Shooting minus the war—the Military World Games did that over the last week. At Hyderabad’s Lake Line Ranges, the military meet got together a bunch of men and women, usually donning the battle-fatigues, of possibly-conflicting hues of green and brown, to compete internationally in organised sport. A bulk of the athletes assembled in India for the quadrennial event indeed are professional sportspersons in the armed forces. Recruited on their athletic credentials under what is locally called ‘sports quotas’ here, they train full-time the year round, with only token time devoted to military duty. Some like Andrew Sause though, leave the clammed-up interiors of their nuclear submarines once in a while to swim in the sea, bike around and then break into a run for triathlon. “The submarine confines are secretive, and we always work autonomously, hardly ever communicating with anyone not American,” says the lieutenant, based somewhere unspecified, off the US east-coast. “It’s nice to come out of that and interact with those outside our world,” he adds. Meeting submarine officers from other nations, Sause has figured that they are all made alike — of the same thick-skin. Annoyingly curious about minute details of machines and endearingly picky of each other’s quirks — they are blessed with a latent sense of humour. Hard to say if the same characteristics push them towards submarines, he wonders, or its the U-boat which tickles the funny bone. “But training’s tough, since the only equipment we can access is a stationary bike. Triathlon keeps me active since it’s a sedentary life otherwise,” he says of the sport he has pursued through three years out in the sea and two on a base at shore. Also flying down to Mumbai is military orthopaedic James Bales whose encyclopaedic-texts of broken bones accompany him wherever he goes. “You are constantly with patients and that makes you grateful for your limbs which work. There are some out there who can’t even walk. Triathlon was my way of showing gratitude,” he says of the gruelling sport, though his work-demands at the hospital are too severe to afford him more than 8 hours of training time a week. The US contingent of 10 here comprises just two professionals — others are divers, military police, satellite communication experts and aircraft maintenance hands. “Unlike Europe where a lot of pro-athletes are with the forces, in the US the percentage of elite sportspersons in uniform is minuscule,” says Bales. A nation like Italy draws 18 of its 19 medallists at the Winter Olympic Games from the military and an European sailor here in India this week gets away with six hours of the “annual military thing we need to do!” No such luxuries for 1st Major Kurt Preem, a Belgian triathlete whose prime job is at the minesweeping Holland-Belgium bi-national naval mine warfare school: Eguermin.“It’s good to learn about other navies and meet them in a non-military way,” he says. Having scanned the oceans for dynamites, Preem hardly complained about the sea-water at Chowpatty where many ‘professional’ triathletes refused to take the plunge before D-day since it didn’t appear too clean. “It was cleared by the officials as fit for race, so I jumped in,” he says in typical soldier-like fashion. American Sause (from Washington DC) had fewer grumbles about the heat, while Texan Bales’ highly Mexicanised palate ensured that he was cribbing little about the spices in the fare served here. What the week-long interaction with his fellow men in uniform achieved can’t be defined in concrete terms. “But the fact that soldiers from different militaries can stay in the same barracks will be the unspoken, unwritten success of these Games,” Sause says, adding there was neither conspicuous hostility nor special awe for the Americans. “People are just a bit more interested in us. And we were watched a little more,” he admitted as the guard went up again for the visiting Americans.
