Vaudine England, Jakarta – Set back from a junction of tree-lined avenues in the West Java capital of Bandung stands a white Dutch-era mansion. It is the headquarters of Kodam III – the Siliwangi provincial Military Command.
Across the lawns and up the grand staircase, the visitor's first sight on entering the office of the Siliwangi commander, Major-General Purwadi, is a stuffed tiger.
It represents the pride of these Indonesian fighting men. For the elite Siliwangi officers are named after the last king of West Java who, according to legend, never died but lived on in the form of a tiger.
This gives the Siliwangi men their official viewpoint that there is no imposition of men with guns on an unwilling populace, but a historically sound, long-standing and inter-connected relationship between Siliwangi soldiers and civilians.
"We live together, we stay together with the people," General Purwadi says. "So if there are problems in the community, we try to help, for example in agriculture, medical assistance and such.
"Our motto is that the Siliwangi [command] is the people of West Java, and the people of West Java are the Siliwangi." After a couple of hours with General Purwadi, it is almost possible to believe this. But these are sensitive and confusing times for Indonesia's armed forces.
A newly open society with investigative journalists, outraged relatives of people killed or tortured by soldiers, vocal intellectuals and more competitors for national power is raising questions about where the military fits in.
Can it be true that a "reformist" group of generals is changing the alternately loved and loathed institution from within?
General Purwadi does not fit easily into the stereotype of an Indonesian general. He is courteous, efficient and twinkles with charm through a haze of the occasional kretek (clove) cigarette. He is also tipped as a man who may rise to the highest echelons of one of the most influential institutions in Indonesia.
So when he speaks of the military's mission on behalf of the masses he is not just spinning a line, but bringing to the fore the most deeply-felt belief of any committed Indonesian officer: without the armed forces, the country would not have achieved independence, and would have fallen apart many times since. This remains the root idea behind dwifungsi, the military's doctrine of its dual role, in defence and social-political affairs.
"It's about their rightful place in history," a Western defence attache says of the military's self-perception. "The belief that they are society, and are at one with it, permeates the armed forces to this day. Thus, it is their duty to hold the nation together."
There is much truth in the assertion. The army has long been the glue holding the disparate country together, but a remarkably brutal glue.
And that brutality is coming to haunt them. In many ways, this is now a military on the run, desperately trying to patch up past messes, trying secretly to maintain a presence in the restive areas of Aceh and East Timor, and explicitly asserting its commitment to constitutional processes.
The military's pivotal faction in the national parliament has been reduced, through legal debate, to 38 out of 500 seats. Major-General Agus Wirahadikusumah told the army-backed Republika newspaper: "If the people want it scrapped, we will do away with our representation at the parliament.
"We also know that the 1945 constitution and even the Pancasila [state ideology] are both man-made, not a holy book that cannot be modified."
The military has also let the police go its own, civilian, way. The Armed Forces of Indonesia, or ABRI, used to include the army, navy, air force and police. Now the police are autonomous, while the three branches of the military are named the Indonesian Defence Force, or TNI.
Military officers are no longer allowed to double as civilian bureaucrats. Thousands of officers holding positions in the civil service and legislatures have been told to leave the armed forces or leave their civilian jobs.
On top of that, every fashionable TNI general now talks of the need for a "new paradigm", and of his new-found aversion to "practical politics".
So there are cases such as that of Colonel Sri Roso Sudarmo, just court-martialled for offering bribes to a Suharto-linked foundation in order to be reappointed as Bupati, or regent, of Bantul district in central Java.
But Colonel Sudarmo also highlights the military's dark side. Among the countless victims of military abuse – the thousands of women raped, family heads murdered, the students and artists tortured and missing – is the journalist Fuad Syafruddin. He made the mistake of exposing Colonel Sudarmo's financial dealings and did not live to see his young wife and child into middle age. He was beaten to death in August 1996. No murderer has been found.
The parallel realities pile up. In East Timor, TNI officers train paramilitary groups who slaughtered at least 30 worshippers in a church in April and rampaged through the capital, Dili, shooting wildly and burning down homes.
Yet in Ambon, when murderous violence broke out between Muslims and Christians earlier in the year, residents fled to the nearest military bases for protection, hoping the soldiers would live up to their founding fathers and rise above the fray.
One can almost feel sorry for some in the army. As many of the older, retired generals will point out, they did not ask the young General Suharto to ride to power on the backs of at least half a million corpses in the mid-1960s. They did not even like him.
But Mr Suharto went on to set up a 32-year regime in which the army became so domesticated, so mired in local administration and business deals, that they became "Suharto's troops" instead of "the nation's troops".
It is certainly believable that many of those generals who entered the force without proper boots but with nationalist ideals are now eager to reform.
But these are also the men who lead troops who can shoot at least 41 unarmed civilians – including mothers and children eating lunch at home – as they did in Aceh on May 3. And they tell their Western counterparts they cannot handle watching a rugby match because "it's too violent".
Last year's events have given the military a rare opportunity to get their house in order, if they so choose.
It was the commander-in-chief (and concurrently the Minister of Defence), General Wiranto, who helped ease his former patron, Mr Suharto, out of office and who triumphed over former Lieutenant-General Prabowo Subianto, the man believed responsible for the shooting of students in May last year that precipitated Mr Suharto's fall. General Wiranto let the students occupy parliament during those heady days of change, all the while keeping in touch with Mr Suharto, the man to whom he owed his rise after a stint as Mr Suharto's aide-de-camp.
"Wiranto is like a diamond, with many sparkling facets. Seen from many sides, he still sparkles," the defence attache says.
Southeast Asia-watchers wonder if General Wiranto is Indonesia's answer to the Philippines' president Fidel Ramos. Mr Ramos was head of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos' hated constabulary, but crossed in 1986 to help bring Corazon Aquino to power. Repressing his urges to take over then, he protected her rule against countless coups, to go on to win the presidency through the ballot box in 1992.
General Wiranto does nurture ambitions, if advisers close to him are to be believed. But talk of a mere vice-presidential slot is discounted as he surely exercises more power than that where he is. And diamonds can be deceptive.
When General Wiranto appears in a province soon after a decapitation or communal murder spree to announce a peace deal and take the credit, he may simply be trying his best to hold the nation together in the only way he knows.
The military forces, numerically small relative to the population, cannot hope to contain the violence, and must battle a growing perception that though politically strong, the army is militarily inept.
He could be promoting his presidential aspirations and cheering on his troops at the same time. Or he could be turning a blind eye to the involvement of his men in provoking the violence in a machiavellian conspiracy to keep his military at the centre of power, come what may.
General Wiranto also presides over a military divided by political competition. There are the "green", or more overtly Islamic, generals who coddle President Bacharuddin Habibie and would like to depose General Wiranto at the earliest opportunity – such as State Migration and Resettlement Programmes Minister General Hendropriyono.
Army Chief of Staff Subagyo is another, who is also involved in competition regarding arms procurement. Another old-style general is Feisal Tandjung, who is unlikely to countenance any fundamental change of military ways.
There remain "Prabowo's boys", men loyal to the former special forces commander who has wealthy friends in the Middle East. Even General Wiranto's sophisticated "thinking general", Lieutenant-General Bambang Susilo Yudhoyono, who speaks long and often about reform, is said to have his eye on the top job.
Then there are men such as General Yunus Yosfiah, veteran of East Timor campaigns, implicated in the murder of journalists there in 1975, now strikingly open and Minister for Information. He might have hoped for a higher position, but now he says: "I'm trying to retire [from the army]. I want this country to be more democratic."
According to General Yunus, who smiles broadly under his dark shock of hair, only a free press can help the military fix its failings.
"The main problem for the armed forces is how to make them disciplined, how to make them behave properly," he says. "When I give lectures at Bandung [staff college], I'm trying to make them understand why we should create freedom of the press to improve democratic quality. I tell them: 'If you're allergic to criticism from the press, then it means you should behave properly.' "
Fighting words from a military which, even when members call for greater openness, knows that full revelation of military crimes would unravel the institution, if not the nation.
A Western military officer experienced with the Indonesians confesses he finds nothing in common between his military tradition and that of the Indonesians. "We are worlds apart – culturally, morally, there's just nothing in common. They are trained bullies. And whatever they say, there is this vast disconnection between where they want to go and how to get there."
Solutions to such puzzles may never be known. But, as the University of Washington's Indonesia expert Professor Daniel Lev said recently: "Anybody who believes there's going to be any legislative or political reform unless the army withdraws from politics is dreaming."
Generals who have been active in either Aceh or East Timor, where terrorising the population has been routine, evince no shame about their record. After all, their heavy-handedness can be seen to work if effective repression is the need of the nation.
But one is left wondering if these generals are incredibly clever – to spread fear as a way to justify a continued role in such areas – or incredibly stupid, not to see that fear foments hate in return.
"I'd veer towards the incredibly stupid," the defence attache says. But at the same time, he admits his suspicion that perhaps Mr Suharto, the wiliest general of all, had even encouraged the attacks on Megawati Sukarnoputri in 1996 as a plot to create an acceptable opposition leader when the time came to move on. Certainly Ms Megawati has no intention of putting Mr Suharto – the man who deposed but did not kill her father, president Sukarno – in the dock.
Does the army's restraint on election day on June 7 – when no soldiers were in sight of the majority of voters for the first time in decades – mean these trained killers are indeed adjusting happily to life back in the barracks? Evidence in favour of a reforming military is available for all to see. But the labyrinthine processes behind the exercise of power, in Indonesia as elsewhere, suggest any congratulatory champagne should be kept on ice for a while yet. Does a tiger change its stripes?