A lady on a mission

A civilian catapulted into the military world. All of a sudden the unthinkable happened. My cell phone rang. On the other end of the line, in perfect Italian and without any inflection or accent, there was a girl. The Production Manager of a Roman company that made documentaries for Rai TV, asked me: "Would you be available for a collaboration? Do you know the Hunters Squadron of Calabria? " And I replied: "Who, the military? What do they have to do with marijuana plantations? " "Yes, the special department of the Carabinieri arresting the fugitives, we are filming a TV documentary about them." I still did not understand the nature of the collaboration and ventured with a question: "Do you need an interpreter from Calabrian dialect to Italian?" I heard the girl smile on the other side of the phone. "Not really, we need a person who stays at the base camp of Vibo Valentia, near the barracks for at least two weeks, to perform daily tasks related to the needs of the crew, while we are filming, following them with an embedded crew. I was incredulous. After a second telephone appointment, in which Barbara confirmed the arrangements for collaboration, in a hot July afternoon I arrived in a small fraction of Vibo Valentia, in the lovely residence where the crew was staying. It was hot, I was very curious, and a little excited. This beautiful girl with green eyes opened the door. On the balcony, while we were smoking a cigarette, he explained to me the details and the problems of the project. From the beginning there was a different job from the usual, every day we had to organize the work, without knowing what we would do the next day. A jump in the dark. The first approach to the military world, totally unknown to me, took place on the following summer morning, when I entered for the first in my life in a military barracks. I crossed the entrance gate and the barbed wire, fascinated by the time I passed the sign "military zone, limit impassable-no unauthorized access". I had never had contact with that environment, not a relative Carabiniere and not even a mobster, as one of them had asked me jokingly. The "Luigi Razza" barracks are very large, home to the 14th Calabria Battalion, there are wide roads where the boys train jogging. Some live there. A large area is dedicated to the helicopter core, complete with hangars and take-off/landing for the vehicles available. Then there is the shooting range, the canteen and a small vegetable garden with various herbs, useful in the kitchen. The boys of the base of operations, in t-shirt and camouflage pants, have shown themselves immediately welcoming and collaborative. In the following five weeks, we lived between the barracks, the Aspromonte Forest and the long car rides at night. In the early days I will have known at least a hundred people among the Hunters Squadron, officers, helicopters, and from the beginning I found it hard to understand the hierarchical ranks. Although I understand that most of them are all Brigadier Sargent or Deputy Sargent. Then there are the lieutenants, the Colonel and the elders. To date, for me it remains a mystery to identify them only by their ranks. Based on the daily availability we were assigned the team to support, the means of transportation(Ducato, Land Rover, Isuzu) and what operations to resume. The Hunters were almost always in camouflage, with various straps and zip on their sleeves, called patches, which distinguished their department and rank. You will think that they are obvious knowledgeable, but for me they were not at all. The patches for them are a source of pride, so much so that even our colleagues were competing to have someone, instead in my eyes were unknown symbols, even if I understood that they indicated their value. This is how my adventure began: two girls catapulted into a barracks with four hundred Carabinieri, in a totally male environment, surrounded by vigorous, handsome men and a halo of mystery and secrecy. So, here I am, I was at the beach the week before playing with children, and the next one I was catapulted in the Aspromonte Forest, without any training, with the special department of the Calabria Hunters Squadron who arrest the fugitives. I started to feel part of this group: a lady on a mission. https://www.amazon.com/Fratello-Falco-Italian-Melania-Bella/dp/1980933456/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=fratello+falco&qid=1569856481&sr=8-1