The Furlough and The Gorilla

The Way of the Arpha: 10 of 12

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

THE FURLOUGH

The shelters were in the foothills of the Troodos mountain range and made a fine place to idle away an afternoon. With a few exceptions like Chewbacca, the conscript officers leading the training were highly unmotivated, so we often just loafed and napped in the sunshine until someone spotted a permanent officer coming for inspection. Even the softest and whiniest among us had to admit, as far as boot camps, we had it good.

“If you could screw now and then, it wouldn’t be bad,” said one three-monther as we lounged on the grass with our backs against the shelter.   

“Well, they screw you, you can’t have everything,” another said.

“I hear if you get raped, you’re discharged. And the guy who porks you gets all your months.”

There was a pause.

“Boys, I’m a good-lucking guy. What’s three more months on top of 25?”

Later that week we were told that if we behaved well, we’d get a two-night leave over the weekend. As Friday approached there was an undeniable improvement of behavior as we went from atrocious to merely awful. On Friday morning Grives delivered a Don’t Drink and Drive and Just Say No to Drugs lecture. (“Don’t accept offerings from strangers, because whoever offers you grass today, will sell you cocaine or heroine tomorrow.”) Then, after we satisfactorily chanted for him where we were going to have a coffee, light a candle, and swim, he let us go.¹

We were supposed to leave in what was now referred to as civilian clothing but a third of the conscripts remained in army uniforms. They crowded around the mirrors in barracks, adjusting their berets, straightening their shirts. Now that they were leaving, they had transformed into proud soldiers.

that’s me grinning on the left, in the brown hat

Even after just ten days in the camp, you felt a wave of liberation leaving those barbed wire gates and turning onto the highway, the shimmering sea whizzing by to the right, the Eye of the Tiger playing over the bus speakers. The sight of women when we rolled down the main avenue of Nicosia sent the 17-year-olds into a whistling, window-knocking frenzy. One girl blew a lipsticked kiss at the bus, triggering such deafening cheers that the bus driver threatened to kick us off.  

On our return to camp, a younger conscript approached a six-monther who’d boasted about his plans for a different woman each night.

“So did you get a girl?”   

“Two,” he replied, grinning.

“Two!”

He raised both hands triumphantly. “Maria,” he said, nodding to his left hand, “and Ioanna,” he added, motioning to the right. 

THE GORILLA

The weekend furlough was always dangled over us as a bribe for good behavior, but it never worked. Conscripts were denied upcoming leaves as punishment, but the night before departure our captain would say that the camp commander had granted a universal amnesty. There would be no more reprieves, he assured us on a weekly basis.

One disciplinary measure was, however, upheld: the jail cell. It was a severe punishment, out of place in such an otherwise lax camp. For jail time you had to commit some serious infraction like beat someone up or spray paint insults on army property, although even then you might just get a scolding. If you did land in jail, they stripped you of belongings and locked you in a three-by-five-meter cell with only a bed frame and a small barred window near the ceiling. You stayed there alone for three to four days, sometimes as much as ten.  Three times a day, they let you out to briefly eat and smoke in an adjacent room, again alone.

my friend Petros, a street artist from Athens, who got sent to military jail for graffittiing a building

The military police ran the jail. The head of the military police at our camp was a massive guy, about six foot five with thick arms so long that, on a man of average Cypriot height, his knuckles would have dragged along the ground. We called him Gorilla. Anytime there was trouble, he’d arrive in his Gorillamobile, the lights flashing, making the rounds of each company and roaring threats.

“No, and I mean NO favors to any recruits,” he bawled the day before they brought in sniffer dogs for a random drug search. “I know there’ll be some who say, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it…’ Well, my nutsac he didn’t! The devil can take him! I’ll step on his neck! No, and I mean NO favors to any recruits!” 

He was, I sensed, a friendly hardworking man who under different conditions could have been a cheerful restaurant owner or a compassionate family doctor. But he was the head of the military police at the training camp and so he had to act up to size and play the chest-pounding Gorilla. We all had our roles to play. 

1. This is a reference back to the Grivas chapter, where the commander has us chant that we would drink coffee, swim, and light a candle in various spots in northern Cyprus once they were no longer under Turkish control. He seemed to find no irony in asking us to perform this chant right before the furlough when we could, technically, travel the next day like tourists to the north since the checkpoints were now open.