Schulz has been very tired lately. He goes to bed at nine and dreams dreams that are entirely new to him: he is standing in the middle of a party. He goes home to visit his parents. He dreams about normal life. And he reads the Koran. He doesn’t want to do anything wrong. He learned how to fire a P1, a P8, a G36, and an MG3. He learned how to camouflage himself with leaves, use radios, and drive a truck. He knows one sentence in Pashto: “Melgero Mellatuna – Dreesh, kah nay say dasee kavoom!,” a phonetic version of “United Nations – Stop or I’ll shoot!”
He sat like a schoolboy in a course on “Regional and Cultural Studies of Afghanistan,” so that he’d be a politically correct soldier, if that’s even possible. He has learned that Afghanistan is “a country where people are used to having less personal space,” where children will come up very close to him. He has learned that in an accident he should never touch an injured woman, even if she dies right in front of him. And that a pot on the side of the road could also be a bomb. And that the moment he looks out of his vehicle and sees that he’s being filmed could be the moment of his death, since Al Qaeda films its attacks.
Sometimes he gets worried all of a sudden. “What if I run over a sheep? Or a child?” He won’t be able to see much through the hatch of his armored vehicle. Schulz has heard, and read, and trained a lot, but in the end his life will also depend on chance. Whether he drives a yard farther to the left or right, whether the pot on the side of the road really is just a pot, or whether he’ll be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Is that war?
Schulz knows now that he wants to run a gas station, like his father, when he gets back. But first he has to get through this, and he wants to as well: “I want to show that I give a damn about the world.” Not every know-it-all college student can say that about himself.
The next morning Schulz marches with two hundred troops through a light fog to the farewell roll call. The first winter frost has arrived. Frozen breath billows in front of the soldiers’ faces. Two hundred silhouettes standing at attention, one of whom is Schulz, alone with his thoughts. He wrote a will leaving everything to his sister. Up front a colonel is speaking, “…foreign deployments are a dangerous milestone in the lives of our soldiers…. In the name of the German people….” A march is played. Schulz already sent in his annual dues for the model-making club. He still has to buy Christmas presents for his parents and cancel his car registration. His life insurance covers both active and passive risks of war. Now the mayor steps to the front, a petite woman in high heels, and she presents the troops with a Brandenburg city limits sign.
The fading out of the national anthem marks the beginning of the “snuggle weeks” for the soldiers, the mandatory farewell leave period with their families.
[ . . . ]
In the days leading up to his departure, Schulz floats in an ocean of time. He goes to Heiligenhafen with his father to do some high-sea fishing, but they abort their plans because the waves are more than six feet high. He gives his mother a brooch. Has pictures taken of himself and his sister. Gets together with as many friends as possible. What used to be an everyday routine is now “life.”
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