. He also got a "Null Kilogramm Schein" (zero kilogram certificate) from the medical doctor - this excepted him from carrying anything but his clothes due to his joints and back issues. He still was kind enough to carry helmet and rifle on occasion - even though nobody could order him to do so. (Others got 10 kg Scheine.) Nobody could figure out what the Bundeswehr wanted from him. Eventually, he ended up as sauna boy; handing out towels and taking them back. Supposedly this was an all-essential job, for without such a sauna boy who kept watch the sauna supposedly would become filthy. Go figure, it was used almost exclusively by officers and senior NCOs.

There were plenty such anecdotes, and they fed my disgust for bureaucracies more than any theoretical education in economics ever did.

The most useful skill that I learned in those first months in uniform was how to fall asleep in an instant. We were kept busy artificially all the time, and the permanent stress made us take naps at every opportunity. When the order came to "self-study" in our dormitory, we all calmly went to the six-stool table there, sat down, crossed arms on the table, dropped our head and fell asleep in no time.

Still, with all that stress the Bundeswehr did not in any course or at any time train me the way all other trainings and educations went; usually it's too little learning for my taste, too much exercising for my taste. The Bundeswehr only met the "too little learning" part. I'm not joking; I did 30 push-ups in a minute every day during the months before I joined the Bundeswehr, at the end of basic training I was barely able to do 20 push-ups and when I left the service I was down to 15.

The Bundeswehr got considerably worse in the years since I left it, so I was told. Repeatedly.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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