Course Adjustment

The Way of the Arpha: 5 of 12

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

5. COURSE ADJUSTMENT

Our company commander was a capable, coolheaded orator in his early thirties who would lecture us in an authoritative tone about team spirit and group unity, about respecting and depending upon the soldier at your side. “Adjust your course,” he would tell us. “You came to the KEN and you think you’re on vacation. Forget it. I repeat, recruits, adjust your course.”

He was one of those rare officers who had managed to climb the military hierarchy without the usual corrosion of character that comes with authority. Everyone liked him and no one ever adjusted his course. 

He was the kind of decent reasonable army man that any recruit would be lucky to have as his commanding officer and I desperately wanted him to hulk out into the kind of unreasonable blockheaded brute that I would despise. I yearned for a bully of violent unreasoning action to crush spirits and bones.

A few arphades in specific would send my nerves squirming and my teeth into lockjaw. Graphic visions would possess me of a fist going through their heads, splintering out the backside in a blissful eruption of skull and brain. I prayed with inward feverishness for the officers to drop the paternal talk and threats and instead take up the bludgeon, to flog them with rusty chain, pull out toenails, electrocute testicles, shatter kneecaps, or just execute them one sunny morning against a wall, why not, the world will go on spinning, where are the fascists when you need them?  

The arphades were so maddeningly aggravating that I soon grew incredibly fond of them.  You couldn’t help but respect their boundless disrespect. They managed to turn boot camp into a bizarre state-funded kinderarmy for the delinquent. At the same time, the bulk of the finest and most generous Cypriots also come from their ranks. In these so-called uneducated peasants one still finds mellow earthy warmth and fierce devotion, traits fast growing endangered due to the materialist cult that’s swept the island in recent decades with the destructive frenzy of a locust plague. 

As I too was an arphas, I soon learned to adapt to the arpha way, or as the company commander put it, to adjust my course. In the afternoons, when ‘free time’ ended, I’d remain in bed when the first call for lineup was bellowed out. On the 12^th or 13^th call I might consider putting my boots on. I once counted them yell “Lineup!” 35 times.

But I was never quite able to cultivate their knack for insubordination and disregard of duties, which was their way of rebelling against the conscription system. The arphades understood perfectly well the gulf dividing conscript officers, who were merely completing their two-year service (in increasing order of rank: corporal, sergeant, and cadet officer) and ‘permanents,’ who were career army men (warrant officer, company commander, camp commander, colonel, brigadier, etc).

It wasn’t until I left the KEN and was sent for sentry duty on the U.N. patrolled Green Line that I came to fully recognize this distinction (one of ‘us’ versus ‘them’). That’s why they paid little to no attention to the 19- and 20-year-old corporals, sergeants, and cadet officers, who had absolutely no power to do anything but refer them to the commanding officer, who for all practical purposes had been stripped of disciplinary power thanks to the advent of mobile phones, human rights rhetoric, and zealous pro-active mothers.

There was only one conscript officer who commanded their respect and could silence and still an entire lineup of rioting arphades with a few deep barks. And he happened to be my platoon leader.

*to be continued Saturday with Chewbacca