Part 1: Eric on basic training
Vic: Do you have anything you’re going to take for good luck?
Eric: Actually, yes. I’ve this small figurine of a cat that, I’ve had it for years, just kind of in my bag as a, I don’t know, good luck thing. <laughs>
Vic: Is it something from home?
Eric: Yeah, it’s something that I got years and years ago, and it’s just… it’s.. it’s always somewhere amongst my stuff, whenever I move or go to a different country or something, it’s just always kind of there.
Vic: Did a lot of the people that you met in training have good luck charms, or I guess like religious things?
Eric: There was a lot of, like, a lot of the guys had religious stuff. I saw quite a lot of guys had, like, religious icons- you know, the orthodox religious icon stuff. I’m not sure what the correct word is for it. One of the guys had this little- it was actually really fucking cute in a way, he had these little… like they were paper cutouts in the shape of an angel or something, and he had one of them dangling off his helmet at all times. That seemed to be very much a for “luck thing”.
Vic: He had a bunch of them so that he could replace it when it got messed up?
Eric: Yeah, and he’d had them hung up- he was on the bottom bunk and he had them hung up from like the bunk above him, over his bed basically. And seemed to be like very much a “for luck” or something thing. I think it might have been something that a relative might have mailed him or something.
Vic: Did a lot of people get mail from home?
Eric: Yes. A lot of the guys would request, you know, food and additional stuff to be sent from home. Once or twice a week they come and drop off the packages. Obviously the packages would then be inspected to make sure you didn’t have like a bottle of vodka or something. A lot of guys that get sent like mostly food, you know, that was the majority of what guys were ordering in, or like getting sent by the relatives. The- in the run up to Easter, there was a metric fuck ton on a packages of food being delivered. The- I’m not sure what the, I can’t remember the name of them, but you know the Easter cakes?
Vic: Pampushky? [note: pampushky are bread rolls, paska is the cake]
Eric: I think? They’re like the, like a bready cake thing.
Vic: Yeah, I know what you mean.
Eric: There was like, there was more of those than people in our tent at one point. Which was great, because there was fucking heaps of cake for everyone.
Vic: So people were sharing, even with the people who don’t follow orthodoxy?
Eric: Yeah. Amusingly, they were people getting blessed and all that, and I was just kind of nearby, hanging around, and I was like, “oh, this is going to be interesting”, like I’ve never been to an orthodox service. One of the instructors comes over me, and he goes, “well, are you baptized Christian?” and I go “yep!” and he goes, “okay, go over there.” So I ended up being told to go get blessed by the priest. One of the guys had to very quickly give me a like two second crash course in how to bless yourself the Orthodox way, because it’s different to the Catholic way.
Vic: What do they do?
Eric: It’s like, which shoulder you tap first is like the opposite way around, basically.
Vic: Ahh, okay.
Eric: Yeah, that was definitely an unexpected interesting experience, because my initial thought was stand well clear, just observe this whole thing from a distance, like don’t be too close to it, stand back out of like- to be respectful of the thing. But I also wanted to see what was going on. But they were like, nope, it’s way better if you just participate. I was kind of scared shitless that I’d fuck something up and offend everyone. <laughs>
Vic: So, what did you have to do?
Eric: Basically, you stand there and when everyone else blesses themselves, you do that. Priest comes around and douses you with a fuck load of holy water, and he says something, and you say what roughly translates to “Christ is risen”, and then yeah, you just bless yourself a bunch more times and say that a couple more times, and that’s it.
Vic: Did it make you feel better at all?
Eric: I mostly just found it interesting because I’m not a terribly religious person, but it was like, yeah, okay I’ll take every bit of help I can get. <laughs> You know, it’s was funny, because one of the other guys that I knew there, one of the other Ukrainians, he’s like a Buddhist but he went to get blessed anyway, because, again, it’s like, you’ll take all the help you can get.
Vic: Yeah. So did people tend to become more religious during training?
Eric: I did notice that a lot of people definitely, like- even some of the guys who were like, at the start, shall we say they wouldn’t be very religious- but some of them definitely- by the time Easter rolled around, they were very enthusiastic about the idea of getting blessed and such. There was definitely some… I think was also because we’re at that point, we’re more than halfway through the training cycle, and guys were starting to get very nervous about where they’d be sent or what they’d be doing next, you know.
Vic: Yeah. So did people talk about things like, I don’t know, good luck charms or religious symbols that they’re going to take with them? Or was it more of a personal thing?
Eric: More of a personal thing. I was kind of curious about some of the icons and stuff, and a couple of guys were like, “oh, it’s for protection”. I don’t have the knowledge to know what the, what the icons stand for, but I gather they’re like saints and such. An interesting thing was in the training centre there was a lot of like iconography and symbolism of a Saint Michael. Like the chevron of, like, the corpus includes Saint Michael’s flaming sword.
Vic: I mean he’s the emblem of Kyiv, so he’s very, like, culturally tied with Ukraine.
Eric: It turns out he’s also like the patron saint of paratroopers, so.
Vic: Oh, good for him.
Eric: Yes, apparently Michael’s got a lot of jobs.
Vic: I think that’s the thing with a lot of saints, they’ll be patron saint of like 10 different things that can be quite disjointed.
Eric: Mhmm.
Vic: Do you think you’re going to end up becoming more religious after your first deployment?
Eric: I have no idea. There’s that old joke like, “there’s no atheists and foxholes”, and I can definitely, like- talking to some of the other guys, some of the guys have started going to church and stuff. Even the ones who were definite non-believers, shall we say. They’ll turn to it, like- it makes sense because it offers you a, you know, “it’ll be okay”, kind of thing. So I can definitely see that happening.
Vic: I’ll have to try and catch you again in like half a year or something, when you’ve had time to be traumatized a bit.
Eric: <laughs> Yeah, I’ll have converted to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church or something. Gotten rebaptised or something, I don’t know. <laughs> I joke now, but that’s a thing that definitely happens. We’d this one chap with us, another international, and he would like- he was super, super religious. It was kind of funny because you’d get what, 10, 15, minutes to eat at mealtimes, so you’d sit down and start shovelling food in your face as fast as possible. Not this guy! This guy was like, “Nope, I have to thank God for this food first, and that’ll take like a minute or so”. So you know, he’d sit down and say prayer, and in the morning you see him praying, before he went to sleep, you know. He was super into it.
Vic: And what religion was he following, do you know?
Eric: Catholicism. I asked. I was kind of curious, so like, “oh, which of which type of Christian are you?” He’s a very super devout Catholic.
Vic: Do you reckon he’ll convert to orthodoxy?
Eric: No, there’s enough Catholicism here that he’ll be fine. Him and one of the- we had another one of the other guys, a guy from the States who’s like a, I think, Baptist? Like one of the American flavours of Christianity, and he also was super, super, religious. I found it was- it was quite interesting because a lot of the internationals that I met before I went were quite agnostic or atheist, but then you meet the ones who have signed up and are doing the thing, and a lot of them very quickly find religion. Which I think is definitely a, it’s an interesting thing to note.
Vic: I guess it’s a good framework for processing the experiences you’re gonna have.
Eric: Yeah, I mean, that’s probably it. It’s like there’s, there’s a lot of, you know, difficult moral questions that they’ll have to answer. And it gives them at least something to have some kind of framework, I guess.
Vic: And also God’s watching over you, everything happens according to God’s plan. I guess it takes some of the stress out of it.
Eric: Yeah, there’s definitely some of that. It’s like, well, you know. It’ll be what it’ll be, kind of thing.
Vic: Yeah. So I appreciate you said you didn’t have too much time. Is there anything else you’d like to mention before we finish up?
Eric: I can’t really think about that offhand. Is there something you can think of?
Vic: No, I mean, I could sit and like ask you a list of characters that people have mentioned to me and be like, “has anyone mentioned that one to you?” But I don’t think that’d be a productive use. Yeah, I mean, drop me a message if you, I guess, think of any interesting mentions of those, or any, I guess, key stories that come to mind about the heroes that people have discussed during training.
Eric: I’ll try and see if I can remember, if I can find my notes, that’d be great- because I did take a shit load of notes, but they’re all on notebooks that are somewhere. I’m still sorting through a lot of my stuff.
Vic: But do you know where the cat is?
Eric: Yes. That is in the backpack by the door.
Vic: In the go bag?
Eric: I mean I guess you could call it that. It’s just the one that happens to have my laptop in it, so it’s the most important one.
Vic: Right, I’ll let you go, but thank you for your time, and for putting up with my questions. And, good luck!
Eric: Thanks, bye.
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