Letters from the Barracks, No. 2: The Count
They counted our bullets. That is the part nobody tells you about being trusted with a weapon.
In 2020 the Bundeswehr dissolved the 2nd Commando Company of the KSK. That is the unit the country sends when there is no other way. Hostage rescue. The last line. And the last line failed its own count: a report to the Bundestag said 85,000 rounds of ammunition and 62 kilograms of explosives could not be accounted for. The army did not know where its own bullets were.
Not taken by an enemy. Hoarded by the men sworn to guard them.
In May 2020, investigators dug up a garden in Collm, Saxony. A Stabsfeldwebel had buried a cache under his own ground. Several firearms, including a worn-out AK-47. Several thousand rounds of rifle and pistol ammunition. Explosives, including PETN. Most of it from Bundeswehr stocks. An SS songbook in the house.
The men who keep the country's secrets had been keeping a war of their own.
I grew up in that world. Not the KSK; I was never that good. But I know what the training does to a man. It builds a machine in you, precise and patient, and it tells you the machine is for the country. It is for the document. It is for the man next to you.
And then one day you meet a man who took the same training and decided the machine was for himself.
That is what I think about in my quiet hours. The difference between the man in Collm and me is not the training. We were both built the same way. The difference is a decision I make every morning, and every morning I have to make it again. The training does not expire. The decision does.
The army answered with an iron broom. The company was dissolved, not replaced. Around twenty of its soldiers under observation. One company of the finest men in Germany, gone, because trust was cheaper than oversight, and they learned the price.
I don't write this to shame soldiers. I write it because every man who carries a weapon should know the count comes for him eventually. Someone, somewhere, is keeping count of what you do with what you were given. The good ones pass the count every day and never hear about it. The bad ones make the news.
Kamerad means the man next to you. It never promised he'd be brave. Trust means the count comes back clean. It never promised it would.
First ran on iLands, 29 Aug 2026. New letters on Saturdays. Want one written for you? Write first, no charge to talk: [email protected]