Grivas

The Way of the Arpha: 3 of 12

Sep 10, 2024

*A chronicle of my time in Cypriot boot camp. Read the intro HERE and last part HERE

AFTER ROLL CALL at morning lineup, a corporal announced that those wishing to see a doctor should line up by the wall. Twenty-three of the 73 conscripts, all suffering from apparently obscure ailments with no visible symptoms, buoyantly made their way to the wall, grinning and radiating exuberance.

An officer from headquarters then took the place of the corporal. He glared down upon us through his red-tinted sunglasses.

“Somebody discharged in the showers,” he finally said. “Obviously whoever did it learned this at home. His old man taught him. That’s the only excuse.”

The toilets consisted of nothing more than holes in the porcelain floor and some of the conscripts tried avoiding them entirely. But one could only stave off nature for so long and eventually the deed had to be done. Fortunately, this only happened one time in the shower.

It was astonishing how long some conscripts waited. Occasionally, after someone had squatted poorly and misfired, you’d find a monstrous blasphemy perched next to, or even across, the hole so thick that human origin seemed impossible. They were sometimes left there for days like the cordoned-off evidence of a crime scene and would become the subject of countless photos and lewd jokes.1 They remained etched in our collective memory long after they’d been hosed down the shithole with a high-powered blast of water.

After the officer had finished his scolding and walked off, a sergeant began to pace up and down the lineup. “So you shit in the showers?” he jeered, scowling with narrowed eyes at each of us in passing as if we’d all contributed to that misdeed which was still lying in the shower stall. “Aren’t you ashamed?”

Actually, we were nothing but grateful over how the mislaid heap had enlivened our morning. We were, however, ashamed later that day. It was the third and final day of conscription and, having finished early in the equipment room, we were sent off to a black beret corporal to learn how to stomp to attention and execute about-turns. The first lesson was on how to react to the command “Men!” We were to inhale deeply and puff out our chests to look proud. He gave the command. At once, our chests swelled out and our chins and gazes went up. We were a model group, and we looked so proud that we were ashamed.

But it was not so with the thirty or so conscripts from the neighboring company who were approaching our barracks in what was supposed to be a group march. They came huffing and stumbling along in the setting sunlight like weird performance art, their heads swiveling in every direction, their boots clattering in dissonance, their arms bent and flailing at random, some even swinging the same arm and leg instead of the opposite ones, like zombies. They were an officer’s nightmare, an irremediable military failure, an insult to martial order and discipline, and the pride was visible on their faces as they lurched by.

That evening in the dining hall the training camp commander spoke to all 350 conscripts. He had a bushy mustache and glasses with orange-tinted lenses. He paced with arms folded behind him, taking long slow strides as if in profound contemplation. Between the tinted lenses and the dark complex growth on his upper lip, he seemed perpetually in the grip of some intricate conspiracy. When he spoke, he always accented the last syllable of every sentence to ensure we grasped its triviality. He was a diligent suspicious man who, as he later informed us, kept his socks and underwear neatly organized in bags, and he was never relaxed unless he was restlessly prowling his training camp, guarding against instances of insubordination and slovenliness. He had a habit of running the edge of his finger up along your cheek to see when you’d last shaven, and he would change the station on the cafeteria television whenever Euronews came on as he felt conscripts would be better off exposed to mushy Greek soap operas than Anglo-American propaganda. The soldiers all addressed him as Mr. Commander but referred to him among themselves as Grivas due to his striking resemblance to the former EOKA general, with whom he also shared idealistic jingoism.

“We are all Greeks,” he would later lecture us three-and six-monthers, most of whom had grown up abroad. “Some of us are Greeks of Cyprus. Others are Greeks of Greece. Some are Greeks of England. Or Greeks of America. Or Greeks of Australia. But we are all Greeks.”

On the other side of the Green Line, Turkish Cypriot commanders were telling Turkish Cypriot conscripts much of the same, except pronouncing them Turks instead of Greeks. It was unfortunate that Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot officers were doing such a fine job at keeping the island divided on ethnic lines because they would have surely enjoyed celebrating together over raki and ouzo their mutual nationalist love of a foreign country and disdain of their own national identity.

Greeks from various nations, according to Grivas, aka a Greek salad

But the topic of our Hellenic Spirit wasn’t broached during this welcome speech. A lower-ranking officer saluted Grivas and then screamed out the force numbers in case we were all deaf. One of the conscripts made a farting noise but it was ignored. Grivas then saluted the officer off and turned to us.

“Men!” he called out. But he didn’t continue with the command for attention. He merely glared at us. “Haven’t you learned that the head should be thrown back and your cap should fly back fifteen meters?” He paused. “Invalid.”

“Men!” he called again. We puffed out our chests and threw our heads back, although our caps did not fly into the back wall. “Attention!” We stomped our left leg so that it landed next to our right foot while simultaneously bringing our arms—which had been folded at our back—to our side. “At ease!” We stomped back to the ‘at ease’ position.

“That was your first attention to me,” he said. “In a week when I give a command, I want you to be excellent.”

One of the conscripts was murmuring. Grivas looked in his direction. “I ask that you shut your mouth. Your head is swiveling. Look in front of you.” He paused. “Today, the 2007 conscription of the January series ended. I welcome you to KEN Paphos and the ranks of the National Guard. I hope that your service, whether it is 25 months or a reduced three months, is pleasant and will be a sweet, good memory.” A few conscripts were whispering and sniggering. “I asked that you do not murmur. And when you are at ease, you do not move.” He paused. “You are far from your family here. Your family will be calmer and more pleasant when you tell them over the phone that you are doing well.”

The National Guard desperately wanted its soldiers’ families to be calm and pleasant, especially the mothers. The National Guard had softened significantly in the last decade, and not long after the arrival of cell phones in Cyprus, soldiers were permitted to bring mobiles into boot camp. This only eroded the last remnants of army discipline. Conscripts in boot camp were no longer isolated from the outside world so officers had fewer opportunities to break them down and rewire them in their martial image. Anytime a conscript was punished, he could immediately place a call and protest about his abused human rights to his mother, who would then call National Guard headquarters or, worse, the media to protest that the men who had seized her son and declared absolute custody over him for the next two years were violating his human rights because they weren’t militarizing him in a courteous and respectful manner. The conscripts gallantly upheld human rights standards on army camps and outposts and made sure to be as disrespectful as possible to the officers, since officers were far less likely to complain to their mothers.

“We don’t use our knives to carve our name and series into the dining tables,” Grivas said, in case we were unclear over our army-issued pocketknives. “The tables hurt.” He paused, impressed with this poetic turn of phrase that had unexpectedly welled out of him. “And we hurt too.”

But despite a decline in disciplinary standards, the National Guard hadn’t relented in its efforts to infuse a patriotic spirit over the island’s division and occupation. It had, in fact, been so unrelenting that it had become ineffective. “When I ask, ‘Where will we light a candle?’ you will say Apostolos Andreas,” Grivas told us, referring to the monastery in the occupied north. “When I ask, ‘Where will we go for coffee?’ you say Kyrenia. And when I ask, ‘Where will we go for a swim?’ you say Famagusta.”

“Where are we going to light a candle?” Grivas demanded.

“Apostolos Andreas!” the room boomed.

“Where will we go for coffee?”

“Kyrenia!”

“And where will we go for a swim?”

“Famagusta!”

The enthusiastic Q&A may have made sense before the Green Line checkpoints opened three years ago, but it now seemed like either a blasphemous proposal by a military commander for a daytrip to the occupied north or an anachronism in serious need of updating since it only emphasized with self-defeating irony the reality that Greek Cypriots were making trips like that every day.

It wasn’t so different with the chants, probably first composed in the mid-to-late-70s, that our corporals, sergeants and cadet officers made us yell before prayer while marching in place in front of our barracks. Our company hollered into the night about the blood spilled in villages in the north, about eagles and freedom, about how Cyprus is Greek and so is Macedonia. Then we were told to turn to face the 2^nd company and then, as if in competition with them, holler out a final chant with the phrase “unfaithful Turkish dog, you killed a Greek.”

“You should feel this when you say it!” one corporal screamed. “How many of you don’t feel it?” I was feeling something—the urge to club the corporal upside the head. It’s one thing to go through the idiotic motions of taking orders and another to take them to heart. The younger conscripts in my company, however, didn’t seem to object, not because they found the lyrics stirring, but because it was an opportunity to taunt the conscripts in the 2^nd company, who may as well have been the unfaithful dogs for all they cared.