My military career in the JW1230 unit in Wesola started with a stomp. Or actually… without the ability to stomp. My first opponent wasn’t the enemy, the training ground, or the sergeant, but… military boots. The designer of those boots apparently created them with tanks in mind, not human feet. After a few days, my toenails decided to ingrow with such dedication that walking became an extreme sport. The result? Almost a month in the infirmary. Finally, a decision was made: surgery. I ended up at the National Defence University in Rembertow, where military medicine did its thing. Interestingly, that was probably the most lasting effect of my service – the problem never came back since. The downside was that while the rest of the company was learning drills, I was mainly practicing lying in bed and walking to the treatment room. When the time came for the oath, my buddies took it solemnly at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Me? I had my own intimate version a day earlier on the unit’s grounds. You could say it was a VIP edition, though probably not the kind of VIP I had in mind back then.
The commander’s ghostwriter and Lord Robertson from NATO
Pretty soon, someone at Headquarters figured out that the Manager of the Internet Cafe should know a thing or two about computers. When that turned out to be true, my military career took a completely unexpected turn. I became the Brigade’s writer. I was the one preparing the unit’s daily orders, the commander’s speeches, and various official texts. Long story short – whenever the commander shone with eloquence, there was a good chance my keyboard had been shining earlier. Today, they’d say I was his ghostwriter. In the army, it was simply called… being a writer. So you could say I commanded the whole brigade – it’s just that no one except the commander knew about it.
A few months later, fate decided to go all in. In March, Lord Robertson, the head of NATO at the time, visited the unit. It turned out that out of about 2,400 conscripts, they found… barely twelve who could say something more in English than “yes”, “no”, and “beer”. I was part of this elite group.
There was no shortage of historical events, either. During my service, the attacks on the World Trade Center happened. Suddenly, all leaves were canceled, and we all sat locked in the unit for two weeks. The atmosphere got very serious, and everyone felt that the world was changing right then and there.
Papal blessing and military botany
But the army also means adventures no screenwriter could invent. One of them was… pretending to be the Pope from the command vehicle. Waving to people with the appropriate solemnity turned out to be surprisingly effective. For a moment, you could believe that a blessing given through the hatch of a military Mercedes G-Class (the commander’s) actually had some power. I often act first and think about the consequences later.
There was also a botanical discovery. In the woods on the unit’s grounds, we stumbled upon a pretty decent patch of cannabis. Naturally, the young conscripts immediately started spinning visions of a great adventure. Unfortunately, it was either a weak strain, or we were completely incompetent as amateur botanists. The effect was exactly zero, apart from bursts of laughter and the realization that even in this field, the army failed to train us properly. So we decided to just get drunk.
After this find, we needed a place to dry it. The choice fell on the map room. None of the officers ever checked in there, the temperature was right, and we had access to paper. We figured that weed should be dried just like maple leaves in elementary school. In hindsight, I think it would’ve been better to smoke the maps the weed was drying in, rather than the weed itself.
Military service and a 20-year-old map
Out of curiosity, I started flipping through those maps and suddenly found something familiar… Ursus. There was an area where people had been living normally for over twenty years – streets were buzzing, houses were standing, kids were going to school – yet the military map still proudly bore the caption: “planned housing estate”. That estate was Niedzwiadek, where I had already been living for 21 years. It turned out the army had its own version of reality. While the residents had already managed to start families, renovate their homes, and change cars a few times, for military cartographers, the neighborhood was still an ambitious project for the future. That was probably the best example of military precision – everything added up, except time had missed the map by about 20 years.
The funniest part is that I have fewer photos from the army than my Dad, who was in the military probably 40 years earlier. I already had a cellphone, but it didn’t have a camera. Digital cameras were expensive and took pictures that only looked nice on their own screens. I had a few taken of me, but I only received one, and in the end, Edyta had more photos taken in my uniform than I did 😛
