Schulz once flew there using a Google Earth flight-simulation program and crashed into a chaotic cluster of houses. His major said that it will be freezing in Kabul in November at 6,000 feet. Right now Schulz is kneeling in the fluttering shadow of a tree. The days in Klietz are like sports camp. In the end, Schulz places ninth in his group of fourteen. Birds are singing in the trees, and Schulz is surrounded by the soundtrack of peace. The deployment is still far away, like a distant thunderstorm.
In the meantime, in a tract of forest fifty miles farther east, worrisome news has reached the Bundeswehr mission command headquarters near Potsdam, where high-ranking military men coordinate the global deployment from a command center that is impervious to wire taps: in Afghanistan, the frequency of attacks is increasing. The Taliban is back. The status reports don’t categorize the country as green, like Bosnia, or yellow, like Kosovo. Afghanistan is red, and red means “Situation unsafe and unstable.”
[ . . . ]
When Schulz describes how he ended up in these barracks, in his room, in his uniform, it’s as though everything he did since 1989 led straight to his getting lost here. In a German suburb like Lichtenrade it was easy to underestimate the world. “Life was a party,” says Schulz with a shy smile that betrays how embarrassing he finds that now. But back then politics was something you learned about in school; it was history or distant and absurd world theater: “in the Middle East, for example, suicide bombers here, there, and everywhere.” Schulz remembers wars that didn’t look dangerous on television. “First an American jet fighter is catapulted from an aircraft carrier, and then it comes back.” He didn’t become aware of world events until five years ago, when he got home from school and wanted to watch Star Trek but instead saw the first tower collapse on RTL [a German television station]. And when the second tower fell, he thought he was seeing a slow-motion repeat of the first one. On September 11, 2001, Schulz felt for the first time “that the world is truly evil.” Half a century of affluent tranquility and global standstill had come to an end.
The word “globalization” was everywhere in the media, and in school Schulz heard how few jobs were available out there. Politicians spoke of the Bundeswehr as an “intervention army,” and Schulz enlisted for basic military service. When he became a recruit on October 1, 2005, Germany had long been caught up in global competition, not only economic, but also political, demographic, and military.
[ . . . ]
Three weeks before his flight out, the word “Afghanistan” is being used so much in the Armored Infantry Battalion 421 that everyone has just started saying “Afga.” Now it’s mid-October and Schulz is pushing a shopping cart through the barracks. He has to go to outfitting. He was given a slip saying that he is to receive “two field jackets, tropics” and “two pairs of combat boots, hot/dry.” Aproned women are waiting in a hall in front of floor-to-ceiling shelves of boots, helmets, pants. They narrow their eyes and peek over their glasses, sizing Schulz up like the saleswomen at C&A used to do; then they disappear and come back with a pile of uniforms.
Schulz traded in his old, dark green Bundeswehr “flecktarn camouflage” for the new, sandy gray “desert camouflage.” He slips the color of dust and heat onto his pale body; it is the color of the Gulf wars. The Bundeswehr no longer wears the green of the German forests; it now wears the colors of the new global trouble spots. Bundeswehr [literally: national defense] – suddenly the name sounds so outdated.
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