Lizard Sandwich
Manning the Dead Zone - IX (penultimate)
Even after being discharged, conscripts are required until age fifty to return as reservists once or twice a year for firing practice and the occasional night of sentry duty. Our commander began requesting reservists regularly. A truck would drop one or two of them off at seven pm and collect them the next morning. Each took a two-hour shift—usually midnight to two or two to four—giving the rest of us a longer stretch of sleep. On rare nights, our numbers were high enough to allow us the luxury of eight uninterrupted hours between shifts.
The older reservists were always amused, almost offended, by how soft the army had become. My cousin Christos, who’d served in the eighties, told me some officers used to beat conscripts openly. He once took dozens of punches to the stomach because he’d refused to insult himself in front of the others. The conscripts too were rougher. One, Christos told me, once put a “kourkouta”—the biggest lizard on the island, which grows up to a foot long—between two slices of white bread and ate it raw.
Another conscript, he told me, used to go around sticking his cock in the mouths of others conscripts as they slept as a practical joke. Or at least under the pretext of one.
Not that that sort of thing had ended over the decades. Even when I was in boot camp, two teenagers in the second company were sent to the army psychologist after someone filmed one blowing the other in the barracks. One had taken the other’s pillow and refused to return it unless the other gave him a b.j.
According to the reservists, amid all the softening, there was one undeniable improvement: the quality of the food. Every afternoon at one, and again at six, a truck delivered large pots of hot meals—squid with potatoes, roast lamb, etc. The food was restaurant-worthy, and the conscripts refused to touch it. Instead they ordered takeaway or fried up frozen patties.
The conscripts tossed the food because they claimed the pots were disgusting. And they weren’t wrong. The pots were collected and refilled daily, but if you didn’t wash them before pickup, they came back refilled but still crusted with old food.
There was, of course, a time-tested solution: wash the pots. So the first day, I dumped the food, soaked the interior, and scrubbed them with soap and bleach. The pots gleamed. From then on, I had all the hot grub I could manage.
The other conscripts looked on with horror when they first saw me fix myself up a plate. I was the butt of their jokes for several days. In turn, I called them fools for wasting money on inferior takeaway and shitty frozen food. My refusal to be cowed made an impression. As the days passed, they began peering at my lunches and dinners with interest.
It was after about ten days—when spaghetti and two boiled chickens were delivered—that the first one succumbed to temptation.
“That looks good,” he confessed to me in private as I carved out several moist slabs of chicken breast.
I extended my fork with an impaled slice. “Try it,” I urged him.
He paused, wracked with conflict. Then, after casting a furtive glance about, he bit off half.
“My God,” he whispered, chewing slowly. “It’s delicious.”
He scarfed the rest and then attacked the chicken, tearing off strips with his fingers.
“Don’t tell anyone,” he pleaded.
Within two weeks, half the conscripts were eating from the pots. Every few days another would fall, yielding to the steaming pot despite admonitions from the remaining holdouts, who couldn’t let go of their disproved claims that the pots were filthy and diseased.
“But look at Markides,” the soon-to-be convert would say. “Nothing’s happened to him yet.”
It wasn’t until about two weeks before I left the outpost that the leader of the opposition—the most outspoken reviler and disparager of army food—finally gave in. I saw him one evening in the kitchen, serving himself from the pot.
Our eyes met briefly. We never spoke of it.
TO BE CONTINUED (next post is the finale, finally!)
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Where do we buy the Jesus pillow? 😂 some utterly disgusting things going on here while the boys were asleep.🤬