6. They actually like their drill sergeant.

1. Using nicknames in the army is forbidden. Possible penalty is 20 extra push-up when you use it near drill sergeant. Rised to 100 if you use it near an officer. 2. It is forbidden to put anything to locker that is not in regulations. If it is found, it will find its way to garbage. That includes photos of beatiful girls. I have never seen any Turkish soldier who has a photo of a man in the locker. 3. You can get away from harming an animal as long as it is not the commander's pet. But if you ever harm a tree, you will spend some time in prison according to damage. If the quilty one can not be found, entire company will be punished including officers. 4. Immediately sent to shrink. Better be founded to have mental problems. Faking insanity is a serious crime in Turkish army. 5. In our brigade I was 1 of the 2 who ever played commercial wargame. Other one was my best friend. By luck we both were at the same brigade. There were some officers who played military wargames like Janus. But these kind of games mostly played by staff officers which you can not see in a training Brigade in which I served. IMO, staff officers do not want ordinary officers to play with their expensive toys. :-)

This is a true story, I saw it happen myself, I was a fairly young sergeant at the time, about 1979 I think. We had a soldier who started acting a bit weird, as time went on, he got stranger and stranger. One day he started riding a motorcycle everywhere he went. The problem was, he didn't actually have a motorcycle. His sergeant started off by trying to reason with him, assumed he was playing a game to fake being crazy and get out of the Army. Then the commander and first sergeant got involved. They finally decided he might just be crazy and sent him to a psychiatrist, which he said he didn't want. After several months the psychiatrist decided he really was crazy and they started processing him out of the Army. On the day he was discharged, the commander was saying goodbye to him and wishing him good luck. The ex-soldier reached in his pocket, pulled out a key and handed it to the captain, who asked "what's this"? The guy looks at the captain and says, "It's the key to my motorcycle, I don't need it anymore".

It would never have worked in the Danish Army: If the soldier had been told his motorcyckle was imaginary, he would have answered: "Sure, so is that platoon of tanks you promise us in support if the Russians attack." Ilpars: Though there are few similarities between the Turkish and Danish army, it is also forbidden to have personal stuff in the locker. A private in my dorm had a personal letter under the matress. The sergeant threatned to read it out. The soldier just said: "You are wellcome." The contents was never revealed, neither was the question as to the literacy of the conscripted sergeant. They stopped all that fuss, when they saw me reading a Dutch newspaper.

In the Danish army the strange soldier would have been considered officers material.