Get tagged for the AMF and you learn one thing fast: Christmas break is not a break, it’s a countdown.
Right after the holidays we bugged out. Lots of cold-weather army stuff, the kind where you find out exactly how many layers a human body can wear and still be expected to hold a pencil. Then, before we’d finished learning that lesson, we got pulled out early.
Next stop: Earlton, Ontario. Mudfest. Somebody somewhere decided that if the snow didn’t break us, northern Ontario in the thaw might. We got pulled out of there early too. Then London. Then Kingston. By this point the whole thing felt less like a plan and more like a bus schedule written by a dartboard.
And then Bardufoss, Norway, for a month.
Nothing but snow, mountains and a population that was very much awake and paying attention. Just south of us, the regular No Nukes crowd was doing what it did every time NATO showed up: mass protests. We never saw the protests themselves. They were outside our area of operations. What we saw was the traffic, people heading down to them, while a bunch of Canadians in winter gear headed the other way to play war in the mountains. Nobody waved. Fair enough.
Here’s the part I still like. Bernie and I were armed for this ex. Armed! In a NATO exercise, in a foreign country, with protesters down the road. Sounds serious, doesn’t it?
We were armed in the CRATTZ. That’s it. Not out on the ridgeline, not guarding a pass, not repelling the Red Horde. We were armed because of what was inside the box with us: the crypto, the radio and the teletype, all secure. The rifles weren’t there to protect Norway. They were there to protect a machine that typed.
That’s the army in one sentence. The guns went where the paperwork was.
I don’t say that to knock it. Somebody had to sit on the keys, and Bernie and I were the somebody. But every time I hear somebody describe the Cold War like it was all tension and brinkmanship, I think about two guys in a comms box in northern Norway, loaded for bear, babysitting a teletype while the locals drove south to tell the whole alliance to go home.
They had a point. So did we. Nobody asked the teletype.
— The Retired Menace
