Military training

Military training was a school subject in grades 8-10 in Russia, or maybe 9-10. AFAIK we had 4 hours of it a week, in 2 blocks of 2 hours. Or maybe not; my memory is not what it used to be.

Military training classes were always taught by retired officers with the rank of lieutenant colonel and with a Ukranian accent. I don't know why, but that was the case in every school I heard of. I suspect there was also a maximum IQ requirement for the job; as my cousin's school's military training teacher used to say: "they don't keep idiots in the army, and that's why I am here", meaning in school.

Our was called Nikolai Ivanovich, but we used to call him Nalivai Ivanovich, "nalivai" being the imperative of the verb "to pour". There was a girl, Sasha Grandelevskaya, who even called him that to his face. (Sasha, drop me a line if by any chance you are reading this). He was not a bad guy for a kind of person who becomes a military training teacher.

They taught us to march properly. I made many experiments on how badly should one march in order to be excused from marching indefinitely, but none of my attempts were quite bad enough. Even buying a uniform-like skirt that was slit almost up to the waist did not help. Wearing it without anything underneath probably would've helped, but I did not quite have the right spirit back then.

The purpose of the class, as stated by one of our teachers, was to give boys a taste of what is awaiting them in the army so they won't all commit suicide. Which, of course, begged two questions: what are girls in there for, and whether anal rape will be part of the class. I was not suicidal enough to ask either of them. In any case, they taught us the army rules book for a while, but then figured it was counterproductive to the suicide prevention purpose.

Mass destruction weapons were a part of the class. Of course I mean protecting oneself from them, not using them. The advice was along the line of "if a nuclear bomb falls on your head, you should go lie on your stomach with feet towards the blast". They taught us about the use of iodine in case of nuclear fallout, which turned out to be a lot more useful that they expected, about the use of Geiger counters (but not about the prison terms we'd get for ownership and unauthorized use thereof), about bacteriological weapons "boil everything and hope for the best" and about chemical weapons, describing in greal detail what each poison gas would do to us.

We were taught to use gas masks, and found out that most of them don't protect one from fart smell. Some of them, however, were very efficient and did not let any gasses through, even oxygen.

Shooting classes were pretty much OK, except that I would have appreciated some ear protection, especially for higher-caliber rifles. We had two different kinds of rifles to shoot with, and a special room in the school basement to do it in.

One of the worst things was disassembling and assembling AK-47s. Boys were supposed to take a Kalashnikov apart and put it back together in 47 seconds and girls in 53 seconds. Somehow I could never make it, ny best time was probably 58 seconds or so. The teacher ran around us and screamed that no man would ever have sex with us if we don't take the weapon apart and put it back together in 53 seconds. It seems that so far I lucked out, or maybe my sexual market value is so high that men are willing to disregard my insufficient Kalashnikov disassembly skill.

Some people tried to shoot the teacher's hat (without the teacher) with AK-47, but it disassembled in their hands all by itself. No injuries though.