What joining Sweden's defence force taught me about the country
I joined the Swedish Home Guard to help protect my adopted country – but I wasn’t expecting the experience to teach me so much about the people of Sweden, writes Loukas Christodoulou.
Back in 2018 it felt like things were on the verge of falling apart, catching fire or blowing up.
Millions of copies of a pamphlet telling us to prepare for war or disaster were arriving in our Swedish letterboxes.
As I held the booklet in my hands that summer I looked out of the window of my Stockholm apartment and wondered if I could smell smoke.
The greatest wildfires to devastate our extensive Nordic forests were raging and tiny patches of tinder-dry woods kept igniting. I used to wonder whether I lived too close to a patch of trees.
So when the world you know is battered by unpredictable crises, what do you do?
It seemed to me that the only way to deal with volatility was to contribute to stability.
I looked into becoming part of Sweden’s crisis preparation system, or total defence.
READ ALSO:
That journey was to take me inside some of Sweden’s most classic institutions and teach me about a side of the Swedish character that quite frankly stunned me.
If you’re reading this and you’re not Swedish (and not over 50) you’re probably as puzzled as I was about what Sweden’s crisis preparedness system actually is.
The short answer is it’s all around us, but it was downsized after the Cold War.
If you visit any Swedish town you’ll see the little blue triangle signs telling you there’s an air-raid shelter nearby.
In the shops you can buy the vanilla-flavoured lip salve developed by the military, or military-style pea soup (to be consumed on Thursdays!).
This is all part of the old defence system as celebrated in films like Refresher Exercise (1979) where a gang of army reservists treat their training as a break from adult life.
But compulsory military service shrank drastically after the Cold War, and was paused entirely 2009-2017, so there’s no longer the same mass of people who’ve actually been through the Swedish defence and crisis preparation system. It’s like a memory.
It exists, and it is waking up. But when I tried to join, I found a system that was largely held together by small groups of very active pensioners.
The years of cutbacks for Sweden’s crisis/defence system can be noted like the tight rings on a tree that show when it was winter.
You can see the gaps between the veterans who’ve held it all together since 1991 and the new blood who’re coming in to play their part – those who are nowadays motivated by fears about climate change, experience from helping refugees in 2015, volunteers who put out fires in 2018, and now those who want to be ready against the Russian threat.
Sometimes it feels like we’re in a race against time for the previous generations’ knowledge to be handed over before they disappear.
People in their 70s and 80s are being asked back to remind us how to do things like cook food in a field kitchen.
There are 18 organisations in Sweden that are part of the crisis/defence system, with a total membership of about 350,000.
If you’re not a citizen then the Civil Defence Association (Civilförsvarsförbundet) is the one for you, because they don’t bear arms and are open to all. They organise small crisis teams (FRG) who can quickly help by bringing food for refugees, heading into the forest to look for missing people, or performing first aid.
What they do depends on what their local municipality needs help with. Unfortunately there is no FRG agreement with Stockholm City, so I kept looking.
I have become a citizen of Sweden. I’ve got a clean record with the authorities. Not even a parking fine (I can’t drive). So after a security check I was cleared to join the Home Guard.
EXPLAINED:
The company quartermaster who visited me poked carefully around my apartment; the cats scattered as he approached.
He was making sure it was a safe place for the King’s materiel. The mission of Sweden’s territorial defence forces is to be able to respond immediately, going from our homes fully equipped.
Just like the FRG our task might be to bring supplies, or to search for missing people, but we are also an armed force with the job of defending key places in the country.
If was a bit confusing working out how to join, I admit.
The volunteer system is expanding and has growing pains. There’s a new system of apps and digital forms on the military’s website, but for me it really got going when I joined a local group of the defence trainers’ association (Försvarsutbildarna) and they guided me through the process.
My goal was to become a trained "specialist volunteer". This is a great path that I’d recommend to anyone who wants to join the home guard but who has never done basic military training.
Instead of nine months to become a rifleman, the training takes four weeks. This is because your specialism isn’t going to be primarily about combat.
Instead this is the path to becoming a field medic, a motorcycle messenger, a pilot for a fast patrol boat, a dog handler, or, in my case, a field cook.
So far I’ve taken my first two-week long basic course and my next two weeks are coming in March.
After that I’ll sign a contract promising to take part in activities for 4-15 days per year.
And I can leave at any point – unless the government has raised the alert level to "heightened state of alert" or wartime; then you’re locked in.
Do you remember what I said about the generation gap between the defence system’s past and all the new blood? Well the metal-framed beds we slept on during basic training felt like they’d seen our grandparents’ military service – and would probably survive to see our grandchildren’s as well.
If it’s broke, why fix it.
The same went for the heavy battle rifles we trained with, the AK4, which has been used since the 1960s and would still be usable in the 2060s.
"They’re just plastic crap," said my marksmanship trainer dismissively about the newer, lighter AK5 guns the regular army uses.
The two weeks of military training were an incredible insight into Swedish culture and character.
As a result of having to follow the same timetable as everyone else, we all got to experience a kind of boarding-school Swedishness, with mandatory coffee (fika) and kvällsmat (that’s the midnight snack Swedes need to make up for eating lunch when others have brunch).
The most surprising part was the close contact with my fellow trainees.
Have you ever met a Swede? "Close contact" isn’t the first description that comes to mind.
It wasn’t even that we bonded over time; instead there was a kind of instant melting effect where people who normally wouldn’t even make eye contact on the street were suddenly helping each other with the basics of making beds, finding the right locker and making sure there was butter for the kvällsmat.
I think the only other time I’ve ever seen such stark Swedish cooperation was during the terror attack on Drottninggatan in 2017, when Stockholmers gave each other lifts home as the trains were out of action, and opened their homes to those who were stranded.
Swedes have a hard shell, but underneath they are available for each other in a vulnerable and unreserved way an outsider might find shocking.
There’s so much more I could say about the two weeks of training.
How we staggered and sweated in the hot Blekinge summer sun in gas masks, and then went back to pick ticks off each others’ sweaty bodies.
How my worst moment was trying to finding the glow-stick for the piss-trench in the night while deathly afraid I’d find the wrong light and urinate on the sergeant’s tent by mistake.
What I mostly remember is how hands reached out from nowhere and picked me up when I was staggering.
And no, I can’t promise you’ll have exactly the same experience if you join. We were just one training group of two dozen people.
But we were such a random sample that I think we could not have been unique. At the end of one exercise in the forest I looked around and all I saw were tired green-streaked faces, but I realised that under the dirt and the uniform we were very different – farmers, management consultants, nurses, teachers, journalists.
People born in Sweden and people from elsewhere.
People close to retirement age and people just out of their teens.
And yet for those two weeks we managed to work together as though there was no difference between us.
I learned a lot about Sweden and its defence and crisis preparedness system in my journey so far, and I’m looking forward to learning more.
A major thing I learned is that if a crisis or an invader strikes Sweden then we’ll unify to defend ourselves in ways that may surprise everyone.
Ourselves included.
Loukas Christodoulou is a freelance journalist and social studies teacher who moved to Sweden in 2006 and became a citizen in 2014. Until recently he was a reporter at Swedish public radio. This article was first published in 2023.
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Back in 2018 it felt like things were on the verge of falling apart, catching fire or blowing up.
Millions of copies of a pamphlet telling us to prepare for war or disaster were arriving in our Swedish letterboxes.
As I held the booklet in my hands that summer I looked out of the window of my Stockholm apartment and wondered if I could smell smoke.
The greatest wildfires to devastate our extensive Nordic forests were raging and tiny patches of tinder-dry woods kept igniting. I used to wonder whether I lived too close to a patch of trees.
So when the world you know is battered by unpredictable crises, what do you do?
It seemed to me that the only way to deal with volatility was to contribute to stability.
I looked into becoming part of Sweden’s crisis preparation system, or total defence.
READ ALSO:
That journey was to take me inside some of Sweden’s most classic institutions and teach me about a side of the Swedish character that quite frankly stunned me.
If you’re reading this and you’re not Swedish (and not over 50) you’re probably as puzzled as I was about what Sweden’s crisis preparedness system actually is.
The short answer is it’s all around us, but it was downsized after the Cold War.
If you visit any Swedish town you’ll see the little blue triangle signs telling you there’s an air-raid shelter nearby.
In the shops you can buy the vanilla-flavoured lip salve developed by the military, or military-style pea soup (to be consumed on Thursdays!).
This is all part of the old defence system as celebrated in films like Refresher Exercise (1979) where a gang of army reservists treat their training as a break from adult life.
But compulsory military service shrank drastically after the Cold War, and was paused entirely 2009-2017, so there’s no longer the same mass of people who’ve actually been through the Swedish defence and crisis preparation system. It’s like a memory.
It exists, and it is waking up. But when I tried to join, I found a system that was largely held together by small groups of very active pensioners.
The years of cutbacks for Sweden’s crisis/defence system can be noted like the tight rings on a tree that show when it was winter.
You can see the gaps between the veterans who’ve held it all together since 1991 and the new blood who’re coming in to play their part – those who are nowadays motivated by fears about climate change, experience from helping refugees in 2015, volunteers who put out fires in 2018, and now those who want to be ready against the Russian threat.
Sometimes it feels like we’re in a race against time for the previous generations’ knowledge to be handed over before they disappear.
People in their 70s and 80s are being asked back to remind us how to do things like cook food in a field kitchen.
There are 18 organisations in Sweden that are part of the crisis/defence system, with a total membership of about 350,000.
If you’re not a citizen then the Civil Defence Association (Civilförsvarsförbundet) is the one for you, because they don’t bear arms and are open to all. They organise small crisis teams (FRG) who can quickly help by bringing food for refugees, heading into the forest to look for missing people, or performing first aid.
What they do depends on what their local municipality needs help with. Unfortunately there is no FRG agreement with Stockholm City, so I kept looking.
I have become a citizen of Sweden. I’ve got a clean record with the authorities. Not even a parking fine (I can’t drive). So after a security check I was cleared to join the Home Guard.
EXPLAINED:
The company quartermaster who visited me poked carefully around my apartment; the cats scattered as he approached.
He was making sure it was a safe place for the King’s materiel. The mission of Sweden’s territorial defence forces is to be able to respond immediately, going from our homes fully equipped.
Just like the FRG our task might be to bring supplies, or to search for missing people, but we are also an armed force with the job of defending key places in the country.
If was a bit confusing working out how to join, I admit.
The volunteer system is expanding and has growing pains. There’s a new system of apps and digital forms on the military’s website, but for me it really got going when I joined a local group of the defence trainers’ association (Försvarsutbildarna) and they guided me through the process.
My goal was to become a trained "specialist volunteer". This is a great path that I’d recommend to anyone who wants to join the home guard but who has never done basic military training.
Instead of nine months to become a rifleman, the training takes four weeks. This is because your specialism isn’t going to be primarily about combat.
Instead this is the path to becoming a field medic, a motorcycle messenger, a pilot for a fast patrol boat, a dog handler, or, in my case, a field cook.
So far I’ve taken my first two-week long basic course and my next two weeks are coming in March.
After that I’ll sign a contract promising to take part in activities for 4-15 days per year.
And I can leave at any point – unless the government has raised the alert level to "heightened state of alert" or wartime; then you’re locked in.
Do you remember what I said about the generation gap between the defence system’s past and all the new blood? Well the metal-framed beds we slept on during basic training felt like they’d seen our grandparents’ military service – and would probably survive to see our grandchildren’s as well.
If it’s broke, why fix it.
The same went for the heavy battle rifles we trained with, the AK4, which has been used since the 1960s and would still be usable in the 2060s.
"They’re just plastic crap," said my marksmanship trainer dismissively about the newer, lighter AK5 guns the regular army uses.
The two weeks of military training were an incredible insight into Swedish culture and character.
As a result of having to follow the same timetable as everyone else, we all got to experience a kind of boarding-school Swedishness, with mandatory coffee (fika) and kvällsmat (that’s the midnight snack Swedes need to make up for eating lunch when others have brunch).
The most surprising part was the close contact with my fellow trainees.
Have you ever met a Swede? "Close contact" isn’t the first description that comes to mind.
It wasn’t even that we bonded over time; instead there was a kind of instant melting effect where people who normally wouldn’t even make eye contact on the street were suddenly helping each other with the basics of making beds, finding the right locker and making sure there was butter for the kvällsmat.
I think the only other time I’ve ever seen such stark Swedish cooperation was during the terror attack on Drottninggatan in 2017, when Stockholmers gave each other lifts home as the trains were out of action, and opened their homes to those who were stranded.
Swedes have a hard shell, but underneath they are available for each other in a vulnerable and unreserved way an outsider might find shocking.
There’s so much more I could say about the two weeks of training.
How we staggered and sweated in the hot Blekinge summer sun in gas masks, and then went back to pick ticks off each others’ sweaty bodies.
How my worst moment was trying to finding the glow-stick for the piss-trench in the night while deathly afraid I’d find the wrong light and urinate on the sergeant’s tent by mistake.
What I mostly remember is how hands reached out from nowhere and picked me up when I was staggering.
And no, I can’t promise you’ll have exactly the same experience if you join. We were just one training group of two dozen people.
But we were such a random sample that I think we could not have been unique. At the end of one exercise in the forest I looked around and all I saw were tired green-streaked faces, but I realised that under the dirt and the uniform we were very different – farmers, management consultants, nurses, teachers, journalists.
People born in Sweden and people from elsewhere.
People close to retirement age and people just out of their teens.
And yet for those two weeks we managed to work together as though there was no difference between us.
I learned a lot about Sweden and its defence and crisis preparedness system in my journey so far, and I’m looking forward to learning more.
A major thing I learned is that if a crisis or an invader strikes Sweden then we’ll unify to defend ourselves in ways that may surprise everyone.
Ourselves included.
Loukas Christodoulou is a freelance journalist and social studies teacher who moved to Sweden in 2006 and became a citizen in 2014. Until recently he was a reporter at Swedish public radio. This article was first published in 2023.
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