LYB Forevah!

There was a Cretan guy I’ve met in Mitilini, a sergeant called Nikos, who was the type of guy who’d you like to have next to you in a battlefield. He seemed to be valiant, courageous and clever. At first, I approached him with all the “yes sir” crap, but he told me “forget it. One day you may become a sergeant too!”. Call again? How was this possible?

I learned later that this was possible due to my studies and age, and that I was selected, together with other 20 men, to go through a second training period, called LYB, standing for Battalion of Trainee Officers. Sounded hard, but Nikos assured me that this was the best month since he joined the Army. For one, you’d be doing no services, no shifts, no handy work. Training and only training. Good facilities, good officers, and all this for a month. Whatever took me away from my present unit was good enough for me…

Sometime in March, they load us in the back of a truck and they sent us to the small village of Polichnito, in the heart of Lesvos. The camp looked decent enough and more important, nobody was yelling at us. We settled in a cozy barrack and they informed us that the training will last 2 weeks only and that there would be no sergeants out of us, due to an order from the Pentagon. Plus, we were there to do some services after all…

The training was a more intense novice training. Confused? We were doing again the same things we did over and over again in the training centre. This time, from the perspective of a commanding officer – this is how we should view ourselves now. Nikos was right: It was the best time of my “military career”. People were treating decently, I hung out with great guys and above all, I’ve met my pal from my Student’s Life, Nikos Gazis, who was there as well as a trainee officer.

There were great moments during the training. We loved to give orders to each other. We were learning by having fun with our great superiors, who were about 25-28 years old. Another buddy of mine, also called Nikos, was doing a lesson to others about cleaning our gun and parts of it. “Because, when you are on the field, wet, hungry, thirsty, without ammunition, without communication, separated from your platoon and with bullets flying next to your head, what makes more sense than cleaning your gun?” LOL!

The village was nice. It had two cafes, a bar, a press shop, and many places to eat. The best was the hot springs right next to the camp, where we could rest our battered bodies :-P Plus the fact that we could sleep for hours, without disturbance. This place was great and most of my friends agreed on that. We didn’t want to leave.

And we didn’t. At least not immediately. Time passed quickly and we were sworn as corporals. I came 13^th from 130-140 people, not bad. The important thing was, this camp had warehouses full of mines, whom needed to be carried by someone and put someplace by someone as well. And, what a surprise, my unit was selected for this superhuman task. Mind you, we’re talking about 35.000 mines here! But that didn’t bother us. What mattered was that we were away from our actual unit. We carried mines all morning, then came back, unload them from trucks, then eat and then go to our services. But we were happy.

We did stay one more week there and then came the time to go back. It was harder than I thought, to get used to the running and yelling, but we didn’t have any choice. But I was grateful to have experienced these 3 weeks there and meet all these wonderful people and a blog can’t be enough to tell you all my experiences or even more describe my feelings about the time I’ve spend there. It was by far the best time of my life during the Army…

Coming up next: My second-best time of my life during the Army! Small Ropes!