Every morning, we had to attend the morning event at 7 o'clock. This event started with the recitation of the Koran, national anthem, a student speech about the political and religious views that should support the regime, and finally some verbal slogans with shoutings and frequent raisings of the fists to the air! We were dismissed, then, to go to our classrooms. We had to attend classes every day from 8 to 12 and 13 to 17. We had only one hour for lunch and congregational prayers. After the classes, we had only two hours to rest and had to get ready for the extracurricular activities which were mainly religious like the Koran recitation rules, Islamic laws, and Islamic ethics and philosophy. They would all finish at 10 pm. It was a complete recipe for brainwashing, and I was only 18. I realized why there was no questionnaire at the end of its entrance examination. They had a complete program to create the people that they needed, a post-production strategy. It was in there that I first learned the phonetic alphabets, stress and intonation, and teaching techniques. The only problem was that we had no native-speaker teachers and had to listen to the tapes. The textbooks were all complied from here and there ( a cut-and-paste job) and were in forms of photocopied pamphlets. The phonetics teacher forced us to pick up a phonetic alphabet each and copy all the words that included that phonetic alphabet from Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary on A4 paper. Mine was schwa, the most frequent phonetic alphabet In English. In fact, I virtually copied the entire dictionary for my project!
The funniest part of TTC life was in the morning at the time of prayers at the dawn. I could see tens of students carrying their bags, getting hourly leave to get out of the campus. I later learned that they had wet dreams and according to Islamic law (sharia), they have to take a shower to be clean before praying. As there was never any drop of hot water on the campus, they had to go to a public bathroom off the campus to take a shower! This way, they could be also exempted from prayers too and could also have a good breakfast outside!
It was 1983 and I had become 20. The Iraq-Iran war was intensifying and Saddam Hussein had started bombarding the cities blindly and launching long-range missiles to the capital and major Iranian cities. Iran refrained from retaliating for a while but they changed their minds and retaliated. Things became worse. Our campus authorities had workers dig trenches in the yard so that we could remain safe at the time of air invasions! It happened several times at nights and the anti-aircraft guns were aimlessly firing to the air making only fireworks! It was very scary, though! I was still 20 and it was the second and the last year of my education that a new compulsory scheme was suggested by the regime. The plan was to sending university and college students to the battlefronts for three months! It was primarily suggested to instill the culture of war and martyrdom in the university students who were not considered too religious by the regime. The pretext was that there are high school students fighting in the battlefronts who need tutoring to catch up with their studies! University students had to go to the war zones to teach them and were promised not to be involved in any act of war! Later, I realized that that was a big lie! I had to go anyway as it was compulsory and we were told that we cannot graduate without this! After registration in a military base of revolutionary guards corps in Tehran, They took us to Khoozestan province (Southern battlefront) by train. I had prepared myself to teach junior high school combatants English! How naive! We were sent to the war operations headquarters in Ahwaz and later to a military training camp! I asked, "why military training"? Aren't we here to teach?!!! The commander answered, "I need fighting forces, I asked for fighting forces and they sent me you. You are fighting forces for me and have to fight"! We said, " But, we don't know how to fight!". They sent us to a camp for military training. It was an intensive program of learning how to use a grenade, how to use a Kalashnikov, and how to creep and jump into a dugout. That was it. All in only 3 days! On the morning of the fourth day, mud camouflaged buses came and picked us up. They drove to different directions. After a few hours, I found myself in a small patrol base in Dehloran. I was still far from battlefront lines but in the war zone. Our mission was to patrol the area and arrest shepherds who were suspicious of spying for the Iraqi army. I was never chosen for this mission and had to guard the gate all night as I made it clear that I am a student of English and this is only what I do. There were frequent artillery shelling, very close Iraqi jet fighters bombardments right over the base that we had to jump into our dugouts from time to time. Later, I heard many of TTC students majoring in mathematics coming from another campus were killed during an attack by Iraqis. I was miraculously saved and luckily remained alive!
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