@heartathome Thanks so very much for that lovely Bite, from my perspective i pray i may be however small my imprint. Jesus is my all time HERO!
He got me out! Set me FREE to be me. How can i retell such Joy of being? But i know i will try. Jesus deserves not only praise but recognition the good He does in believers hearts, that is for sure.
@ENKELI @Realness @AuntGlow @tyme
Last Chapter is light and easy. My Army days. They were very important to me from what i learn about Authority in both good and bad ways, and how hard it can be to be with six people in a confined space not out of own choosing. Overall my time was a lot of fun. Young, boisterous, and drunk a lot of the time.😁 (Had to really stop drinking after the Army and proved to be hard as. Stayed of the booze for years before i carefully reintroduced it brewing it, but found the same problem still existed. So i stopped drinking the stuff for many years apart of occasionally and at parties. Never more than 3 or 4 cans tho. Now i like it better, use it more often, and love a whiskey as well. i hate getting drunk now. Never let myself even come near.
A beer can help against low lying anxiety - just 1 or 2 sipped slowly. A whiskey is great to help sleep when not been sleeping or help cope with more acute back aches, i still get at times from an old injury combined with stress.
Blessings.
Chapter 7 (Authority That Puts Down.)
My days in the air force were not always fun.
Within a few weeks of service, we had a roommate who did not clean his corner. So all of us lost access to our lunch break.
Forced to march in the snow in full gear, minute after minute, my anger kept rising with the unfairness of it all.
Then suddenly, a part fell off my rifle.
Without thinking, I bent down to pick it up.
Everyone behind me crashed into my back.
A young man my own age, with stripes on his arms, started screaming abuse at me from five or six metres away.
That was it. The simmering rage boiled over.
I took off running, riffle raised above my head. I probably screamed as well, though I honestly cannot remember.
He was wise enough to run too.
For that little stunt, I only got a slap on the wrist.
I still smile sometimes remembering him running.
He completely panicked, or so I happily believed at the time.
Back in the room, nobody said anything.
But I knew I had gained respect by the way the others treated me afterwards.
Of course, there are always those who want to challenge you.
That happened not long afterwards.
Two cadets from my room, together with a troublemaker from another room, thought it would be funny to wake me with a bucket of ice-cold water while drunk.
What a way to wake up. I was out of bed in a flash.
They had left the half-full bucket beside my bed,
so naturally, they got that back.
One of them wanted to fight.
“I’m a boxer,” he shouted.
Three city boys, only one taller than me. “Then you’re first,” I said calmly.
“We are with three,” the tall one mocked.
“All the better.” I took up a defensive stance.
I was visibly raging, and wisely, they thought better of it. I was already over six foot,
broad across the shoulders, had trained judo for years,
and had worked heavy physical jobs since I was thirteen.
Boys from our village were not known for backing down easily.
Three city boys honestly did not frighten me when I was raging mad.
They backed off and left me alone after that.
“We are with three,” the tall one mocked. “All the better.” I took up a defensive stance.
They backed of after that and left me alone.
With six people sharing one room, and constant power struggles between young men, there was always tension.
So many different personalities, all trapped together in one small space.
My alertness was peaking all the time, always waiting for the next insult or sudden problem.
Often I sensed trouble coming milliseconds before it happened. Gut feelings warning me that something was about to go wrong.
So I started trusting those feelings. There is nothing wrong with that, as long as we do not blindly believe every conclusion we draw from what we feel.
Yet misunderstandings, power games, or someone drunk suddenly feeling braver than usual could quickly turn ugly.
Those situations were much harder to manage.
There was a lot to learn in a very short time.
What amazed me most was how cruel people could be to one another.
The disgusting jokes they played, especially on those who were already disliked.
The best part, however, was the booze.
Thirty cents a glass. It made playing blackjack worthwhile.
Every night we ended up in the soldiers’ bar. Our platoon became honoured patrons there.
Probably a good thing too, because it may have kept us out of military jail.
The trouble started with our sergeant.
He hated a colonel who commanded an eighty-man anti-aircraft platoon.
Because there was little work, we had been chosen as the attacking party in a training exercise.
Six of us from our room, and six from the room next door.
Eighty stationary positions against twelve opponents who were free to move around and knew the terrain extremely well.
But we kept beating them.
Eventually, the colonel secretly began giving away our positions to his own men.
So our sergeant decided the colonel needed a lesson he would not quickly forget.
The eight of us daredevils were ordered to overpower him at night and dump him face-first into a muddy puddle.
At the time, we thought it was hilarious.
So the colonel, strutting around in the dark trying to find our positions, fell into our hands.
He was furious when we grabbed him, especially when we ignored his orders for us to let him go.
The poor man hit the mud hard. Not that we cared.
Later, back at the base, technical problems left us without work overnight.
To our horror, the mud-faced colonel became our commanding officer for the next three months.
Through deceit, he deliberately set us up to disobey orders, then had us charged for it.
Minimum sentence: six months military jail on top of our compulsory service.
We were in serious trouble.
Disobeying orders was no small matter, especially when it involved a high-ranking officer.
Then the soldiers’ bar came to our rescue.
As honoured patrons, we had access to the bar’s kitty. A surprising amount of money had been sitting there unused for years.
The general who would decide our fate had originally established the bar twenty-five years earlier.
So a desperate plan was made.
A grand jubilee celebration was organised in honour of the general, celebrating twenty-five years of soldiers being allowed such a place to drink.
There was a mountain of logistics to organise. The general was stationed on the other side of the country. Food, drinks, travel, everything had to be arranged.
And somewhere during all of that, certain private details about our colonel’s personal preferences reached the right ears.
That was enough.
The charges were dropped among knowing smiles and silent mocking.
The colonel was furious.
But we knew we had escaped by the skin of our teeth.
Military prisons were no joke in those days.
I loved the guns they placed in our hands.
The design. The power. The cold steel.
Every Wednesday we trained.
Often the highest scorer won a carton of beer, which had to be shared, though the winner always received the lion’s share.
I loved those competitions.
The smell of burnt gunpowder. The sharp kickback of a rifle. The discipline and control behind it. The precise body posture needed to score ten out of ten.
That part suited me well.
Then came the cold shower.
A brand-new F-16 arrived at the base.
We were chosen as the guard of honour, ordered to protect the aircraft after landing.
Huge protests had gathered outside the base. The protesters claimed the F-16 could carry nuclear weapons.
We were issued live ammunition and ordered to shoot anyone who attempted to reach the aircraft.
And there I stood, with ten live rounds in my rifle, fully determined not to let anyone near it.
I still have a photo of myself standing in front of it, looking grim and determined.
At that time, I know I would have obeyed those orders.
That frightened me deeply later on.
Especially when my raging side mocked me for even worrying about it:
“Just mow them down. They are breaking the law.”
But in my mind, I could already see the bloodbath.
That impression haunted me for years.
Yet not all officers in the air force turned out bad.
One evening, while drinking in a pub near the base, I began complaining loudly to a stranger sitting next to me about the arrogance of some pilots.
How they treated us on guard duty. How they strutted around as if they were above everyone else.
The man listened calmly, buying me another beer while I ranted.
Only after I had finished did he quietly smile and say:
“I’m a pilot too.”
My stomach dropped.
Worse still, he was stationed at our base.
I thought: Boy, you’ve done it again. Big mouth of yours. You’ve really done it now.
But he was not angry.
Instead, he said he understood exactly what I meant, and that he was not like that himself.
Then I started asking questions.
What was it like to fly?
That touched something deep in me. Flying had fascinated me since childhood.
We sat there for hours, talking about aircraft, speed, training, and what it felt like to leave the ground behind.
Before leaving, he asked me something I never expected.
“Would you like to come sometime, when I get the double-seater?”
I could hardly believe it.
A flight in a Starfighter.
For a young man like me, that was almost beyond imagination.
I went to bed drunk that night, absolutely thrilled.
But sometime soon after meeting that pilot, I woke to a night of terror.
I had gone to bed drunk, like usual, when I suddenly became aware of a horrible sound and an overwhelming sensation of suffocating.
I woke up.
Intense pain greeted me.
To my horror, my tongue had fallen back into my throat and I could not move it.
I could not move any part of my body.
My head was locked backwards in an impossible position.
The pain was excruciating.
I thought I was going to die.
Panic took hold of me as I tried desperately to regain control before I ran out of breath.
Luckily, I could still pull in small amounts of air, though my panic made it feel impossible.
I do not know how, but after some time, I somehow managed to lift my right arm, grab my head, and force it sideways and down.
I think I lost consciousness from the pain.
Afterwards, I lay there for hours.
Unable to move. Unable to speak.
Pondering my life, and what would happen if I died now.
At the time, I believed I knew.
I thought I would burn forever.
I desperately needed to urinate, but was too afraid to wet the bed.
Morning came. The others got up.
One of them saw me lying there in what must have looked like a very strange position.
He kicked the bed hard.
“Hey, don’t you say good morning?”
The pain was shocking.
He must have seen something was wrong, because then he asked, “You okay?”
I could not answer.
I just stared at him, feeling like an absolute idiot.
He turned around.
“He’s not okay, guys. He’s acting really weird.”
They all gathered around my bed, looking at me strangely, demanding I say something.
Then one of them realised something was seriously wrong.
“I’m telling the lieutenant.”
Everyone else left. Breakfast seemed more important.
Eventually, a doctor arrived.
He spoke to me, then gently tried to move my head into a better position.
The pain was indescribable.
My whole body arched upward from the force of it, then collapsed back down again, powerless.
I think I blacked out.
Then came the ambulance.
The doctor feared I might have a dangerous contagious illness, something involving severe neck spasms.
Big alarm.
I no longer remember how long I stayed in hospital. At least a week.
After that, I remained sick at home for much longer. Possibly another month.
Thankfully, it was not the deadly illness he feared.
The doctors never became fully certain what had happened.
All sensation and movement slowly returned that same day, though the muscle cramps lingered for quite some time.
The whole room cheered when I finally dared to urinate.
The pain had been so intense.
Trying to relieve myself in bed, lying flat, with a room full of people commenting on the process, was not exactly easy.
But it worked in the end.
For all the jokes that followed, the nurse still had to fetch another bottle.
Talk about relief.
In the meantime, the pilot’s next double-seater flight had been assigned to a general.
So he promised me the next one.
But by then, I had already decided to leave the army.
My flight to Australia had been booked.
I wanted to escape Holland and find a new horizon.
One of my sisters had travelled there with a friend, and hearing her stories inspired me to immigrate.
Weeks later, the pilot finally called.
The double-seater was available. A long flight across the country.
I only needed to sign the legal documents first.
Reading them sobered me quickly.
If anything happened, the air force accepted no responsibility.
And Starfighters crashed often enough. Pilots had already died.
By then, my ticket to Australia was already booked.
So in the end, I declined.
Even now, part of me still wonders whether that was a foolish decision.
I would have loved that flight.
But another horizon was already pulling me away.
