Chewbacca

The Way of the Arpha: 6 of 12

A chronicle of Cypriot boot camp. Intro HERE and last section HERE

6. CHEWBACCA

Chewbacca was a muscular, disciplined, capable, and dutiful young man despite having spent almost two years in the army. He was a 19-year-old green beret and cadet officer but appeared a decade older due to his commanding presence and the deep, primordial timbre of his voice, which seemed to boom forth from the bowels of the earth. One could not ignore a Chewbaccan bellow any more than trespassers could ignore the bark of Cerberus or philistines the apocalyptic denunciations of an Old Testament prophet. 

The arphades had so much fearful respect of Chewbacca that they’d ambush him at any opportunity. He offered an insurmountable physical challenge and brawny arphades tested their manliness by pouncing upon him in gangs of three or four at a time. During one of my two am sentry shifts, I watched four conscripts tackle Chewbacca in the barracks hallway but fail to wrestle him to the ground. Chewbacca never objected to these ambushes. Instead, he humored them by putting them in headlocks and squashing their faces against the floor.

Chewbacca hauling a delinquent to the brig

There were, however, two scraggly arphades in my platoon – Satan and Wig – that knew how to get a rise out of Chewbacca. Satan was a ruffian with expansionist acne and eyes that occasionally, and for no apparent reason, goggled from his sockets as if he’d just experienced some infernal flashback. Satan was always finding new creative ways to irritate cadet officers. When his phone would ring in the middle of lineup and the cadet officer would sternly warn him to shut it off, he’d promptly reply that he didn’t know how.

Satan’s partner-in-delinquency, Wig, was a restless windbag who slouched about like a slinking alley cat with skinny arms that hung limp at his sides and a head that was always craning forward and to the side like a turtle taking stock of its surroundings after a long hibernation. Wig always raised his arm for a question during training seminars with the word “Permission?” His questions were consistently ridiculous, and four out of five times the answer was no. He would then merely lower his hand and raise it again a few moments later, requesting permission to ask a question. None of us knew who first called him Wig or why, but the name stuck.

Both Satan and Wig took boundless pleasure in repeating the same jokes, or what they saw as jokes, countless times per day. Wig would often count “one, two, three” and then he, Satan, and some of their groupies would yell out “Patrida! [Country]” as loud as they could. No one knew why Wig and Satan yelled this, and they probably didn’t either.

In lineup they would do anything to disrupt roll call and make a scene. “Permission?” Wig once said, raising his arm. “I’ve gotta piss. Can I go…? No? Then I’m gonna pull it out right here.” As he started to unbutton himself, the conscript officers started yelling. “Well, what do you want me to do?  Piss all over myself?  I can’t hold it.” They let him go and he slunk indoors, grinning back at the rest of us.

During one of the training seminars held in the hills on the army camp’s perimeter, Chewbacca was explaining how to orient ourselves without a compass. “If it’s a cloudy day, you can look for physical landmarks. In Cyprus trees usually bend towards the south because the winds generally blow—”

“Permission?” Wig asked, thrusting up his arm.

“No,” Chewbacca said. “Because the winds generally blow from the north. You can also look for anthills. Ants build the north side of their anthills slightly higher to block—“

“Permission?” Wig asked, again raising his hand.

“Don’t interrupt! Ants build the northern side higher to block the wind. You can also orient yourself if a graveyard is nearby. Tombstones all look to the east, so that when the dead rise, they face east.”

After a moment of silence, Wig raised his hand. “Permission?”

“Yes.”

“How can they rise if they’re dead?”

*to be continued Tuesday with The Brigadier