Conscription – thoughts

During the last years, the armed forces of many countries have gone from relying on conscription for recruitment to being manned entirely by professional personnel. After a time of reducing the number of people called to serve for each year, Sweden finally followed this trend and in 2010 the conscripts were replaced by volunteers. During the five years that have gone by since the abolition of mandatory service in peace time – and especially after the crisis in Ukraine – many voices for the reintroduction of conscription have been raised.

The main argument that is heard is that Sweden would be better prepared in case another country attacked because a larger number of people would have received at least a minimum amount of training and could be called to serve. Another argument (often uttered by my commanders) is that mandatory service made it feasible to train soldiers much more intensively during the year that they served than it has been possible to do now. During basic training the number of people quitting is high and after basic training the hours of service per day are reduced in order to match the working hours of the rest of the country. During mandatory service this was not the case and continued training more or less kept the same intensity as basic training. In this way soldiers would get more training in less time and for less money. It was also easier for commanders to plan exercises and to finish those that had been started, without having to cut them off abruptly because the working hours were over as it happens now. This can be frustrating for motivated soldiers too. Maybe, however, this problem will be reduced with the new system. It seems that it will make it possible to train new soldiers for more hours each day even during the months following basic training. Maybe another good thing would be to make it harder for people to leave whenever they want to, especially during the beginning of basic training when most people struggle to adjust to military life and many give up. It can be a good thing for a professional army to get rid of people who do not fit and who are not motivated enough so that money can be saved. However, the beginning of basic training is far from a perfect indicator of who will do well in the armed forces afterwards and who will not.

A further argument for mandatory service is that it makes the military more connected to the people. Once, almost everybody knew plenty of people who were serving or had served. This created another attitude and understanding for the armed forces. I experienced what this difference can mean during my medic training. It took place in a part of the country where the military still has several regiments and establishments. Seeing military vehicles roll on the streets is just an everyday thing to the people living there and gunfire is a background noise that they barely pay attention to. Most of them know someone who serves and when you talk to them they almost always have at least a fair idea of what you do and what it means. On the other hand, when people in Gothenburg (where the military is less present nowadays) have found out that I am in the military, or when I have happened to walk through the city in uniform, I have been met by questions of how it is to train to kill people, if I think that I am cool and a lot of exclamations of: “look! A military!”. These things mostly come from young people, who have grown up after that the armed forces had already been significantly reduced and many regiments disbanded. Besides from being annoying sometimes (but occasionally also somewhat funny), this aspect is not good for society in many ways. First of all this lack of understanding is probably one of the reasons for veterans having problems to readjust when they come back from service in war areas. Secondly: if more people have an understanding of the armed forces, more people can have an informed say about them and about defense politics, instead of risking to sound ignorant and lose audience. More people will feel confident enough about these matters to express their thoughts about them and more people will be able to influence them. The armed forces and defense politics are something very important with potential to affect the whole society. Therefore a larger part of the population should be able to participate in the shaping of them.

Armed forces manned by conscripts also serve to bring people together who are from different backgrounds, with different personalities, dreams, goals, views of the world etc. They learn to live together and collaborate, which is a good thing for the society afterwards. It also means that, not only will more people be able to influence the decisions about defense politics and armed forces, but also more different kinds of people.

The role of conscription as a means to teach the population certain important things should not be underestimated either. A period of service in the armed forces is an opportunity to acquire outdoor knowledge, to learn about first aid, about collaboration under challenging circumstances, about putting out fires as well as other things which many people do not learn enough about otherwise.

There are however some important arguments against conscription too. Professional soldiers have the possibility to attain a higher level of proficiency than conscripts since they stay in the armed forces for a longer time. While it costs a lot to train new people each year on certain systems and to do certain tasks, in professional armed forces it is sufficient to train a smaller number of people who stay longer.

Also: that more people serve because they are forced to, and that everybody has relatives and friends who serve, might make people reluctant to send forces on deployment abroad. This can be a good thing, in certain cases, but it might also cause decision-making to drag out in times when it is vital to make quick decisions.

Another positive aspect of professional armed forces is that the soldiers tend to be more motivated. They are serving because they want to. Maybe, the motivation in a conscript army can be kept up if care is taken to place people on positions appropriate for them and if one is ready to move them from one position to another if it is discovered that they do not fit in their current one. A well-functioning civil service system should also be put in place to give people an alternative to military training and still keep them in roles that can be useful in case of war.

Could the best solution be a combination of conscripts and professionals? This is still the system that I would prefer to see in Sweden. It is already in place in two of the neighboring countries: Norway and Denmark. A large number of conscripts could be given a few months of compulsory training, while positions that require more training are manned by professionals. The conscripts would provide a good base for recruitment to the professional placements. A certain number of voluntary people could also be trained and kept ready for international deployment, like during the last years of mandatory service in Sweden.

The question about conscription is an important one and one that I find quite interesting. It has been, and keeps being, debated in countries all around the world. Some arguments, both for and against, are more unique to individual countries and their specific situations while others are recurrent and global. Different countries probably need different solutions. A country like Sweden, with very few inhabitants compared to its land area, might benefit more from one model, while the same model might not be applied as successfully in a country with many more inhabitants and other circumstances. It will be interesting to keep following these debates and see where they lead.

It is Over Now

More than half a year of medic training in the army has come to an end and it is time to continue towards whatever lays ahead. The people whom I have met here, whom I have lived with, studied with, trained with and who have been there during all the hours of the day, go their own way too and maybe I will never see them again. This time in my life will belong to the past but I have many memories and in many days from this, moments will still come alive in my mind and many will be beautiful to look at. Sometimes they’ll be puzzling, maybe, and I’ll wonder what they mean. Maybe I’ll find a meaning. Maybe not. But that is how life works.

Dead and Living

Joking, we say that the gulls are the souls of the soldiers and officers who have died through the years. There is no shore close by but still here they are. A lot of them. We see them in the morning, ghostly, and hear their loud screeches. They exercise manoeuvres on the field, in the middle of the garrison. They fly a little and then settle in a new formation, then fly a little again and yet another formation. All the while they keep screeching, giving commands and repeating them. Morning after morning we see them on that field. What war are they preparing for? Their feathers are as white as the bones of the skeleton at the front of our classroom. The skeleton is a plastic one but sometimes I find myself wondering if it was modelled on someone. In the middle of our long lessons I wonder who it was. Its bones are beautiful. So proportional. They all fit together so nicely. There are many ways in which a human can be injured, we are told, in which the balance can be broken. We go through them, one after another, and learn to use all kinds of rubber tubes, splints, boards, bandages and other appliances with which we could help save someone’s life, one day. The skeleton keeps standing there, with its ironic smile, as though it was contemplating something that no one else is seeing.

On the fields outside, the birds have settled and the sun has taken their place on the sky. Their screeches have almost gone quiet. The hares still run around though, as busy as they always are in spring. They cannot see us well, because it is too dark in here and outside the sun is shining bright, but it almost looks as though they were observing us. Their eyes are large and secretive. Their ears twitch slightly.

Small Cities Come Alive

It is a weekend evening and even the streets of this small city are full of people. People drift past, often in groups just like ours. We could be classmates. We do not look too old for that and we are girls and guys, all with different styles now, different characters, different ways of talking. What gives us away is that not many other groups of friends would be addressing each other almost exclusively with surnames. We are not classmates. We are platoon and company mates. But it is ok: you can go ahead and compare our platoon to a school-class and the company to a school grade. It will give you an idea. A difference is that we spend almost all of our time together though, each hour of the day. We do not get rid of each other. Sometimes, like now, we choose to stay together even if it is weekend and we are free to go home.

In many ways, life as a soldier in training is rather simple. Someone else prepares your meals, someone organizes your day and decides what you are going to do and when you are going to do it (but you will still have some free-time after that basic training is over), you earn some money and, if you want it, you can rather easily get a full-time employment for a few years, at the end of your training, and the possibility of a career in the armed forces. You do not even have to worry about what clothes to wear during the day. Having people around you all the time is also part of what makes this life simple and safe. Yes, there are times when you would like to be left alone, but, especially if you have left your home and family only a short while ago like I and most others here did, then the people whom you share your days with here become a bit like some kind of substitution for a family. If you need to talk with someone then there is someone there and even if you do not feel like talking it is good to just have others in the background. For me, after having lived alone in student accomodations for almost one and a half year, it is a relief.

Then there are things that do not work very well in the Swedish armed forces, things which we already have started to notice. Sometimes it feels as if the armed forces of this country still have not realized that the conscription is gone, that it is time to start thinking as an employer for real. Massive advertising campaigns have been launched, since the abolition of mandatory service, to attract new soldiers. Still the problem is making soldiers stay. Part of it is probably due to the low salaries but much is the fault of the lacks in the organization and beacuse information always reaches you just at the last moment, sometimes when it is already too late. After a while people get enough of it. Even people who came with a lot motivation and high ambitions end up being desinllusioned.

Everything has its good and its bad sides and, in due time, everyone will have to decide for themselves if the good sides make up for the bad ones. If it is worth it for them. But now it is a nice evening in the little city along the railroad between the two largest cities of the country. Winter is coming to an end and the days are longer and warmer. Soon there will still be some daylight at this hour but for now the only light is electric. It is abundant though. The streets, the restaurants and the pubs are full of people who are talking and laughing and some who already had a bit too much to drink. Sometimes, even a small city like this is alive. Right now we can put the rest to the side.

A Monday Morning

“Fire!”
In one swift motion we drop to our knees and from there down on our stomachs. The mats under us slide a little on the ice but we do not mind it as we adjust our positions and aim. Within ten seconds we have shot three times each and hopefully hit our targets, a hundred meters away.
It is not a complicated exercise and we have done it before but it is still good to take a little break from studying anatomical Latin words and make sure to keep our military skills alive. So I and a few others decided to follow the non-medics this snowy and icy morning. The shooting range is covered by some decimeter of snow. The snow in the shooting shelter has been packed into a layer of ice which forces us to walk very carefully.

While we shoot, 105 new recruits are starting their new life back at the garrison. Their basic training starts today. Yesterday the first ones arrived, looking a little lost as they made their way to the barracks. I think of the terrible and wonderful time that awaits them and the shock of the transition from civilian to military life. I envy them a bit for it. Yes, basic training was different from anything I had ever done before and it was hard to adjust to it in the beginning, but I never got to be thrown right into it like them. When I arrived to basic training I had already experienced military life, a little, at summer camps and other youth courses that the armed forces organize so young people can learn what the military is like. I had already worn uniform, already lined up in barracks corridors, already fired a few rounds with an assault rifle and already heard commanders speak in their funny manner. I was introduced to military life more gradually than many others and, in a way, this made me miss out on something. I had been dreaming of the big day when I would finally start my military training for real but when that day came it did not feel as special as it should have felt. The most special day was probably still back when I was fifteen, and went to the first military youth meeting. I remember that time it was all so new, funny and exciting.
I envy the new recruits a little for the time that lies ahead of them as well, for all the stories they will have to tell and which will unite them. I am glad that I am done with basic training but as I look at them I think that maybe I would like do it all over again.
I wonder how many of them will quit before it is over. The commanders are tough on them, stressing them and remarking on the smallest things. This is not because they are mean people but it is the way they have to be in order to teach recruits that they are not at home anymore, teach them that here they are part of the military. They must stop thinking of themselves so much and focus more on their comrades, their platoon and their tasks. They must learn to handle the stress, not to do things carelessly and to do as they are told. In the beginning they might wonder what this is all about. It will make them feel worthless. I heard people in the home guard talking about how those who have just left basic training are bad soldiers because they are too afraid of doing mistakes. Yes, I think it is true, but I still think that recruits need to be treated as they are in order to understand the most basic things about being in the military. They will learn the rest afterwards. I wish them all good luck!

Also a Home

The toilet booth is far too narrow. When opened, the door almost touches the toilet. I imagine what my building-plannification professors at university would have said if I had tried to draw something like this. It looks just like one of their examples of design failures. But this is an old building and at some point someone had decided that, somehow, they had to fit more toilets in here. There is place for around hundred people living on this floor, after all. The walls of the tiny booth are covered with scribbling, old and new. “Freedom in a few hours!” and “Finally the end is here”, say the ones written by people doing mandatory service, a few years back. “Basic Training 2013” says a newer one. There are words of wisdom too at times, some serious some odd. Many have passed by here and left their mark. So many young people have spent a part of their life in this barracks building.
Like many other barracks in Sweden, this one is hundred years old. It is much larger than the one where I did basic training. Compared to that one, this has almost twice as many floors, twice as large corridors and twice as large rooms. Only the toilets are small.
Each room has beds and lockers for sixteen people, however we are half that number living here now. Girls and guys share rooms, toilets and showers (the showers have curtains though). As far as I know, that is the way it has always been in the Swedish armed forces, all since women started to serve. They always try to place the whole squad in the same room and gender does not matter. It works well. It might feel strange in the beginning but most get used to it quickly. As it is rather common for medic platoons nowadays, we are a lot of girls here.
Everything in the barracks is worn and simple. The bed sheets have the same checkered pattern which has been used all since my dad did his military service and before. It is soon Christmas but there is not much of a Christmas atmosphere here. A girl bought Christmas decorations that she hung to her bed. For a while the golden star-shaped lights illuminated the room in the evenings. Then the commanders discovered it and made her take them down. Now everything is back as before. At least we still have a box with gingerbread in the common locker and the air smells of Julmust, the typical soft drink of Christmas.
Although we have to keep everything tidy during the day, in the evenings each corner of the rooms takes on its own identity, reflecting the character of the person living there. Some corners are more tidy, others more of a mess, in some corners candy wrappers and Julmust cans litter the floor, in others there is repulsive used snus. Some people have taken the matresses from the spare beds and put them under their own. People have brought all kinds of stuff with them, from small fridges to mats. You are almost never alone and some people sleep with earplugs because it can be quite noisy in the evenings.
But living here is not bad, after all. I like the liveliness, the practical simplicity of everything and even the worn metal furniture has its charm. I guess the toilets are bearable too.

Continued Soldier Training

The window of the vehicle is not transparent enough to see through but the streetlights outside make it into a glowing orange square in the darkness. The noise from the motor and the wheels drenches the talk and the laughter from some sitting further away. Some times the talk and the laughter fills the vehicle along with songs. But now we are tired, many of us half-sleeping. The monotonous noise and the glowing orange square are hypnotising.

Outside of the vehicle the frost has already settled in the ground, making muddy land become hard as stone. Frozen shoe prints have many sharp edges which dig into your knees and elbows as you throw yourself down for cover and crawl. Tree branches and grass have already been frost-covered in the mornings for a while now and our breaths are clouds in front of our faces. In our lockers the white snow uniforms are already hanging ready for even colder times.

I have taken a break from studying engineering and I am back full-time in the military for half a year to continue my training and become a part-time medic. I had to leave my home-guard unit for this and it feels a bit sad. I felt at home there. But I also felt that I was too motivated to only exercise a few days a year. I needed to continue my training for real and better do it at once than to wait. It would only be harder to adapt back to this as more time passes and also it would probably be harder to find a unit that wants me, I think. It was quite hard to find a place already. It feels nice to take a break from studying as well.

Now, before the real medic part starts, I am doing Continued Soldier Training. It is strange being back amongst young people who are fresh from basic training and once more being treated kind of like a recruit by the commanders, after having talked with my home-guard commanders as you talk to friends. It feels a bit like it would feel to be back in primary school. Yes, we mostly only have eight hours training a day now, mostly we get an hour lunch break and we get proper pay as well, but rules, order, time-pressure and commanders who yell at us are back to a certain extent. It is fun that I used to talk and joke about these things with people from my basic training, after that it was over, as if they were gonne for good.

We are pressured to always do our best and it is tough at times but it also feels good, in a way, that they expect something from us. In the home-guard it was good if we got better, of course, but it felt like, at the end of the day, it did not really matter that much how much better we got. We haven’t donne as many different things here as in the home guard. Instead we spend much more time on each thing, learning it in detail. It is nice to have experienced both.

In Sweden the reasons, which I have heard the most, that people give for being in the military are that they want to try it, to give it a chance, that they don’t have anything better to do, that they want to challenge themselves, that it is fun. In normal Swedish fashion there is no exaggerate display of patriotic emotions or any emotions at all about it. That would be viewed with suspicion in this country (and that is not because people here aren’t patriotic but more because it isn’t very Swedish to be too emotional about anything). Well, I did have other things to do, like staying at university. I did not come here out of a sudden impulse. It is something that I had been thinking through for a long time. Partially it was that I liked the idea of being so close to nature, like each detail of the landscape around you is important for how you go about to solve your task in a way that rarely occurs in the civilian life. We are outside in any weather, at any time of the day. I like that we don’t just sit behind a desk the whole time. I like that each day is different because I can’t stand days that are all the same and end up melting together. I like how you learn to appreciate the moment, how you learn to appreciate all the small things. And I like how it feels that the things you do are for a reason more than yourself. You’re always supposed to think about someone or something else before of yourself: your comrades, your unit, your task. You become better at noticing the needs of people around you. I want to try and make the world a bit better, no matter if I really achieve anything at all. But at least I want to feel that I have really tried, that I have dedicated my life to it. That is why I do this and it is also the reason why I do other things, like studying construction engineering. It is one of the things that makes life feel meaningful.

Another good thing about becoming a medic is that I’ll get to study the human body, which is something that interests me a lot but which I thought that I had renounced to when I chose to direct my path towards becoming an engineer. This is a wonderful opportunity.

The rumbling noise from the motor dies away. It is quiet for a while, as everyone listens. Then the order to dismount comes and we open the sides of the vehicle and climb out, take all our equipment and walk away to clean our weapons. Soon we will finally line up in the large worn-out corridor in the barracks to be dimissed for today and then go shower and sleep. Tomorrow new challenges await.

After One Year

Now more than a year has gone by since I started this blog. A year ago I was in Togo. I thought that Togo would seem so strange and far away when I came back. Like a dream. But that isn’t the case. Somehow it still seems so present and real, sometimes more than Europe. Maybe it is that Europe feels less real. Maybe because it isn’t the whole reality. Once it was easier to live as if it was because, even if I did know that it wasn’t, it had always been the whole reality to me. It had been the reality which enclosed my life, my small world. Now I see the old, familiar things around me, which invite me to go back to that way of living, but I can’t. I see the streets around me and I remember other streets made of red sand, with hens running amongst heaps of garbage. I see people eating ice creams and remember buying FanMilk on my way back home from the orphanage and as I remember that I remember the humid heat, the light, the smell of burnt plastic, the markets, the motorcycles. On Easter eve I go to church and while I stand amongst the small group of people there with me I remember other people. I see the new church of Attikoumé that lights up with hundreds of candles as the electric lights go out. Hundreds of people who sit in silence while the fire spreads from candle to candle in a warm African evening. I almost feel their presence. What can it be? One hour time difference now? They are also gathered at the church in this moment and I feel as if I’m not at all in in Sweden with those few others. No, I’m at the church in Attikoumé as well, amongst them.

Around Christmas I sent some letters and packages to Lomé. I sent them to the family, a friend and to the orphanage. I know that the friend got one of the packages but I haven’t heard from the others. Not that I expected to. I wonder if the package and the letter that I sent to the orphanage arrived, if the letter was read to the children, how it was read and if they remembered me. I wonder if the calculator I sent them was helpful for their homework and if the girls made new bracelets and necklaces with the beads. I wonder what has changes and what has stayed the same. I think about the host family as well. I wonder how they are and what they are doing. For them time has gone by there in Lomé. I was just a young yovó girl who came and went like many others. Most might not even distinguish me from the others any longer, in their memories. I hope some do.

In Gothenburg winter passed. The snow came and went. Spring arrived and finally chased away the days that were so gray and dark that there wasn’t even a reason to open the blinds in the morning. Although I do like winter, that side of it was heavy. Eventually it got warm and sunny and even when it rains now it is still light.

I keep studying. Some of the courses at the university are more fun, some are less. Some, like mechanics of materials almost make me go crazy. I sit up late in the evenings, trying to get my head around it. Mostly I just stare at the assignments, without knowing from where to start. In one of the courses we get to plan and design residential buildings which is fun and interesting but reminds me much of solving sudoku. There are so many rules and things to keep in mind! Another course I have is Geodesy. That one is fun and boring at the same time. Fun because we get to learn how to use interesting measuring equipment and be outside. Boring because sometimes we have to take a lot of measurements of land areas on our campus. And when I say a lot of measurements I mean a lot. Like over two hundreds-a lot. For over three hours everything we do is walk a few steps while holding a stick with a prism and pressing a button, with the occasional excitement of having to refocus the measuring machine on the prism when it looses contact with it, once in a while.

Before Easter I had a four-day exercise with the home guard. It was a good one and I learnt a lot. I was happy to meet the people from my unit again, I was happy to feel the familiar weight of the combat equipment, to hear the sounds from explosions and gunfire and smell those smells that are so typical for the military: the smell of the waterproofing chemicals in the uniform, of the forest, of gunpowder, of clp for weapon cleaning… And I was so very happy to be out in the forest once more. Even the last evening, as it rained, and I got a cold water puddle in my small, personal tent and my clothes and sleeping bag got wet, what did it matter? I need these sides of life as well. I’ve been missing them and I even wish that I could have more of them again.

As I got back home I unpacked my military things over the whole floor of my student accommodation room, packed a civilian back pack and left again for a few nice days in Stockholm with a friend from my old school. It was sunny almost the whole time and there was a summer atmosphere. I’ve only been in Stockholm once when it wasn’t winter or autumn and there wasn’t snow or rain. Not that I don’t like the city then. Snow actually suits Stockholm very well. But it was nice to see it in the sunlight for once, with a lot of people outside on the streets and in the parks and with trees full of flowers. We walked around the city, went shopping and took the boat to an island.

Back in Gothenburg again I didn’t have many days left to study for my retake math-exam which I’m almost sure that I failed again. Then I went to Vienna and that’s where I’m now as I write this.

 

 

 

When studying gets too boring it is important to find ways of making it more fun. What better way is there than finding a good place to be on? And days like this should simply not be wasted.

 

   

Total station. I always wondered how they worked. Now, thanks to Geodesy, I got to find out.

 

 

Just the view from my window. Again. This time in a different season.

 

 

My sleeping place in the forest, during the exercise with the home guard. Airplanes were looking for us so we had to hide everything a bit.

 

 

 

Stockholm.

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Stockholm.