*headscratch* *headdesk*

[skull_bearer]

This really does make me wonder, and ponder. And headdesk, but that's pretty much a given. I was planning to go to Auschwitz as part of my Holocaust tour next month, to have an idea of what I've been writing about, but now I'm wondering if I should just sign up to an American boot camp instead.

My father had to do military service in France when he was young, and while it wasn't anywhere near this bad, it was pretty hideous. He lasted three weeks, straving himself, before the sent him home in fear that he'd kill himself on site. Three weeks, in the medical block while the officers and high ups were threatening and intimidating him, swearing they'd see him in jail before they let him leave. But he beat them, and they had to send him home.

A few years later, he told me this amusing side story; one night, in the medical block, my father was woken by a tremendously loud commotion, and the door to his ward was thrown open by a group of doctors and nurses holding this BIG guy wearing a straitjacket, his head swathed in bandages. They wrestled him down on the bed beside my father, injected him with enough tranquiliser to dope a rhino, took the straitjacket off and left him there.
As you can imagine, my father didn't sleep a wink that night, waiting for the guy to wake up.
The guy woke the next morning. He woke up, got up, and smiled at my father. My father smiled nervously back. The guy nodded to him, picked up the bedside cabinet, and started beating him own head against it. Before my father could do anything, the doctors raced back in the room, and dragged the guy out.
The next time my father saw him, it was the day they were to leave, he got on the train that was taking him back to France, and saw the very same guy getting on next to him. The guy's head was still covered in stitches and bandages. Terrified, my father went to hide at the back of the train. But the guy followed him, he tracked my father down to the last carriage, sat next to him, and said "We got them good, didn't we?"

I love my dad so, so much.