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by Victor Pogostin
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My odyssey in the Red Army was conceived in Egypt. Something went wrong in the land of the Pharaohs and in 1972, Anwar Sadat packed off the Soviet military advisors back to their land. At the time, military translators were drafted and sent to Egypt to work with the military advisors. The returnees settled in the cushy jobs in Moscow military institutions pushing their freshly drafted brethren to the far corners of the country.
I’d have thought that there was no more need to worry about the draft and I could return to my civil life. No such luck. A Colonel from the Draft Board explained that the Minister of Defense had signed the Draft Order and, in short, there was no turning back. “Congrats my Lieutenant!” He said and handed me my officer’s ID Card.
The next day I appeared before the Medical Evaluation Board. A Duty Officer ushered me to a room where my evaluation was to begin. Bewildered I looked around. There was a rotary chair for vestibular tests and two men with white lab coats over their uniforms. I was told to make myself comfortable in the chair. One of the men put a blindfold on me and strapped me into to the chair.
The chair spun first right then left and then in circles. Finally, it stopped abruptly, the blindfold was quickly removed, straps unfastened, and I heard the command, “Open your eyes, get up and walk.”
I couldn’t even stand. The room was spinning, and I felt like I was flying towards the wall, and would smash my head against the cast iron radiator. I gripped the armrests but the radiator was approaching with an alarming speed. The men grabbed me and held tightly in the chair.
My bewilderment changed to sluggishness and in that state of my once alert mind I was told to strip down to underwear and ushered to the next room. Four or five physicians waited for me at their desks. Three of them I won’t forget.
A hearing doctor, a babushka with a large head mirror was first. She examined my ears, ordered me to step a few feet back, and turn my back to her.
“Thirty-five,” she whispered.
“Thirty-five,” I whispered back submissively.
“What? Louder!” she yelled.
I returned to the table and repeated loudly:
“Thirty-five.”
“Good. See, you can do it when you want.”
She scribbled something in her log and waved me off.
A surgeon quickly checked all my limbs, ran his fingers down my spine and commanded: “Show me your heels.”
“Both?”
“Yes.”
I stood up on my tiptoes.
“Are you nuts?” he said.
“You said both,” I retorted.
“One after another, dummy…”
The next doctor was a sturdy looking redhead. She ordered me to turn around a few times, examined my skin all over and said: “Show me your head.”
I obediently bent my head forward.
She gave me a dirty look and hissed angrily:
“Peel back your dick, idiot.”
“Speak proper Russian,” I snapped at her, did as requested, and left.
Long story short, my medical reports recommendation was “Fit for military service in all branches except Navy and Air Force.” And, of course, my assignment order was to appear for appointment to the Personnel Department of the Northern Fleet HQ.
A week later, on a cold September morning a train with a distinctive name “Arktika“ dropped me off at the Murmansk railway station. It poured. The handle on my suitcase broke. There were no cabs and I walked about a mile to the Military Commandant Office carrying my suitcase like an umbrella.
The Duty Officer studied my papers and shrugged in disappointment. “Wrong place, Buddy. Go to the main bus terminal and take an express up north to the Navy HQ.”
I grabbed my suitcase and raised it over my head prepared to step in the rain.
“Hey, pirate,” the officer handed me a roll of tape. “Make a handle for your chest.”
It was late afternoon when I finally reported to the Navy HQ Personnel Department and was sent to the Officers Hostel. At dusk I walked to the shore to watch sunset.
A narrow path winding through the rocky shoreline led me up to a cliff. Down below, a ragged submarine was bouncing on small waves. Shreds of rubber were hanging all over its carcass. It resembled a tired killer whale that had washed ashore and was waiting for a complete overhaul or a scrap dock. Somehow the sad looking sub put me in a romantic mood.
“After all, so be it,” I thought.
Falling asleep I imagined myself smoking a pipe and marveling at the bright stars on the upper deck of a sailing vessel gliding in the far seas or listening to “no shit, this really happened” tales of exotic ports in the officer’s wardroom.
In the morning my dreams of long nights under the polar or tropical stars were ruthlessly grounded.
The floors in the Personnel Department office squeaked like the deck of an old frigate. A grey-haired Captain 2nd Rank studied my file and said:
“Want a career in the Navy?”
“Why not. Sounds kind of romantic.”
“Tell you what… the ships you’ll be on do not enter ports. You’ll need binoculars to see the land. For six months you’ll be hanging out at sea, eating canned bread, drinking “shilo” (awl; Russian naval slang for sprit diluted with water) and puking overboard.”
“What are my choices?”
“I have a request from Long-Range Reconnaissance Aviation. It’s closer to your home and will save you a year of service. Then you’ll decide.”
“Sign me up,” I said.
The loop closed. I was fit for service in all branches except navy and aviation, and wound up in naval aviation.
After a year in the unit, I was commanded to the Pionersky boot camp. My orders were to bring a unit of fifty sailors-recruits who had completed their training to our naval aviation base.
After the punishing winter in the North, I felt enchanted by the warm and salty March breeze, the soft murmur of the waves rolling over the strikingly white sand beaches, almost touching the high dunes. It was late afternoon when I reported to the camp’s duty officer. I asked when my unit would be ready for travel. The officer hesitated and advised me not to rush.
“We have an emergency here,” he said.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Well,” his voice turned to a whisper, “someone painted the moustache and the beard on Lenin bust with ink. The orderly swears he didn’t do it. Our political officer is investigating, and a special department officer has been called in too.”
Lenin’s bust, now freshly painted white, stood next to the unit’s banner. Guarded day and night by an orderly.
“Damn it,” I thought, what a cluster fuck. I’ll be stuck here till they find who did it. If they found the “culprit”, the poor guy would be lucky to get away with a severe reprimand that would stick in his file for many years. He’d never be able to enter a university or get a decent job.
I remembered what a bombshell it was when a sailor from our intelligence unit “committed” a far less serious offence. In a letter to his folks he called the head of the photo laboratory an asshole. The letter was intercepted by the special department officer doing the mail cover check and then passed on to the political officer with a recommendation to, “take action.” The order/recommendation trickled down the chain of command to the deputy regimental commander for political affairs, then to the regimental Komsomol leader and finally landed in my hands with the indisputable verdict “expel from the Komsomol.” I ignored the “recommendation.” The sailor got away with a warning notice.
It rained in the morning. In the early spring the white sands looked as grey as the sea. The boot camp looked even less inviting than the day before. The culprit was still unidentified. The Camp’s political officer threatened to contact his counterpart in our regiment and ask him to keep his eyes and ears open in case someone bragged about the incident.
Ironically, sixteen years later on a tour in the Naval Academy in Annapolis, I was reminded about this episode. Right inside Gate 1 to the Academy stands the Navy Bill, a sculpture of the Academy’s mascot. The cadets rub his brass balls to a shine for good luck. Apparently, there too, the orderlies keep 24-hour watch over the mascot, but the “culprits” are never caught.
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Victor Pogostin was born in Moscow. He graduated from The School of Translators of the Moscow State Institute for Foreign Languages, worked as translator for the Soviet Trade Mission in India, taught Russian Language and Culture course at the Aligarh Muslim University, served in the Long Range Naval Reconnaissance Aviation of the Northern Fleet. After his return from military service defended his PhD dissertation on Ernest Hemingway’s nonfiction. For many years he worked at the Academy of Sciences, while working as a freelance author/translator for national newspapers and literary magazines throughout the former Soviet Union. In addition to translating fiction and nonfiction into Russian, he has compiled, edited, and written introductions and commentaries for over a dozen books by North American authors, including the works of Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck. In 1993 he relocated to Canada with his wife and son. In North America several of his articles have been published in the National Post, Canadian Literature magazine, The Epoch Times, and Russian Life magazine (published in Vermont).
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