The Fart Of A Soldier

On Mandatory Military Service in Turkey

It was the third week of my four-week military “service.” Every morning, our company gathered in the yard, where the sergeants in charge of us would make us clean the barracks or practice our lockstep march. On that day, however, we were sitting in the stands, and in front of us was the captain himself. He wanted to know how our experience had been so far, and what he could he do to help.

A few people complained about the food, others about the state of the bathrooms. The captain, a pudgy, bespectacled man, listened intently. The batch of one-monther before us, had their relatives file complaints through CIMER, which can’t have been pleasant for the officers.

The captain said that he was making note of our problems, but that things wouldn’t change in the week we had remaining of our time there. He gently encouraged us to adjust our perspective to make something of our time there:

“You will wake up at 2 in the morning. You can’t sleep. There is a pungent smell. The man on your right is snoring, the one on your right is passing gas. You will get a taste of this.”

[“saat 2’de kalkacaksın. Uyku tutmamış. Keskin bir koku, havasız bir koğuş. Sağındaki horluyor, solundaki gaz çıkarıyor. Bunu tadacaksın.”]

I snuck out my little sheet of paper and wrote down his words.

After about the second week, when the novelty wore off and everyone got a little more comfortable with each other, existential questions had been surfacing. Why were we here? Most of us were in our late 20s or early 30s. We had jobs to get done, families to support. It’s not like anyone was expecting to be trained in the arts of war, but the lack of even the pretense of usefulness was bothering people.

All this was part of a very recent shift in mandatory military service. It used to be that nearly every male citizen of the Republic of Turkey had to do some kind of it, but the duration and content varied. When I was growing up, the two main categories were:

• Long term [Uzun dönem]: Most people went soon after they were 18 and served for a year. (This was longer for previous generations)

• Short term [Kısa dönem]: If you went to university, your service got delayed automatically, and if you obtained a 4-year degree, you had a choice of either serving 6 months as a private, or a year (long term) as an officer.

Now, the vast majority of the people doing their military service in the 2000s didn’t do anything remotely useful. Real military tasks were so specialized that someone with a few months of experience couldn’t contribute significantly to the effort. Especially if you were a short termer, you were all but certain to be resented by other soldiers and given mind-numbing tasks nobody else wanted to do. People who had recently returned would nearly always advise against going. Many of my friends did think it had been interesting to meet people from different walks of life, and getting away from the professional grind for a while could have been interesting (the director Nuri Bilge Ceyhan famously benefitted from his time in service), but overall, it wasn’t worth it, especially if you had already started a demanding career.

And there were ways of not serving:

• With foreign exchange [Dövizli]: If you spent a few years working abroad, you could pay a set amount of money (in foreign exchange) and not serve at all.

• With payment [Bedelli]: every few years, the government would declare a general amnesty in which people would pay a certain amount of money and be exempt from any kind of service whatsoever. When asked where they did their service, a few friends of mine would say “at the ATM.”

• Rotten report [Çürük raporu]: You have a physical or mental disability that prevents you from serving, and are therefore pronounced “rotten”.

• The pink bill [Pembe tezkere]: You’re gay, the state classifies this as an illness and considers you unfit for service. (They used to require documentary evidence, which is why it was said that the military had the biggest gay porn archive in the country. I think they now have doctors perform a psychiatric test to attest to your malady).

Of these, it was the bedelli that screwed up the system. If there is something every “healthy” male has to do according to their educational status, but every once in a while there’s a general amnesty, people are going to wait for that amnesty. And we did.

Those of us born in 1988 had just missed the one in 2014 by a sliver (this came on top of a long list of grievances for my fellow 88’ers) and it looked like maybe there wasn’t going to be another amnesty. After the failed coup attempt in 2016, something fundamental about the country had changed. Its martial spirit was coming back to life (I reflected on this at the time in a two-part essay), and I suspect that the government saw mandatory military service as a way of bringing the entire population into that broader project.

In the summer of 2019, the government announced that they were reforming the entire system. The options now were:

• Get some real training and actually do things that might be important, including combat. You get paid doing this, and can transition into a career in the service if you want to. There are different lengths depending on educational attainment.

• Serve six months, doing basically menial work, regardless of educational attainment. This is the old “short term” deal, but now available for everyone.

• Pay a fee (constantly adjusted according to inflation, think many months of minimum wage) and only do your first month of “acemilik” (literally, “state of inexperience”), meaning basic training. This is also open to everyone regardless of educational attainment.

• Get exemption via foreign exchange, a rotten report or a pink bill.

This did several things. It extended a hand to the huge population of unemployed young men and sought to entice them to enter the lower rungs of the professional military service. The Turkish military was engaged in active combat across the stretch of the country’s long southern border, and needed more soldiers. If you had to serve, why not get paid for it?

On the other side of the equation, it took the huge backlog of people waiting for bedelli and converted them into one-monthers bringing in cash. People wondered why we couldn’t just pay and be done with it, like previous groups of bedelli, but I suspect Erdoğan saw that as a personal issue. He wanted everyone to get “a taste” as our captain so aptly put it. This was a huge pain in the behind for actual soldiers who had to deal with us, as well as most of the people in (I hesitate to use the actual military term) my “company.”

I didn’t mind. It involved lots of cleaning, marching in formation and presenting ourselves for head counts. There was basically no PT (we did pushups once, “don’t say I didn’t do them” our sergeant said) and we each shot three rounds from some ancient G3 rifles (the sergeant buckled to pressure and used his phone to take photos of everyone holding rifles as if they actually used them).

The interesting part of course, was spending time with people you otherwise wouldn’t meet. I got along great with my bunk mates. They came from all over the country, were a mix of blue and white collar workers and most had very young families. We actually flowed remarkably quickly into something you’d recognize from movies: we called each other after our home provinces, sneaked in smoking breaks when we were supposed to be working, or pranked each other. Our little room of bunk beds had a imam from inner Anatolia and an atheist urologist, perhaps the two professions with the most exposure to the country’s sexual practices, which was entertaining (but could have been awful for periods longer than a month. I don’t know how they do it). It was alright. I also welcomed the ability to be offline* and free from work obligations.

The political implications of the reform did make me worry. Just as in countries like the United States, the military wanted to get better at attracting young men without job prospects. In this kind of a system, the people actually serving serve harder and expose themselves to more danger. The people who have the means to stay behind are more comfortable, but are expected to “support the troops” on the home front, more or less unconditionally. Worse, some of my bunkmates couldn’t afford the bedelli price tag on their own, but took out loans because they couldn’t afford to leave their families for six months.

Towards the end, we often chatted with the professional sergeants about their experiences in actual combat, especially the operations in the South East from 2015 on. They were in the gendarmerie, which has been at the forefront of fighting. I remember how someone from our group said that he considered joining up, and what kind of a career it was. The sergeant asked the guy whether he had a profession [meslek]. The guy said he did. “Then don’t bother” he said, “it’s a nice thing if you don’t. You join up, they give you a profession, and of course there is an emotional element that’s nice. But if you have a profession, just stick with it.” Then his phone rang in a patriotic tune, and he picked up the call.

At the end of our stay, we went through a whole ceremony where, in age-old Turkish fashion, we put our hands on a table with the flag and guns and swore to defend the motherland against all threats. Once we were all packed up and ready to leave, a group of us - maybe ten people or so - decided that we’d go to a restaurant and have our first meal outside together.

This is what it looks like. Our ceremony was smaller. Source: Ensonhaber.

I remember leaving the barracks, and how weird it was to see everyone in their civilian clothes. Someone had the address of a kebab place that was supposed to be the best in town. We got there, sat at a big table, and were handed menus. I looked at the guy across the table from me. I knew he was working for an important government agency, and now saw that he was dressed in a nice button-down shirt and was wearing Ray-Ban glasses. He called over the waiter and asked him for his recommendations. To my side, I could see two guys, who I knew worked in construction and had kids. They looked at the menu for a very long time, the way you might look for gaps in a fence.

It took us a while to order.

I think it was a Friday, and a couple of people looked up prayer time. Now that people were back on their smartphones, they were combing through messages, calling loved ones, thinking about their way back home. After a month of bunking together, we could barely maintain conversation.

I wondered whether we would have been more sensitive about this meal if we had stayed in uniform longer. Could we have connected on a deeper level? I’m not sure. Simulating low-tech socioeconomic equality for a while is nice, but won’t achieve much by itself. I suspect the gaping inequalities we’ve created are enabling the most dangerous parts of nationalism while muting the most redeemable parts.

Ideally, our societies would have some kind of mandatory (military or civilian) service for everyone (not just straight men), one geared towards solving real problems.

*Bonus:

• No smartphones are allowed. The military tells everyone to buy analog phones to stay in touch with their families. I decided to try my luck smuggling in an old iphone. I’d keep it in my pocket, so as long as they didn’t do a body search, they wouldn’t find it. When I first approached the gate leading to the barracks, there was a private there waiting for new arrivals. First thing he asked was whether I had a smart phone. I said I don’t. OK, he said, he was going to have to look through my luggage. So I put my little black carry-on on the table he had set up there, and he went through my things. He took out some allergy and cold medication and put it aside. Then he found my iphone charger in my luggage, dangled it in front of me and said “where’s the phone?” I took the iphone out of my pocket and gave it to him. He then closed my stuff back up, and carrying the medication, phone and charger separately, we went to a little building on the side of the road. There sat a man in green-brown camo with a few stripes on his arm. The soldier called him sir (“komutanım”) so I did too. He asked me where I’m from and what I do and whether this medication was anything serious. He then called over another private, handed him my pills, phone and charger and sent us off to the barracks. The private was wearing the light blue uniform that would later be given to us as well. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was a long termer (uzun dönem). On the way, I said something like “I figured they might let me keep the phone, so I brought it.” And it worked. We were in the main courtyard, there might have been people watching, so the private turned to me and discreetly handed me the phone. He was a bit annoyed when I was a bit clumsy in receiving it and putting it in my pocket. “Don’t take it out” he said. “To tell you the truth brother, do we call our families, our loved ones over video? Yes we do. So will you.” I thanked him as he dropped me off with the officers at the main building. It turned out I was one of two people among the more than hundred people in our company to have snuck in a smart phone. I kept it in flight mode most of the time because charging was an issue, and only rarely used it. I also leant it out for others to use every now and then. If there is one very clear benefit of this month in the barracks though, it’s from being offline and talking to people without the distraction of digital leashes.