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Reluctant soldiers: The first day

We arrived in Burdur at 6 a.m., having travelled by bus from Istanbul overnight. As an aside, buses do most of the long-distance passenger hauling in Turkey. There's plenty of competition and most companies feature the most modern buses and quite good service these days. Ours was one of the better ones - I was astonished to see the extra driver (who took over halfway) and that they strictly obeyed a self-imposed speed limit. I could see this because other companies' buses kept whizzing past us. In the good ole days this could very well have provoked a heated race between the two buses on narrow two-lane roads in the middle of the night. Aaaah! No thrill left in road travel these days, I tell you. This Turkish reliance on buses is due for the most part to the sorry state of our railroads. Of the 8000+ km of railroads in the country, only 300 km have been built after 1940. We can put the blame on our conservative ruling class - for example, as late as 1990 the Turkish president (Ozal) was able to make the comment that railroads are for communists while motorways represent capitalism. The result has been the worst road traffic problem in Europe and the highest road casualty rate. I realized that Burdur had a train station only when I came on it unexpectedly during one of my aimless walks later in the month while I was on leave. It had never occurred to me to take the train there.

Anyway, we got into Burdur at 6 a.m. and immediately searched for a hotel to shower and get some sleep. We hired a taxi who proceeded to take us to the hotel which happened to be farthest from the bus station. Another proof of how Burdur makes its money was presented to us at the hotel, a two and a half star establishment at best, where they charged us 15 bucks a piece for a four hour stay. I then got a real short haircut at the town before proceeding to turn myself in. As it turns out, they did not care that much about long hair; I saw a few people with quite longish (by military standards anyway) hair later on.

I formally surrendered myself at 2 p.m., along with about 800 other people. Hakan and I immediately got separated and eventually ended up being assigned to different battalions. He got 1st Btn, I got 2nd. Apart from meeting up during some of the weekend leaves, I would see him less than ten times during our stay. Having walked in, I stood in line for about one and a half hours just to get to the desk where they gave us our assignments. We then stood in line to get our shots, uniforms, and then stood in line to be registered. By the time everything was finished, we had missed dinner and it was almost 10 p.m.

They took away all electronic equipment, including cell phones. They took away some books (I kept mine). They gave us two shots without telling what they were or asking us for permission. I learned later that one was a tetanus shot and the other meningitis. We were given a medical exam, which consisted of: A young doctor pressing his stethoscope against my heart, breathe in, breathe out, OK, you're fit.

After we were given our uniforms, we were taken to our unit (2nd Btn, 1st Co) by a very pissed off looking corporal who was swearing all the time. He's an 18 monther who for some reason that I cannot fathom yet is having to serve an extra month.

Throughout the day, people kept asking us which town we were from. "Anyone from Antep? No? How about Van? Anyone from Van?" Don't know what being from the same town is going to do. Perhaps alleviate the shared suffering?

This scene should describe that first day well: A long, dimly lit corridor. Along one side are several tables with various very bored men (These men were our personnel - NCO's mostly, some privates. They were 18 monthers. They kept the outside sentry watch, got assigned as squad leaders, and were responsible for the various functions which had to be performed.) On this occasion their task was to record and re-record and re-re-record the same information about us. Flies (ever present during the first two weeks) buzzing around little mounds of plastic cups here and there. Officers hustling in every now and then to "accelerate" the process. This usually means that they ask which number they've got to. Every time this happens, everyone stops and confusion reigns for a few minutes. "Is it 5? You've got 5? No, I've got 4. Then why are you asking me if I've got 5? etc., etc." Then the officer gets a phone call on his cell phone and runs off on some other business.
After we were registered, we were introduced to our squad leader. He's a soft spoken, young boy from the northern Black Sea town of Bartın. He's barely nineteen; he is also a corporal and our superior. Of course, now *he* has to write our information in his little notebook. While this was going on, he made me assistant squad leader. I reflexively asked why. He smiled and said it was because he said so. However, he could not bring himself to use the familiar "Sen (thou)". Instead, he called me "Siz (You)" and told me it was because I was the only one with higher education. I'm supposed to keep track of every one of these nineteen others and make sure that the beds are made up in the morning. He'll tell me the rest later. We missed dinner. He then made us run to the barracks. For some reason, we could not get in and had to strip right there outside the door and put on the uniforms. It was dark, he was in a hurry to get to the depot where we will deposit our civvies, the belts that the military uses were strange, and only a few of us had the right size uniform so we had to swap with those who had our size (if we were lucky - unfortunately no short guy had my size so I ended up with pants which barely reached the tops of my boots), then some guy came by to try to sell us tea in plastic cups. All was confusion.

Any scene of lots of heroic people sleeping in the same location (inside or outside) should not fail to include the multivariate snoring. We share our sleeping quarters with two other squads. As soon as lights were out, the snoring started. Add to that the fact that people returning from sentry duty every two hours are turning on the lights. Add to that the fact that one of my squaddies woke up at four and began complaining about the cold. He is trying to whisper but the guy has a built in subwoofer. You can hear his whisper across the room. I got very little sleep. My term of service was not starting very auspiciously.

Pittsburgh 10 November 2000

miscellaneous

Copyleft notice: Copyright (C) 1999-2005 Mustafa Ünlü. This information is free; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

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