Retired Servicemen And Young Lieutenants At The Exercise

On the 8th of September, the members of the Ercsi and the Székesfehérvár Club of Retired Servicemen and their families visited the former military water training ground near Ercsi, where the most extensive training event of the Hungarian Defence Forces, exercise Deployment Direction 2009 is in progress. The former officers and non-commissioned officers were very glad that if only for a few hours, but they could be in their ‘own environment’ again and had a chance to look at how today’s soldiers carry out their tasks and what changes have taken place in the past few decades in terms of combat procedures.

Retired Brigadier-General János Domine, the chairman of the Ercsi club told honvedelem.hu that their association was founded in the town in 1977 and they have 140 members at the moment. Most of them are retired servicemen and their relatives, but there are a few people who joined the club as ‘civilian’ pensioners. Today twenty of them have come to the bank of the Danube to take a closer look at the practice phase of the most important training event of the Hungarian Defence Forces this year. The majority of the retired personnel used to serve in the Ercsi corps and they have come with nostalgia to the water training ground they had used so often.

– We were curious how the young soldiers carry out the tasks we had also fulfilled decades ago. The former engineering troops are extremely happy because they can see the technical equipments again that they had used back then – told us retired Brigadier-General Domine, who served in Ercsi between 1966 and 1970 as the head of the food supply service.

The town at the bank of the Danube had been a military town for almost five decades, from 1950 until 1999, when engineering corps had been stationing here for the most part. At the edge of the town the two former barracks are still there, they were connected with a pedestrian bridge that spanned main road number 6. The bridge was seriously damaged a few years ago, when a camion ’stuck’ into it with its high load. It had to be pulled down.

Together with the retired servicemen from Ercsi, the members of the Székesfehérvár club have also paid a visit to the bank of the Danube on 8 September. The chairman of the club, retired Major Gábor Szalai told us that the Székesfehérvár club is the biggest club of retired military personnel in the country. The organization that was founded in 1967 has more than four hundred members, one hundred and fifty of them are former servicewomen or military wives.

Naturally, they are in regular contact with the HDF Joint Forces Command and the HDF 43rd József Nagysándor Signal and Command Support Regiment that is stationed in Székesfehérvár as well. And since many of the Székesfehérvár troops participate in exercise Deployment Direction 2009, they have decided to come and see the phases of the maneuvers.

In addition to the retired personnel, the members of the ’younger generation’ have also taken a look at the practice on 8 September. Eleven newly commissioned lieutenants of the HDF 5th István Bocskai Infantry Brigade of Debrecen, who have recently taken up duty, were watching the events in the water and on the banks from a tribune set up near the Danube.