20. Chapter – First moments in my new platoon

My weekends passed quickly by. I was on the bus bringing the legionnaires up to St. Christol. Those, who had less than 5 years of service didn’t have too much choice because we weren’t allowed to own a car.

I always found this fact a bit disagreeable. Even nowadays, I still don’t understand why do we keep these stupid rules. The journey took a bit more than 80 minutes. As we were approaching to the regiment, I got more and more excited about the next few days.

On Monday, we started with a 12km run around the regiment.

I wasn’t in my best shape but I tried to keep up with the rest of the platoon. After the sport, we had 30 minutes to take a shower, dress up, put our kepi on and get ready for the first orientation with the captain. I entered his office, presented myself as I learned in Castel and tried to understand what he is talking about.

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Once everyone finished, I met my SOA (sous-officier adjoint) who was replacing the chief of the platoon for some weeks. He was a 2 meters tall Russian man, with no mercy in his eyes. Later, someone told me, that he used to be a member of the Russian army, but was kicked out for a reason that nobody knew.

He distributed the room keys and when he gave mine. He told me this: I’m sorry, but you’ll be with the psychopath.

I thought I misunderstood his words (he had reason, but it’s another story), because when I entered the chamber, it was empty. There was only some stuffs on the other bed, but that’s all.

I didn’t have too much time to think about the problem, because the corporal of my new platoon already called us to the corridor. His face was familiar to me, I’ve already seen him in Castel. His first rule was that when he is speaking to us, we had to do push-ups until he didn’t finish.

He ordered us to come back to the platoon’s corridor at 7pm after the diner and we will see what’s going to happen. 

And we saw what was going to happen…