Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
~ ~ ~ My Universities: Part One
"And the drill grounds will start shining,
Will get polished with our boots,
Will get crushed to fractions tiny
By the marching brave recruits…"
to the air of "C’mon, fellas, uncinch the horses…"
At the Draft Collection and Distribution Point in the regional center, I made a desperate attempt at getting exempted from the army service. During the final medical check, I reported to the oculist that I couldn't see with my left eye any deeper than the second line in his check chart on the wall, although, in fact, I saw three. For that, slightly exaggerated deficiency, I was recognized fit for non-combat service in the construction troops.
After three days of kicking back upon bare-timber decking at other Collection and Distribution Points and equally hard shelves in the railway cars for draftees, in the scant pre-dawn light I stood in the line of draftees on a platform at the Stavropol railway station thoroughly drenched by the last night’s rain in just one shoe. Differently from the Perseus' case, my shoeless foot still had a cotton black sock on.
And what other choice remained there? Early in the morning when they commanded all to leave the car, I searched not only the section I slept in but 2 more under the mad yells of the Sergeant by the exit from the already empty car. My right shoe was nowhere and, while chilly dampness from the puddles in the asphalt around edged in thru the sock fabric, I felt an incipient suspicion gradually building up at the back of my mind that even in absence of direct evidence the disappearance of my footwear item had occurred by dint of the vindictive hand of Valik Nazarenko from the Krolevets city.
Of all the guys in our car section, only he had a thick pack of postcards, and at each stop, he begged the people passing along the platform outside the car to drop a bunch of filled out postcards to a mailbox. Who would deny a young boy being taken away even though not in a prison, yet also in a securely locked railway car?
And after our train left the station, Valik would put on an acute countenance and ask himself his invariable question, "Who else to write to?" And then he answered to himself, "Ah! I know!" and began filling another postcard or two that he goes to serve in the army and has already passed the city of Rostov. In the end, he would read his literary production out loud for all the present in our car section.
All of his writings were alike and concluded by the inevitable, "My best wishes, Valik". On the second day, I suggested him to vary the word order—at least in some postcards, for a change—to make it, "My Valik wishes best". All laughed then, but he laughs best who laughs last and, standing on the platform in a soaked sock, I did not feel like laughing at all. The kickback to my innocent pun left me without a shoe which, most likely, never arrived in the city of Stavropol but stayed way back, mateless, strange and foreign to the rank grass in the embankment wet after the rain in darkness… To a whimsy play on words, the redhead bastard responded by the rude practical joke. However, who's not caught at action is not the joker…
We were told to get into the beds of waiting trucks, that took us thru an unknown, not yet awaken, city and left it by an outgoing highway which also was left for a worn-out asphalt road and, after three more kilometers along an unsubstantial forest edge on the left, there popped up a long white-brick wall by the right roadside, a meter-and-half tall or so.
The trucks drove into the openwork high gate of iron pipes (cross-section 2”) by the whitewashed guardhouse. The glazed red-&-yellow tablet by it outer door announced it was Military-Construction Detail 11, Military Detachment 41769, while the empty road outside the gate went on to the nearby horizon…
We were lead to the bathhouse, before which they asked us whether anyone was going to send his clothes back home. Quire predictably, no one planned anything of the sort, keeping the time honored tradition, draftees were leaving for the army service in their junk clothes which were eventually dropped on the grass about the bathhouse porch.
Only in the canteen at the Rostov Collection and Distribution Point, I saw a draftee in his suit and necktie. He fell out of the picture by his age too – about ten years older than the surrounding skinhead yobbos, however, he was not twenty-seven yet, otherwise, they wouldn't draft him. And his hair wasn't cut. He ate nothing, just sat without a motion staring in front of himself, or rather looking inward.
(…because it's only from outside that we all look the same, while inside there is a hell of a lot to consider, the epics unfolding in there are way cooler than the Illyad added by the Odyssey…)
There he sat in a tie loosened on his thick neck, paying no notice to empathetic nor to sarcastic ogles, not knowing what was ahead where they were taking him…
The Military-Construction Detail 11, shortened to VSO-11, had basic minimum engineered for keeping lots of humans in one place.
A close group of five long barracks, paneled from inside with painted plywood sheets and overlaid without with white bricks in shiner position, squatted behind the white brick fence run along the roadside. The barracks were interconnected by the common system of steam-heating pipes running up in the air on tall iron props. For heat insulation, the pipes were wrapped in glass wool, fixed with white glass cloth, and covered with the finishing layer of black roofing felt kept in place by twists of thin baling wire.
Three of the barracks to the right from the gate were lined along the brick wall separating the military territory from the road outside, each of them surrounded by an internal asphalt path. Across the path behind the leftmost barrack, there stood a wider, but also one-story, building comprising the Canteen with its kitchen, and the Club of the detachment.
In the third row, counting from the road, there was the stoker-house, the bathhouse, the shoe-making and sewing shops under one common roof for all.
The drill grounds covered by the layer of rough concrete, started from the gate and stretched on to the Canteen. Opposite the Canteen, across the drill grounds, there stood the last two barracks of the five, parallel to each other and the wall along the outside road. Behind them, next to the far left corner of the drill grounds, there stood a brick toilet, aka sorteer, accomplished with 10 holes, aka ochcos, in the concrete slab alongside the left wall and the cemented urinal runnel along all of the opposite one.
To the left from the sorteer, there stretched a ten-meter tin trough of a washbasin raised by meter-tall rebar props above the ground. The water pipe with a dozen taps ran along over the trough.
Farther on, behind the drill grounds, there stood three tall truck boxes in a raw, each one without the face wall and—to their left—2 rows of sturdy sheds of ware and food storehouses. Behind them, a bit on the outskirts of the detachment’s rectangular grounds, stood the squat structure of the pigsty.
Ah, yes! The last but not least – the narrow brick hut of the military store by the gate, opposite the checkpoint guardhouse…
The narrow white wall of bricks stood only along the asphalt road, and the rest of the perimeter was guarded by the fence of barbed wire, so familiar from the early childhood. Behind the truck boxes and the barbed wire fence, a wide field rose hiding in the invisible hollow a deserted sandpit and the village of Tatarka, which was visited by the soldiers of VSO-11 on their AWOL's, aka absences without leave.
As for the road by which we were brought to the detachment, it entered, after another six kilometers, the village of Demino, where the soldiers also went on AWOL's, as well as to the city of Stavropol, sure thing.
But all that I hadn't known yet leaving the bathhouse in the cotton khaki outfit and high kirza boots on top of badly wound footcloths – two strips of light coarse calico or flannel fabric (30 cm x 60 cm), which are much more practical than common socks. In summertime, when baring your feet you'll notice the dirty stains left by the dust that sieved in thru the socks' fabric, while the footcloths, however dirty they become themselves, still keep your feet clean. Only they should be wound properly around the feet—tight and smooth, without wrinkles—otherwise, you'd rub your feet to bleeding. And in winter, footcloths without socks feel warmer than footcloths over socks, though both methods do not save toes from getting frozen inside the high boots…
Two soldiers from the previous drafts were poking thru the civilian clothes dropped on the grass in front of the bathhouse, checking whether there were any citizenka items suitable for AWOL's…
We were led to the detachment Club fitted out with a stage bare of any curtains, and rows of plywood seats lined across the hall over its tilted floor of not paint-coated timber. Our army service started there by dragging the audience seats out of the Club, washing the wide floorboards, bringing and installing 2-tier iron bunk beds for the Fourth Company personnel to sleep upon, since we, the recruits, were to be kept in their barrack.
With the first non-combat mission accomplished, they collected us by the entrance to the Fourth Company barrack and split into three platoons, each under the command of a separate Sergeant. The Sergeants compiled lists of their commandos, checked them with the general list by the lieutenant and started training the newbies. In all the three platoons were drilled the same commands.
"Platoooon! Fall in!"
"Platoooon! Fall out!"
"Platoooon! Fall in!"
"Platoooon! Fall out!"
"Platoooon! Fall in!"
"Platoooon! Fall out!"
We executed the commands keeping our hunger in check by the wishful thinking because a small group of recruits had been already sent to the Canteen for laying tables with the midday meal. And finally, "Fall in for the meal!"
"Slow.. march!"
In contrast to the Club, where you had to climb three stairs in the porch way to the door, in the Canteen, on entering the door, you went three steps down into the spacious hall filled with two quads of tables split by the central aisle.
On both sides of each table stood a bench of solid painted-brown timber allowing for ten men to sit in a row. The dark gray floor of smoothly polished concrete endowed the hall with a bouncing hum, like in the waiting rooms of passenger stations at their busy hours.
Along the whole left wall, two steps ran beneath the three consecutive windows to the rooms outside the hall. The wide uninterrupted shelf-ledge of white-painted tin stretched under all the three windows. The first (and also the smallest) of the windows was the seat of Bread-Cutter already closed from within with its tin-clad shutter. The next one—wide and having no shutters—presented the view of the kitchen with the steam rising off the wide cylinders of nickel-plated cooking boilers, and a pair of soldier-cooks midst them, in khaki trousers, slippers on bare feet, and tank tops under their half-unbuttoned white jackets in yellowish grease smudges. One of the cooks had a white-cloth beret on his head. The last, also wide and shutterless, window connected to the Dishwashers' room filled with steam and noise of hot water bursting from several taps at once in the long tin trough full of heaps of used enamel cups and bowls, and aluminum spoons.
The far blind wall opposite the entrance, in a pragmatic dark-swamp-slime paint-coat, separated the Canteen from the Club. In the right wall high up above the floor, the row of wooden frames kept the panes of hingeless windows…
The white enamel bowls, arranged in 2 long rows along the table edges, marked the seating places on the benches put close by. 20 aluminum spoons, studded with water drops, were piled in the center of the table for each eater to grab one. Next to the spoons, lay a heavy dipper accompanied by 20 enamel cups spruced up with combat scars from the pell-mell pileups in the Dishwashers' trough. Two and a half, multiply cross-sliced, loaves of "brick"-shaped brown bread on the crumpled aluminum tray provided also exactly 20 chunks…
The cooks began throwing five-liter enameled pots on the ledger-shelf of the dispenser window, issuing shrill indistinct yells. The first meal in the army began.
The borshch was red and scorching hot. It was brought in a pot from the dispenser window and ladled into the bowls with the dipper. Since thru all of the dinner each serviceman was to use just one and the same bowl, the borshch should be eaten to get the second course, or you had to refuse the first course at once and wait until the on-duty soldier brings the following pot with barley porridge, more commonly handled kirzookha.
(…take a look at the top in army high boots made of kirza [plagiarized English "kersey"], this artificial leather was invented as a war effort during the Russian-Japaneese war and though it did not prevent the defeat of the Russian Empire in that conflict yet for more than a hundred years it faithfully remained in both combatant and non-combatant service.
Now, if you ignore these deviating asides and carefully consider the fine pattern impressed into the surface layer in the top of high boots at the Russian-Soviet-(yes, here again)Russian armies made of the artificial kirza leather, you start to understand the accuracy of the unofficial term kirzookha traditionally used for the traditional meal of the barley porridge in all of the above-mentioned armies. No wonder, the considered likeness prompted servicemen on the doorsill of their hunger death to cook their boottops as it happened on the small barge that for 49 days became a plaything for storms in the Pacific before it was met by a US aircraft carrier off the coast of California. The Soviet sailors were proposed the political asylum in the United States because the Cold War proclaimed by the British hereditary political star Churchill in the Fulton piece of his orations raged globally at that time.
However, Sergeant Ziganshin recollected the beauty of both sunsets and dawns in his native Tatarstan steppe and refused. The rest three sailors followed the suit (being not Tatars though) and later all of them were awarded one of the higher orders in the Soviet Union after a proper check if they didn't become CIA agents while being fed up back to normal in the cornucopious State of California [only by mid-90's Askhat Ziganshin managed to rehabilitate from his addiction caused by the never-subsiding making him drunk at undercover interrogation sessions disguised as ceremonial parties].
All that happened in 1960 and gave birth to a popular folk-rock song running something like this:
Beware the boogie man!
Ziganshin's on the loot!
The night before
He chomped his buddy’s boot!
Which is the oddest point in this whole story because at that period the USSR hadn't got any VIA yet…)
The porridge was liquid too and as hot as the borshch. Compote poured into the cups from well-dented aluminum kettles, was not so hot, yet also liquid. The stunning din of bustle in a railway station served the background to munching and slurping. At times (not every day though) the peaceful symphony of animated feeding got pierced thru by loud curses and dings of a cup hurled bouncing and spilling along the central aisle. Nothing to get jumpy about, the soldier noticed that his cup was leaking and expressed his indignation with that fact because in the since-long-established prison tradition using of impaired utensils was the prerogative as well as the mark of a petukh, aka faggot among inmates.
On finishing the meal, the tools of personal saturation had to be taken to the Dishwashers' window and put in the appropriate piles or stacks on the shelf-ledge. As those accumulate, Dishwashers themselves would topple the heaps into the corresponding sections of the trough under the streams of steaming water from the taps.
Now we could leave the Canteen and return to the "training" barrack so as not to miss the next command to fall in…
The subsequent army experience proved that borshch was never to happen for breakfast or supper, those started immediately with kirzookha, and in the morning next to the bread on the tables they put a tray with 20 cubes (1" x 1" x 0.5") of yellow butter brought from the Bread-Cutter's window, which you spread on the bread with the handle of aluminum spoon picked up from the pile. If the butter was brought in one piece it was portioned by the most authoritative serviceman of those present at the table, with his spoon handle.
The piece of butter could also be reduced by a passer-by serviceman who started his army service a year and a half earlier, and now approached your table to reward himself for his combat merits. The lump sugar, brought for tea, would also do for one or another honored veteran…
On the whole, the ration was unpretentious, yet enough for to survive. In autumn it became even simpler – cabbage and water for the first course, cabbage and no water for the second, water and no cabbage for the third.
On a seldom lucky day, you could detect a sliver of lard a-floating in your portion of the kirzookha porridge (the detachment had its pigsty, after all) but nothing beyond the lard.
And on the Soviet holidays, they would even add white buns for the morning tea…
At first, I couldn't eat soldiers' food. Not that I was over-squeamish, but simply because no matter how hard I tried I still couldn't manage to stuff that ration into myself. It stubbornly stuck in the throat.
At one of the meals, a soldier from the previous draft, seeing my diligent agony, laughed and explained, "No fear! You'll get used and start to havvat anything." He was right. The matter was that in the construction battalion they did not eat, but "havvat".
"The company went to havvat – catch on!"
"And what havvage is it today?"
As soon as I stopped eating and started havvating, everything fell into place. At times, I even havvatted an additional portion.
But that came later because if a soldier in his first half-year in the service (handled in that period "young", or "salaga", or "salabon") dared approach the dispenser window with the bowl in hands, the cook, most likely, would feel lazy to splash into it a scoop of havvage and simply shriek instead, "Fuck you, salabon!" Not because of being a genetic misanthropist, but just aping the attitude he had suffered from when being a "young" himself. However, he also might not start shrieking – you come across exceptions anywhere.
(…in his 2 years in the army service, a Soviet soldier ascended the hierarchical ladder of servicemanship.
In the first six months, he was a salaga, aka young, aka salabon.
For the next six months—after the following draft had brought in a new wave of youngs—he became a dipper.
1 year of service and 2 younger drafts behind made him a pheasant.
For the concluding six months, with no old-timers above him, he was a grandpa.
And, at last, Minister of Defense of the USSR has signed the order on demobilization of the servicemen drafted 2 years ago, which act turns a grandpa into a dembel to be dismissed on the arrival of the new draftees.
The hierarchy terminology is not overly hieroglyphic.
Young meant the youngest in the service.
Dippers were entrusted with dealing the havvage out – for the youngs too early, for the senior servicemen below their status.
Pheasants took in the width of their cotton pants to have them tight like sausage skin and began to stagger kinda bunch of dandies.
Grandpa was antipodal to young, and dembel presented a nice abbreviation for "demobilization".
To go thru that ladder you had to live 2 years… At the age of 18 or 20 such quantity of time seems an eternity.
Besides, the quality of time in the army is unpredictable, some days fly by hardly having been started, while others – vice versa, you feel that no less than a week had passed already but—no!—it's still today. In the army, the amount of time of the latter sort prevails over that of the one mentioned first.
The most miserable lot was that of dembels who had pulled, and pushed, and dragged the un-embraceable lump of 2 years to the finish.
For them each hour became an eternity filled with soul trepidation, anxiety beyond any good riddance, disbelief that that was possible at all.
Soldiers from the lower rungs of the ladder tried to spur time employing for the purpose card calendars where all the 12 months of the year were printed on one side, while the card reverse called to keep money in the saving banks or fly by the Aeroflot airplanes.
They ruthlessly pricked each day lived thru with a needle, one by one. The card calendars lost their glossy appeal, but when raised against the sky, they showed quads of pin-thick holes – 1 for a month lived thru.
Such calendar-pricking calls for a disciplined unswerving mind and remarkable willpower. Not by a single pheasant have ever I happened to see such a calendar. Eternity humbles and crushes any high-and-mighty pride…)
The first day in the service ended about midnight – we were trained to fit into 45 seconds when going to sleep or getting up after it. In the time specified, you had to remove all your outfit, carefully stack the items on a stool in the central aisle lit by the long daylight lamps under the ceiling, and dive into your bunk in the koobrik, and cover yourself with a sheet and blanket.
Koobrik was four two-tier bunk beds set in two rows closely, side by side, separated from the neighboring koobriks by narrow passages where you collided with those who slept in the next koobrik's beds. The collisions were just inevitable because the width of the inter-koobrik passage was dictated by the 40-centimeter-wide cabinet-box crammed in between the bunk beds and bounding the passage with 8 newbies who rush to their bunks. Oops!. Ouch!.
Under the top of the 70-centimeter-tall cabinet-box, there was a drawer. The door below the drawer provided access to the inside shelves. Those 2 shelves and the drawer were allotted to 8 people whose bunk beds towered above the half-meter-wide 4-meter-long passage. If any of the beds in the passage was occupied by a grandpa, then all of the cabinet-box, the drawer as well as both shelves under it, was his sovereign stowage whose indivisible immunity was not a matter for the feeblest discussion. In case it was a pheasant but not a grandpa, he could farm out the lower shelf, still, not every pheasant would.
Construction battalion trained you to live lightly and not burden yourself with things you could do without. As for your safety razor, it could find a place on the shelf of the buddies from your draft who happened to have neither oldies nor birds in the passage of their koobrik…
Raising questions before commanding officers had undesirable backwash on the state of health. The "pheasant-grandpa" system was the pledge of military discipline in the army, and an officer with disregard to it was sawing off the bough he sat upon. Therefore, in case of being addressed with some complaint, he complained about you to the "grandpas". In the evening, the officer would go home after his day at the service, and at night the "grandpas" were damaging your state of health.
Yet, all that was to be discovered later, and now the Sergeants were walking along the central aisle of the training barrack, looking for a footcloth wound not accurately enough around its boot top, or a belt dropped in a hurry over the stool in a careless manner, or the absence of any part of outfit – the son of a bitch had dived under the blanket half-dressed!.
Finding where to find fault, they commanded a general "get up!" and the training began anew. No chance that we had started doing the job any better, most likely, the Sergeants themselves wanted to sleep. After another "lights-out!" they did not command "get up!" and the long fluorescent tubes in the ceiling over the central aisle were switched off, except for the one over the cabinet-box at the entrance to the barrack. Its remote light was not a hindrance, you could close your eyes and…
"Get up!!"
What? What for?! O, shit, it's morning! And where's the night?
(…I have told already that time in the army is a dirty bitch, ain't I?.)
~ ~ ~
A couple of "get up!" were conducted without much of nit-picking though, just to remind you're in the army now, bastards. Which leniency was caused by the breakfast ahead, and if we were late for it, the cook-grandpa would hail the Sergeants with his "J'ai presque dû attendre" from the dispenser window.
(…the kings of France had a special courtier whose job was to clap his pole against the floor and thus bring attention to the monarch’s entry to this or that hall in one or another of the royal palaces. The clap was coupled with the strident yell, "His Majesty the King!"
So, one day at the Louvre, Louis of Certain Number, approaching the door to the general hall, noticed that the announcer was not in place. Maybe, dropped around a corner to correct a certain kind of mess in his outfit…
Yet, at the very last moment, directly from nowhere, the courtier with the pole ducked in the doorway and—as required by the statute—boomed his bang into the floor, "His Majesty the King!"
In fact, the King hadn't even had to march on the spot, and passing by the servant, without much fuss, he reproached him in a royally dignified way:
"J'ai presque dû attendre."
When translated from French, it means "I almost had to wait"…)
But the grandpa in the window would translate it another way:
"You, fucker! Got too fucking cocky, eh? They threw that Sergeant stripe-snot across your shoulder-strap and you lost your scent? I fucking fuck your fucking rank and you too! You once again be late and I'll have you dispensing the fucking pots. You fucking cock!"
And the Sergeant would have nothing to parry such a translation with, because if though not a "cock", yet for the current period, he still was just a pheasant.
(…What on earth could any king have to do with our construction battalion? The most intimate connection. The commonly used, albeit unofficial, denomination of the Soviet Army military construction battalions—aka conbats—was "the royal troops".
Got that under your belt? On we go.
The outfit of the military conbat soldier, aka conbatist, consisted of a khaki piss-cutter with a small red-cherry star screwed in its bow with the still smaller yellow sickle-and-hammer inside. The star was a very important detail called to make easy seeing the front from the rear in that headgear.
On the strength of its shape, the piss-cutter was of no use for protecting the soldier's ears. When caught in the strong wind or rain, you could turn off the cap's flaps and pull it on your skull, yet the trick bestowed on the serviceman the looks of a mugger in a "condom"-hat.
Under certain circumstances, the conbatist could even put his piss-cutter crosswise, that is, with the star transferred into position above one or another of his ears. The cap applied in that manner was supposed to present a motif "a-la Tricorn of Bonaparte", however, on the whole, that looked like a dull moron with the star on the side of his fucking gibbosity.
Alternately, the head of the conbat soldier might be covered with a forage cap, but, according to the Statute of Inner Service, the forage cap should co-occur with the jacket and trousers over the blunt-nosed high shoes of black leather. Such a set was briefly referred to as "parade-crap" (ceremonial uniform) with black shoulder-straps on the shoulders of the jacket. (…black is always in vogue…)
The black insignia fields up the lapels of the ceremonial outfit were decorated with miniature emblems of military construction troops, made of a light yellow alloy. The same emblem was repeated in a larger size on the forearm part of the jacket's left sleeve, but already without any metal impurities.
The Brief Heraldic Explication of the Conbat Emblem
“Battalion Commander pours forth Thunder-and-Lightning;
Ensign trots like a squirrel in the Wheel;
I dropped the Anchor and don't care a fuck,
They won't urge me onward
Not even with the fucking Bulldozer.”
* - * – *
Between the parade-crap jacket lapels peeped a khaki shirt and a necktie of a darker hue of khaki with the elastic string—like that in underpants—hidden under the collar and secretly holding the tie in place.
But let's turn back to the casual (everyday) uniform the upper part of which (the cap) has already been exposed, in general.
The innermost layer of those sheathing a conbatist were underpants and a tank-shirt (in winter long-sleeve undershirt and long johns).
These next to the skin items at the following (moving outward) lever had a composite cover of the khaki cotton jacket without any shoulder-straps (in case you got promoted to any rank distinguished by a number of yellow stripes across the shoulder-strap, then you were in charge of procuring the needed insignia).
Five round buttons of light green plastic had no holes but a single protruding eyelet in the underbelly so as to save their entire globoid faces for the embellishing bass-relief of pentacle star that contained sickle and hammer (crisscross) in its center, all of which served to fasten the jacket's front vertically. The skirts of the jacket reached the middle of the thighs and its sides had straight pockets—just below the waist—covered with flaps wide enough to prevent ground getting inside when the conbatist dug holes. The buttons in the wide sleeve cuffs were of the same green plastic, and of the same design, but thrice smaller in size.
Under the left breast in the jacket, there was the inner sack-like pocket of khakied burlap.
Besides the jacket, the second level layer in casual uniform included trousers—some proud manifestation of the ideals of pragmatism—two cotton pipes of legs, narrowing downwards, overlaid with large patches on knees for hardening and prolonging the service life of the whole item, two upright pockets on the hips had no flaps and the small smooth buttons of emblematic decorations to operate the fly. (Just for the record, at each of the leg down apertures there also was an inch-wide strip sewn across the openings but the fanciful additions got cut off at once so that they wouldn't fuck your brains nor rub your soles.)
In winter the cap was replaced by a hat with ear-flaps made of artificial gray fur. The fastening strings at the flap tips allowed for wearing such a hat in four distinct manners:
1. "ears up"-type, aka King Solomon Crown;
2. "ears pressed under the back of the head"-type, aka Cautious Rabbit;
3. "ears loosened"-type, aka Hawk Coasting Proudly;
4. "ears tied under the chin"-type, aka Sparring Partner.
A padded jacket constituted the outmost layer worn in winter. Upright stitches, keeping the wool lining in place, gave the padded jacket a hybrid-like looks of epic heroes combat outfit and concentration camp uniform, only in an unvarying khaki color.
Instead of a padded jacket, a soldier could wear a pea-jacket with the smooth outside surface. The latter surpassed the padded jacket in many ways. Firstly, there was twice as much wool in its lining and hence it was warmer. Secondly, it reached the middle of the thighs, covering the groin and buttocks from the nasty extremes of winter weather.
And one final glimpse of the parade-crap, not to omit the double-breasted greatcoat of cloth-felt completing the ceremonial ensemble in winter.
The greatcoat ended a bit below the knees and had 2 vertical rows of yellow metallic buttons (same bass-relief of the loaded star etc.) on the breast (one of the rows decorative). Behind—across the sacrum—the short strip of same-fabric, half-belt, with a buttons at each end (both decorative), under which, just next to the rectum, started the vertical gash splitting the skirts – in case of the need to quicken the pace or for any other needs.
And last but not least, the wide belt of sturdy tarpaulin with the weighty metal plate-buckle which could be used for a host of purposes, starting from digging a hole up to becoming a lethal weapon in a fight, when used as a mace on a string, sort of. It was not used to keep a soldiers pants though but to have him girded over any jacket or greatcoat he had on, and only in the parade-crap the belt was not observed, yet mostly present under the jacket, just in case.
Here, in short, how the construction battalion soldier, aka conbatist, was dressed. Though we, the spring draft of 1973, at first were honored and trusted to finish off the Russian and Red Armies' tunics with the stand-up collar, aka choker, which had been inherited and kicking back around in the warehouses of the Soviet Army. Later on, when we had worn them off to tatters and they became a real rarity, the "pheasants” were steaming with the itch to get such a one, unlike anybody else’s.
The comparative analysis of the component items in the outfit of the conbatist serviceman shows that the most idiotic piece in it was the forage cap, being uncomfortable to put under your head when sleeping, because of its hard visor, and mulishly resistant to attempts at pulling it over your ears in the rain…)
Each of the barracks was entered thru the outside cell in the middle of its long side. The narrow vestibule (3m x 3m) had the floor of wide ash-colored tiles underneath the low ceiling of painted plywood resting on wide lattice windows in its walls.
