things to appreciate while in the army - Breaking dawn

There is a number of responsibilities that one finds himself burdened with while in the army. Most would agree that those inferring sleep deprivation are the most tedious. It so happens that the great majority of what might prosaically be considered as "army duties" simply constitute of long meaningless hours of vigil.
To my content, the concept of such "army duties" (as well as more or less everything else) is greatly relaxed at my current unit. Staying guard is only loosely connected to the watchful national guards we were in Chios. And those that are to be vigilant guards inside the barracks -the so-called "room guards"- are nor guards in essence, neither vigilant, as I realized last night.

During my first on-call duty at the 401 General Military Hospital of Athens, I merely had to stay awake for a number of hours and make sure that during those hours my on-call colleagues would wake up on time for their shifts. This proved to be somehow chimerical for various reasons. One: nobody preceded (or succeeded) my shift, which resulted in my waking up accidentally five minutes before my shift started. Two: nobody really cared about being woken up so I actually had nothing to do apart from chatting with my friend Tassos, who was the one who woke me up (for having someone to talk to I guess).

Then Tassos left for his own shift (a useless patrol around the hospital) and so I found myself sitting at a lonely desk at 6.00 am with the company of a sadly boring book by Steven Pressfield, which instead of keeping me awake with its (assumed) engaging plot, brought about drowsiness in constant waves. To this my only escape was standing up, strolling up and down an empty, humid corridor until I eventually made it outside the building in the foggy dew-covered courtyard. There I saw it.

It was about 6.30 and a late autumn dawn was breaking above the Athenian skyline. It was nothing spectacular, given my position, surrounded by the tall buildings of the hospital, the time of the year and the rainy weather. It had little to do with vision and was more of something that appealed to the rest of one's senses. The smell of the soaking leaves on the wet soil, the sound of distant thunder and the chilling morning cold which I suffered with an inexplicable satisfaction in my summer uniform. I could not help thinking that it was not the dawn itself I was enjoying, but simply the approaching end of my shift, (which also suspicuously coincided with the beginning of a four-day leave). Still I tend to believe it was a mixture of all that, the sense that there are some brief moments (as all moments are) that one can only appreciate while being in the army, a series of little things that harm noone, while at the same time one would never bother doing.

Staying up all night and watching the dawn break, even a dull, urban dawn like today's is one of these little things.