| Out of
curiosity I decided to try the military. Due to the National Service
for men in Norway, it's a large part of the culture in our country.
I wasn't expecting to manage more than two weeks and that was exactly
how long I lasted in the Air Force. It was quite unpleasant most of the time, but a
fantastic experience. I learned to march, turn to the left, turn to the right, halt and stand at ease. We practised endlessly and tramped around all over the place with the sergeant yelling left, right, left, right. I got the giggles every time we passed another troop. We all looked so silly, playing soldiers so seriously. I learned to fold all the regulation clothes in the regulation way into the cupboard in the regulation order. No seams visible, no wrinkles, no gaps between the clothes and the edge of the little shelf. They were equally fussy about the way the bed was made. The uniform had to be worn absolutely correctly, with the laces tucked in, all the buttons done up and hair in a chignon. I learned to wash the floor and dust the surfaces and had to do so every morning at 6am. I learned to load, unload, dismantle and polish my rifle. And since I had to polish my boots every night, I learned that too. We had ten minutes per mealtime and had to force whatever we were given down our throats as we weren't allowed to throw any food away. The day would finish sometime between 6pm and 9pm. We were lucky if we had managed to get 10 free minutes since 6am. I had difficulty sleeping and didn't want to go to bed as soon as the day was over anyway, so I never managed to get more than six hours sleep. The days were relentlessly stressful, with jogging, sit-ups and push-ups generously sprinkled into the mixture. Most things were done outside in temperatures as low as minus 27 degrees Celsius. Thankfully, it was usually somewhere between minus 10 and zero, which I learned to appreciate as warm. I was one of twenty women in a camp of nearly a thousand men. We stood out like sore thumbs and got a lot more attention than the average sore thumb deserves. We were whistled at and watched at every moment we weren't locked in the toilet or our rooms. Most of the other girls were somewhat abnormal creations, hell-bent on a career in the Police and I felt profoundly unlucky to be sharing a room with three of them. One day I got a note - 'Marietta, your breadcrumbs are on the floor. Ingrid' - and that pretty much sums up what it was like living with them. The mornings were brutal and one horrifically sleep-malnourished morning I couldn't take any more. It was a Wednesday and I really wanted to hold on til the weekend when we were finally going to be let out of the camp, but it was just too exhausting and braindead and pointless. Yet, in precious little freetime we had, I had a ball. I met loads of great people (all men) and hung out laughing and laughing at their jokes, talking, listening to them play the guitar, singing along, playing backgammon and cards and basketball and jumping on the trampoline. I loved having so many people around. It was quite funny how desperate the men were. I had even the officers practically eating out of my hand. The other girls sulked about that but I couldn’t help playing with it. It was so funny teasing them. The other recruits, including the girls, would get into trouble for the slightest thing and I would deliberately walk around with incorrect uniform and the officers would just sidle up and make chit chat. There was a powerful feeling of security to be found in a life so rigidly structured. If only the days had been shorter, I could have stood it a little longer. |
