baltam

baltam is army speak for an unexpected occurrence, and that seems to be the best way to describe what's going on right now. There's been talk of an impending strike in gaza since the cease fire ended and the rocket fire intensified last week, but no one thought it would come on a saturday morning in the form of a massive aerial bombardment. As soon as i woke up today and saw the number of casualties in gaza my heart dropped. As far as i can tell there is little desire to go into gaza with ground forces because its one massive clusterfuck of terrorists and booby traps. But at the same time one of the lessons of the last lebanon war was that you cant win a war from the air and it seems that a ground invasion at some point is inevitable. i hope it doesnt come to that because sending troops in is much easier than pulling them out and its going to be hard to set clear goals for a ground invasion given that its likely the rockets will continue to fall on the south for a while no matter what we do. At the same time its pretty clear that israel cant allow 50 rockets to fall on the south every day with no response. For now i think the idea is to increase the pressure on hamas in stages in order to cripple and scare them into a new cease fire. In the meantime all we can do is just hope for as few civilian casualties as possible. 

Its funny that this operation started just as i finished a week of urban warfare training at a massive replica of a palestinian city the army built to train in. the one thing i learned from this week is that fighting in these neighborhoods is insanely complicated and treacherous. rest assured that i will not be participating in any ground invasion of gaza in the coming days so you dont have to worry about that. But theres a distinct possibility ill be sent somewhere else to guard and free up forces to go south. Right now were pretty much on standby, our training has been put on hold and were waiting to see what happens. 

anyways, thats the security update for the week. In other news, michael finished birthright on thursday and is now staying with me. I had a great time hanging out with him this weekend, i took him around to some of my favorite places in the city, many of them included food or drinks, hah. it sucks that im not going to get to spend that much time with him, im off to the army tom morning and i probably wont be back for 2 weeks. my roommate was supposed to get a week off next week but because of the situation in gaza that got cancelled. war is a bitch. 

and with that, im gonna go to sleep, i have to be up in 6 hours. wish me luck. 

the lefty within

the fact that i start each post thinking its been too long since the last post suggests im doing a real poor job at this. Maybe mer can give me some tips now that she's a professional blogger. 

so its been over a month since my last post, in the meantime ive finished basic training, started advanced training, went through a week long navigation course, did some time in the dreaded kitchen, and then went through a week long education series with my company at a base near jerusalem.  

Navigating - 

Its hard. 15 of the squad leaders from my company got chosen to do an advanced navigation series with about 30 guys from 2 of the other companies on my base. We were told that most of the guys who were chosen to do this series are going to get sent to the early commander course at the end of training around march. I'd say there's an 80% chance im going to get sent to that course, which can be good or bad depending on a lot of variables which are out my control. There's nothing i can really do about it except wait and see. 

The navigation course was fun/exhausting. Almost all of it was done at night, and it happened to be a week with almost no moonlight, so there was very low visibility at night. We navigated in pairs in a nature reserve known as "the hills of fate". Very dramatic. Soldiers have been learning to navigate there almost since the inception of the IDF. During the day we got the coordinates of our checkpoints and had to plan and memorize a route using topographical maps. We did about 12K each night, with one of us carrying a heavy ass radio on top of our vests. Its a shoulder killer. Ideally, we were supposed to do the navigations without looking at the map but i only managed to do that on the last navigation. 

on the second half of our last navigation a fog came in out of nowhere and covered everything within 10 minutes. I couldn't see my hand in front of me. It got so bad that at one point we went up a hill to where one of our checkpoints was, we found the checkpoint, and then we couldn't figure out which direction we came up the hill from. We got so turned around that we walked a good 5 minutes in the completely wrong direction, thinking we were heading back to our original path. Eventually a bunch of bumbling groups made it to the same spot, argued for 10 minutes about what to do and where to go, until a friend of mine took charge and led us through the fog like moses leading the israelites through the desert. 

Learning how to navigate reminded me of doing alley cat races in ny, with all the checkpoints and route planning. i was never good at planning my routes in those races, so at least I can now say that the army has taught me something useful. monstertrack 2011, here i come. 

Educational series - 

in a word, painful. i would have preferred a week of getting my ass kicked in the field. The army is causing me to lean farther and farther left by the day. All the good work my leftist professors did to make me a right wing fanatic is being eroded by immature 18 year olds and the religious nationalist fringe. 

im too tired to finish this post,

to be continued next week... 

 

my life is a joke

me: sorry

  i just had a gigantic fridge delivered to me

  my life is a joke

  i just dont have enough distance from it to laugh

1:34 PM Meredith: hah ohh arie

 me: this little russian guy walked up the stairs to my apartment with an industrial size fridge on his back

  he gets in my apt

  pushes it through the hallway

  only to discover its so fucking big it wont fit through the doorway to the kitchen

  now my room has a really wide door for some reason, so we end up putting it in my room

1:35 PM so now i have a bed, a sort of closet, no furniture to speak of, and a monstrous fridge in my room

  which

  i cant connect to the electricity because i only have one outlet in my room and the ac/comp and every other electrical thing in my room is hooked up to a powerstrip on this one outlet and im afraid if i hook up the fridge it will burn down the building

1:36 PM so i have a monstrous useless fridge in my room now, thank you very much army

 Meredith: hahahah

  so you can just copy and paste that storry for the blog

1:37 PM me: good idea, i have been slacking on that

  ill do that right now

  

care of you

Some pics from the past couple of weeks:

The real army experience...

getting ready for the sergeant's trek

Leshnick taunting me with a coke i can't drink because im guarding


Aside from fridges, what else is new? well i flew in a black hawk helicopter a couple weeks ago, that was exciting, felt like a real soldier for a second. I got to shoot from a sharp shooter's gun and a machine gun, new toys are always fun. i had a 9k trek the other night at the end of which we got our infantry pins for our berets, one more thing you have to scratch and cut before wearing so it looks like you've been in the army forever and your not fresh out of your mommy's tummy.  The trek was pretty funny, its called the "massa samal", which i think translates to sergeant's trek, and its infamous because its very fast paced and its a tradition for the sergeant to fuck with you along the way. Did i mention the army is exactly like pledging for a frat? Anyways, back to the trek, after many delays a bus takes my unit with all our equipment to a field in the middle of nowhere. we get dropped off, we sit around for a good while and then finally the fun begins. Our sergeant gathers us in walking formation, does a little warm up, and then says with a devilish smile on his face: "this wont be hard, it wont be easy, welcome to the sergeant's trek" (this rhymes in hebrew and sounds much more devilish) and then he breaks out in a sprint and we start sprinting behind him in full gear for a good while and were thinking oh fuck were gonna sprint for 9k, but then inevitably he slows down a bit and we gather ourselves and realize its not so bad. The rest of the trek is still done at pretty much jogging pace, and after about 3k i switched with someone carrying the emergency water supply so i had all my equipment plus 15 liters of water on my back for a 6k jog. The last kilometer is done with open stretchers up a monstrous hill, at the top of which the sergeant turned around, had us go down the hill and jog back up it, with 3 open stretchers and the base in sight, it was one of the more demoralizing moments of the trek, but like all things, good or bad, it came to an end. We had a little ceremony, got punched in the chest, given our pins, and now were that much closer to being real soldiers, supposedly...

bullets over birthdays

ive been slacking, i know, but in my defense ive only been home for like 3 days this month and i spent half of those days recouping the many hours of sleep and layers of skin i lost during the week. I think today i found my muse though. I'm sitting on my porch over looking yehuda halevi street, the sun is setting, the clouds have a pinkish hue and there is a cool breeze blowing. it rained this morning randomly, first rain since i got here in april, perhaps fall is finally here. The prospect of replacing my dirt training grounds with mud is not particularly uplifting. 

so two weeks have passed since i was home last, and it feels like two months. The first week back we were in the shooting range pretty much all week. I started the week with a little spark of brilliance in my shooting abilities but i quickly deteriorated to average over the course of the week. Everyone wants to be a sharp shooter because it means you get a cool scope to put on your gun and when you go home on the train everyone knows your a sharp shooter. I think people underestimate the responsibility of being a sharp shooter though. The trains and buses in israel on sunday mornings and friday mornings are packed with a parade of soldiers eager to impress each other with an array of unit tags, pins, berets, weapon accessories, etc. symbolizing their position in the army. Im starting to think the desire to impress people on public transportation is half the motivation for joining elite units in the army. Theres so many nuances to a soldier's uniform that people pick up on here its crazy. The basic rule is the older the better, so the more dusted up and faded your uniform is the better, and this means people find creative ways to dust up and fade their uniforms and accessories. Theres actually specific techniques passed on from generation to generation explaining how to properly age your uniform, beret, boots, etc. aging your beret, for instance, involves shaving, burning, wetting, rolling, pressing, and drying. its quite a process. But back to my original point, im probably not going to get a cool scope to show off on the train on sunday mornings and im bummed... hah. 

funny story: 

i closed shabat this passed week, so my unit had guard duty over the weekend. During lunch on friday there were kebabs that looked very undercooked but as i think i mentioned before, by the time you get to the lunch room your so hungry you'll eat anything, so i ate it, as did many of my brethren. Well, friday night comes along, my whole class has a shift guarding different posts throughout the base in the middle of the night. i get about half an hour into my shift before i feel the kebab from lunch itching to break out. i make it another half hour and i realize theres no way im making it through the shift without going to the bathroom, but i cant go to the bathroom because then i would be breaking my guard shift. thankfully, i also developed a cold at the same time so i had toilet paper on me to wipe my noise. i yelled to the guard tower near me to cover me and i went down to a ditch near my post to take care of business. long story short, i get back to my room after this shift, the guy guarding near me tells the guys in my room about our little adventure and everyone suddenly goes "ME TOO!" Turns out my entire room crapped up every guard post around the base. Half my pluga had diarrhea for the next two days, which got us out of kitchen duty, but bought us an extra day of guard duty. You win some you lose some. The first thing i thought of when the kebab struck back was todd's sock story in equador, i can thank my runny nose it didn't come to that. 

After my "shitty" weekend...(9 levels down... i know...) we went out to the field for a week to learn how to conquer hills in pairs. It was the first time we got to shoot outside of a shooting range, which was pretty exciting. I was sick all week and we had a lot of injuries so it was a pretty grueling week. By the time wednesday came around everyone was more than itching to get back to base. Wednesday started with an 8 am wake up call, we did drills all day, a 5k run, more drills that involve crawling, running, and rolling on thorns, and we've been living off of combat rations since sunday morning. so you can imagine when we got off the buses back at the base around 11pm wed night we were excited to see our beds. Our mefakdim had other plans however. We ended up having our first layla lavan or "white night" otherwise known as an all- nighter. of course this would fall on the night of my birthday. When we got back to base we unloaded all of our gear, we did it too slow, so we had to reload it, and unload it again somewhere else, then reload it and unload it back in our dorm. Then we went out back and i officially stepped into what felt like a movie. The mefakdim took out megaphones and started yelling commands at us and we started doing drills in the gravel out back while they played techno music through the megaphones and everyone is screaming and doing the drills and its just madness all around. After half an hour or so of this we go to the obstacle course and run the course a bunch of times in full gear. Imagine the obstacle courses youve seen in movies about the army, with walls to scale and ropes and logs of wood to run across and bars to hop and tires and fences to crawl under etc. that is exactly what it looks like. this is going to sound crazy i guess but i loved every second of it. probably one of the weirdest and best ways i could have spent my 23rd birthday. i always said my most productive hours were between midnight and 6am, so now the army finally took advantage of that fact. i had a smile on my face the whole time even though ive never been more exhausted. At one point our medic lifted me up like you cary wounded soldiers and ran me around the dorm with my unit singing me happy birthday, it was a nice little break from the madness, or a continuation of it i guess depending on how u look at it. The physical part of the night ended with the obstacle course, after that we cleaned our guns for an hour and we got like 15 minutes to clean all our gear and shower so we ended up showering with our vests on which was a funny sight to see. After all that we started a new day like nothing happening and my head didnt hit the pillow until 10 pm on thursday night. 

But now im home, recovering many lost hours of sleep, having a good time and relaxing. i have pretty much all next week off for rosh hashana, so i cant complain. 

well the sun has set long ago, this post took much longer to write than i anticipated and i need to get ready to head out to a show soon. i hope all is well with all of you. talk to you soon. 

shana tova 

l

mekutzeret

mekutzeret means they took your short weekend, made it shorter, and told you to get your ass back to the army by saturday night or else. thats what we got this weekend, and next weekend im closing shabat so i wont be home for a couple of weeks. But its not all bad news, because next week i get to walk into a tent full of tear gas and run out screaming and flailing and drooling and puking and have it all photographed to be laughed at later, and i get to throw a grenade, which scares me.

last night we had our first trek with gear. It was pretty short, about half an hour, at night, with our faces painted and vests with full clips and water bottles and our m16s plus i was carrying a folded up stretcher. It was surprisingly hard because the pace was really fast, our mefaked was walking and we were jogging to keep up. it turns out walking fast is a lot more tiring than jogging. when we got back to the base we had a little talk and our mefaked slapped each of us pretty hard in the face and gave us covers for our dogtags with our unit name embroidered on it. then we had a ceremony back at barracks. Everyone was so pumped youd think we just got back from a month in lebanon. we were singing and doing push ups, counting the push ups in different languages. good times. 

i have my swearing in ceremony in about 3 weeks at the wailing wall. the paratroopers liberated the old city during the 6 day war so we get to have our ceremony there, it should be pretty cool, all my adoptive parents here will probably come. The culmination of the ceremony is where all of us scream at the top of our longs Ani Nishbah, or "I swear". Im sure there will be pictures. after that we start going home with our guns. thats going to be a headache, one more thing to worry about. on the other hand, a certain childish G.I JOE side of me will probably enjoy getting on the train home carrying a gun. 

anyways, since my weekend is short, this post will have to be short as well. ill make up for it in a couple of weeks when i get home. 

In the Army Now

private peled of the 202nd (viper) battalion of the airborne brigade. (or something like that, i dont know how to translate israeli military terms into english) I've finally been poked, prodded and sorted to my final destination. no one calls you private here though, its kind of disappointing. They just call you by your name, or whatever nickname you end up getting (everyone ends up with a nickname) i have a feeling mine will be california. 

I think i should have put more forethought into the title of this blog. Now that im actually in the army, i've been assigned a unit, i even know where im going to be stationed in 7 months when im done training (i dont think im allowed to post that here) the title seems a bit dated. Although in another respect the title is extremely fitting because even though im finally in the army (no more fake goodbye parties only to return 2 months later...) , it doesn't feel like im in the army. I guess its like that with everything. You spend all this time imagining what something is going to be like and building it up in your head, so much so that when you finally come to experience it for real it feels fake in some way because its not what you imagined. 

ive learned something important about the army over the past week of basic training. Basic training is 5% combat training, 95% custodial training. I might be exaggerating a bit, but only a bit. I get the feeling that at the end of 7 months of training their going to send us out to the field with brooms strapped to our backs instead of m16's and brillo pads where my clips should be. When i heard the term sweep a house i used to imagine large guys with guns and night vision goggles breaking down doors and going room to room looking for wanted men, now i imagine guys with brooms and mops moving furniture to get the hard to reach corners, guys yelling "DUCK" and dodging dust balls flying overhead. 

ok so maybe im taking this too far, its just the first week, things are going to get MUCH much MUCH harder and im going to look back at this post and laugh, and cry, and lay my head in my hands and wonder why i got on that plane from JFK to Tel Aviv (or was it Newark? i cant even remember now, ive been here for 4 months, can you believe it?). Its just that when your scrubbing a bathroom floor for the umpteenth time that day to try to clean off dirt that everyone knows full well is impossible to clean off you find yourself wondering, if only for a moment, how the hell you ended up here. I cant help think of the time i gave a security guard my berkeley ID when i was picking up a package in ny. The guard looked at me, looked down at my ID, looked back at me, and asked what the fuck i was doing delivering packages on a bike with a degree from berkeley. I get a perverse pleasure from situations like that. i like the surprised look i get from people when they find out im almost 23 and have a college degree. its a little bit of wow mixed with a lot of what the fuck? i have a friend with a 26 year old former wall street stock broker in his unit, can you imagine that guy on his hands and knees scrubbing toilet bowls because a 20 year old kid told him to? its absurd but its also great in some way.

But enough about the army, lets talk about my burgeoning social life. well thats a bit of an overstatement, but i do have more of a life now than i did 4 months ago, which is nice. This weekend i got home around 9am on friday, did a bit of grocery shopping if you can call chocolate milk, chocolate croissants, 4 cans of tuna and a few bags of Bisli groceries, and then went to brunch with my roommate and her brother's gf. we went to a 24 hour breakfast place near my house that would fit right in in the trendiest parts of LA or NY. Then i went to sleep till about 7pm, had dinner in the house with my other roommate and some of her friends, then i went to a friends house to shave my head, have a few drinks, and go to a bar. my california ID plus the im a volunteer paratrooper line works wonders here, me and my 24 year old friend managed to get an 18 year old into a bar for ages 27 and up. 

anyways, im off to jerusalem for the night, i have a field trip in jerusalem with the army in the morning. 4 years ago i ran into my friend from elementary school doing the very same field trip with his unit while i was on birthright, i feel like ive come full circle. im actually planning to have a reunion with a few friends from elementary school soon, ill let you know how that goes. 

till next week...

dazed and confused

so i cant really tell you how any of this happened, because i have no idea, but it turns out im going to be a paratrooper after all. 

here's the gist of it. i finished my pre basic training program on tuesday afternoon. It was a really great finale. we got woken up by screaming and banging at 5 in the morning and told we had 5 minutes to be in full uniform including vests and be down stairs. when we got downstairs there were 6 open stretchers waiting for us. we had to down a full bottle of water (bad sign...hah) and load up our 6 heaviest guys on the stretchers and off we went. we were told there was suspicious troop movements on the syrian border and we were getting sent to the lebanon border for guard duty... hah nice story. we did about a half hour trek with the stretchers, half an hour under a loaded stretcher feels like an eternity, so the thought of the hours im going to be spending under these stretchers in the coming days and months is pretty terrifying. we ended up at a beautiful lookout point on the base right as the sun was rising, we did a little battle cry while lifting the loaded stretchers above our heads and then our commanding officer gave us a final speech after which we "broke distance" meaning we were allowed to start calling our officers by their first names and didn't have to salute anymore. we had some final casual conversations with our officers about their lives and what their up to and then we all filed onto buses and got taken back to the induction center to get our unit assignments. it was an emotional farewell considering how little time we spent together, we had some really great guys in charge of us. i forgot to mention, on our last night, before the 5 am wake up exercise, we attacked 3 of our officers when they came into our room for an inspection, surrounded them, lifted them up in the air, and paraded them around, it was really funny. 

Back to the induction center. We arrived in the late afternoon and immediately we were back to square one, with mean guys behind sunglasses talking to us very sternly. being back in the induction center was bitter sweet for me. i was anxious to find out where i was going to be placed in the army, but we were being housed in the same spot where i did the tryout for the paratroopers 3 months earlier and it felt like a slap in the face. we got divided up into tents, had some dinner, showered, went to sleep, and got a wake up call at 4 30 AM. After folding up all the beds, organizing the base and having breakfast we got taken to the same courtyard where my paratrooper's tryout started all that time ago and 3 or 4 hundred of us (all people from my base, but not necessarily from my program) got assigned these seemingly random numbers and we sat and waited for our numbers to be called. of course everyone started comparing numbers and before long we figured out that the numbers had something to do with what unit you were being sent to. At this point i noticed that i had the same number as all the people i knew who had done the paratroopers tryout and passed it, so i was very confused but i was trying not to get my hopes up. Eventually my number gets called, we all get up and now i see that for sure all the people who got into the paratroopers have my number, and their the only ones who have my number. i was starting to feel more excited but i was still trying not to get my hopes up. we got taken to the building that stores the uniforms, and sure enough my name was called, i came inside, handed over my 2 pairs of black boots and 2 shirts and was given 2 pairs of red boots and the special paratroopers shirts and belt. This is how i was "told" by the army that i was in the paratroopers. no one said "hey we made a mistake back in may, your in, or we changed our mind, your in" they just handed me the uniform and that was that. kind of poetic, but also nerve racking because the entire time i felt i was getting away with something and at any moment someone was going to realize the mistake and send me to two years of kitchen duty in butt fuck. Alas, that didn't happen...yet. Me and the rest of the guys from my base who made it to the paratroopers (about 20 of us) got taken to a waiting area where we filled out some forms with the assistance of a very attractive girl from the paratroopers. after that we were instructed on where we had to report to on sunday for basic training, how to get there, and then we got loaded onto a bus and got taken to the tel aviv central bus station where we were let off for a very long weekend (wed-sunday). 

so there it is. In some inexplicable way everything worked out and i became a paratrooper. this is turning into quite the hollywood melodrama. Actually, I guess its more accurate to say im now on my way to becoming a paratrooper. Its going to be a long trek but ill keep you posted. 

My new uniform

i was born to be a soldier boy

so i've had the Mason Jennings song "soldier boy" stuck in my head for the past 2 weeks, thanks doron. 

Im home from another 2 weeks in the army and it seems really hard to recap it all but ill give it a go. 

the first week back was pretty interesting and tiring. we had a couple of days in "the field", which involved hiking a couple of kilometers in all our gear (vests, water bottles, gun, sleeping bag) to the shooting range, and then hiking to another spot where we slept and did exercises the next day. 

its funny the things you learn about yourself that you never really thought about before you tried shooting a gun. For instance, im right handed, but i could only wink with my right eye, i couldn't shut my left eye independently of my right, which makes aiming extremely difficult... hah. at first i used a piece of cloth as a patch to shut my left eye so i could aim, i looked like a friggn pirate, or a war casualty with a head wound, take your pick. After the first shooting session, which was just used to fix the aim on the gun, i started practicing winking with my other eye, because i figured the muscles are there, i just need to learn how to use them, and within a couple of hours i managed to do it. "hakol barosh" (its all in your head) is the favorite saying of our mefakdim when people are breaking during physical exercises, in this case it turned out to be true. 

after the aiming session we had a night shooting session where we shot targets from a shorter distance in darkness, i hit A target with all 5 bullets... the only problem was it wasn't MINE! hah. when i was aiming i focused in on the target of the guy to the left of me by accident (they were all pretty close in my defense). so that was a bust... but the next day we had another shooting session where we did a standing position (called instinctive shooting) and the laying down position, and i hit my own targets, which was nice for a change 

Aside from the shooting range we also did exercises where we practiced walking in team formations in the field. The fun part of this exercise was when the mefaked decides a mortar went off and half the soldiers are injured and need to be evacuated in 30 seconds. you have to carry them one on one, meaning you throw their gun over your shoulder, throw one hand under their armpit, one between their legs, throw them over your shoulder and start running. carrying and being carried both suck in their own way, one hurts your back and legs,  the other hurts your balls, no one gets off easy. 

Another fun game was AZAR. Throughout the day the mefakdim would randomly throw rocks in our direction when we were just sitting around relaxing and yell "AZAR" (initials for "enemy threw a grenade") and everyone had 3 seconds to run as far as possible and jump for cover. At one point one kid accidently ran directly towards the grenade, so he became designated as the grenade cover and had to jump on the grenades whenever they were thrown to save the other soldiers. (there's a famous story of an officer doing that during the past lebanon war, he saved his whole team by jumping on a grenade and absorbing all the shrapnel and impact. he screamed the prayer "shma israel" as he did it, sounds like something out of a movie, but its a true story)

At the end of our 2 days in the field we played a night time army version of capture the flag with the mefakdim. we had to steal a sticklight from them that was hidden somewhere on a hill covered in brush and trees. If we were too obvious or loud they would flash a flash light on us and wed have to climb down and start over. no one got the sticklight...hah, but it was a cool exercise. 

oh i forgot to mention the best part of the field days, nothing but battle rations. well to be fair we had bread too, and even vegetables sometimes, like i said before, its army-lite, but still it was basically just field rations. These rations included the israeli version of spam, called "ful" (pronounced like fool) a can of tuna (reminded me of the good old days on the road trip) a can of halva, and a can of non-dairy chocolate spread (even the battle rations have to be kosher after all). it wasnt all bad, i would mix the tuna with the ful to try to mask the taste, but after 5 of those meals in a row it grew old. 

after we got back to the base late on wed night the mefakdim felt we were being too slow so they made us run 100 meters carrying each other on our shoulders like we did earlier in the day, except they did it over and over again. i thought my back was going to snap in half. after that i took the best shower of my life. when i got out of the shower i noticed the face paint they put on me earlier wouldn't come off the area around my eyes so i looked like a girl doing the walk of shame on a saturday morning in santa barbara. 

Pre-Shower

on friday we had a really nice shabat dinner on the base, everyone was singing and it was really festive, it was one of the coolest shabat dinners of my life. it also took on a special meaning because we were all in our ceremonial uniforms, not the dirty ones we train in. well actually everyone was in their nice uniforms except me and 3 other guys who had to go straight to guard duty after dinner. 

speaking of guard duty, that friday afternoon there was a big fire on the base that got sparked from the heat apparently and took out a bunch of brush near the entrance to the base. the fire got put out in about an hour, or so we thought. i had guard duty at a weapons storage facility near the base, me and 3 other guys had to stay there over night and switch off guarding. Right when i get back from shabat dinner and i get my boots and shirt off my buddy comes running in screaming FIRE FIRE FIRE. For a second i thought he was kidding but then i saw him sprint off so i realized it was real and i threw my boots, shirt, vest and gun back on and went sprinting after him. we started dragging fire hoses and trying to replace all the ones with holes in them to keep the water pressure up, we quickly ran out of good hoses so 3 of us just stomped down on the holes and kept our boots on it while another guy sprayed water on the fire. i got soaked. exciting times. in retrospect it was a pretty small fire, a little left over from earlier but at the time my adrenaline was pumping like crazy and i felt like a fire fighter. Also the fire was just across the road from the gas depot where the army keeps a shit load of gas reserves for its vehicles, so it seemed pretty hectic.  

so that was the exciting portion of the 2 weeks. the 2nd week was mostly guard duty and nothing. They were running out of things to do with us. i was put on an emergency response team with 5 other guys, so for 2 days we couldnt be more than a few ft from each other at all times and we couldnt take our boots off so we couldnt shower, and we had to carry a stretcher around all day. at any time they could call us on the radio and we had to be at a certain spot on the base within 5 minutes. we made it in 2:40 when they called us for a practice run despite the fact that 3 of our guys were injured. (only the army would put 3 guys with foot and back injuries on an emergency response team, brilliant) the shower i took after those 2 days rivaled the glory of the shower after the field days. 

the second week was pretty uneventful but it was full of laughs. the funniest part of the army so far has been the creative punishments. a few kids got caught with cell phones on them, so the mefakdim gave them new cell phones (blocks of concrete or rocks) to carry around all day. for one kid they drew the numbers and everything on the block and wrote "no service" on the top. they also come up with stress positions with funny names for us to stand in. the best one so far has been the kwala stance. this is where we each had to pick a tree and hug it like a kwala bear so that our feet were off the ground for 3 minutes, but every time someone put their feet down the clock started over so it took a while. after this little exercise we had to stand in the push up position for a while and the guy next to me kept yelling out the mefaked that he had to take a dump and was about to shit his pants, i was laughing so hard i almost peed myself. 

Im the Kwala on the right                                      

Me about to Pee

well thats about two weeks worth of stories from the army. next week im going back to the induction center and finally finding out where im going to serve. basic training starts the week after. i should be back next weekend so ill let you know how it went. 

i miss you guys 

the lost boys

so i got home from the army this morning around 10 am and i just woke up from a 7 hour mid day nap, which pretty much sums up how tiring this week was. 

lets take stock shall we? 

i have 3 dime sized patches of missing skin, one on the inner side of each heel and one on my right hand from running in combat boots all day and doing push ups on the scalding hot ground. i have a V shaped tan in the triangle between my chest and neck where my shirt was open at the top, and i have a farmer's tan to boot. i also have cuts on my elbows and knuckles from doing knuckle push ups  and standing in a position called "thinking man" which is like a push up position except instead of using your hands you put all your weight on your elbows and supports your head with your hands. so all in all it was a fun week...

im actually making it sound worse than it was though, it was a lot of fun at times looking back. its hard to sum it all up because we have 18 hour days with 6 hours of sleep so it feels like we did a lot but i guess a lot of it is repetitive. we got our M16's on the second or third day and we have to treat them like a new appendage. we sleep with them under heads, eat with them on our laps, and when we shower we have to put them with a guard who cant take his eye of them. we were supposed to go to the shooting range this week but because of the heat we weren't allowed to make the trek there so thats gonna happen next week, but we practice dry runs of different shooting positions and take the gun apart and clean it every day. 

i guess the best way to describe what im doing is to outline a typical day so here goes: 

whoever has the last guard shift of the night wakes everyone up around 5 or 6 am depending on when we went to sleep the night before, we have to run downstairs in shorts and a t shirt and line up in 3's for the misdar boker. everything is done on a strict time schedule, everything we have to do we are assigned a specific time to do it in which is never enough. the sargeant will say "7 minutes ur in uniform and back here" "3 minutes ur shaven ur boots are shined and ur teeth are brushed and ur back here" "30 seconds ur standing in 3's by the lunch room" stuff like that. And if anyone from the division is late were all late so you have to ask for extentions all the time and hell give you an extra 10 seconds, an extra 5, an extra 30, whatever he wants. but if someone fails to ask for an extension and time lapses everyone is punished (sprints or push ups or some other physical punishment they can think of). After the morning routine we run to the lunch room and eat, we get a set time for that, then we usually run to some class room and have a class which ranges from gun safety, or shooting positions, or first aid (how to block arteries in case someone loses a limb) or the meaning of the national anthem. basically its a range of classes to get us ready both practically and culturally for the rest of our army service. in between classes we run here and there, do dry runs on shooting positions, run from here to there, do odd jobs (kitchen duty, cleaning the building, moving stuff) eat lunch, dinner, and before you know it its night time. we usually have a night time run and work out in sports clothes but before that the sargeant adds up the times through out the day he felt we were too slow (he says throughout the day "you owe me 30 seconds for this, a minute for that) and at the end of the day he tortures us physically for that period of time we owe him. thats where the cuts on my elbows from the "thinking man" position came from. and everything is done as a division so if anyone drops knees or falters everyone pays and if it happens 3 times we start all over. after all this we get an hour to do whatever we want before we got to sleep, but this has to be used to shower, brush our teeth and organize our rooms as well so its not really an hour of free time. the bed has to be organized every morning and night in a specific way and everyone's bed has to be organized identically. 

so thats about the gist of it. 

the people im with are pretty cool. theres about 7o total, split into 2 divisions and each division is split into 3 teams, each with its own room and its own sargeant (i really have no idea how to translate israeli military ranks to american ones so im just guessing).

 

In my room theres a guy from zimbabwe who went to Tulane for college, theres a couple guys from germany, one converted to judaism on his own and decided to move here and join up, 3 guys from france, a guy from holland, a british guy, and another 3 guys from the states, one of whom lived near me in LA and also lived in ny for a while. In my division theres a 30 year old guy from argentina, which is just crazy, and a guy with the last name kennedy that looks like a US marine who ended up in the israeli army on some clerical error, but he speaks fluent hebrew and is probably more israeli than me so its pretty funny. 

i guess thats about it for now, i have the weekend off and sunday as well as an errand day, but next week were staying on base for the weekend so i wont be home for 2 weeks after sunday. next week is when we learn to shoot and sleep in the field and do camouflage and stuff so ill keep you posted in the next episode of this army life... 

hah 

heres a picture of me getting drafted, thats my dad and my friend alon. ill post a pic of me in uniform next time.

d day

its is now the 6th of july in israel, its 1 am, i have to get up in 5 hours and ill be a soldier in 8 hours. be back in a week i hope with some interesting updates and if im very lucky, some idea of where im going to serve for the next 2 years. 

the day of reckoning

so i finally did it, i shaved my head. 

now i feel like a person whose joining the army in 3 days. people here have been giving me gifts for the army non stop, so i have an entire new wardrobe consisting of olive green and white t-shirts, army socks, new underwear, new toiletries bag and a new monstrous backpack to carry it all in. im fully equipped to sit on my ass and do nothing for three weeks at a special base for recent immigrants... 

on the bright side, the army restored my faith in them for the first time since i started this seemingly endless process. They called me this morning on their own initiative and informed me that they realized it was retarded for me to drive all the way to haifa (over an hour north) just to get on a bus to take me back to tel aviv, so i could go to the induction center myself and i just have to be there by 9 am. maybe theres hope for this country after all. 

anyways, heres the haircut i will sport for the next couple of years, and heres cece. 

moving day

im finally moving to tel aviv, finding an apt took about as long as my draft process... but i got a bed today and ill move the rest of my stuff tom. those of you familiar my past living situations will not be disappointed by my new diggs. ill post a couple pictures tomorrow and give you the rest of the details. 

im getting drafted in 2 weeks... time flies when ur doing mostly nothing and a rotating cast of your favorite people come to visit you. 

i thought id make this blog interactive, do any of you have thoughts on when i should shave my head? now? or in 2 weeks? todd is my usual barber, but with gas prices going up i just cant afford to fly him in every time i need someone to take half an hour to shave my head with the cheapest most ineffective electric shaver known to man. exhibit A is the current state of affairs. i should clarify that the bulge in my cheek is not an abnormally large gumball but rather the result of having 2 wisdom teeth violently extracted from the clutches of my jaws. As for the tea bag hanging from my mouth, well, somethings you just don't want to know... trust me, its for your own good. 

Exhibit A

wisdom

getting your wisdom teeth pulled sucks. dont do it. wait for a car accident, a bar fight, or a skating accident to knock them out for you, its probably less painful that way, and it comes with a much better story. im recovering from my second round of extractions, i feel less wise already... 

visitors

ive been doing a pretty shitty job at keeping up with this blog, and things will probably only get worse once im in the army, but on the bright side im guessing my posts will be much more interesting, so theres that to look forward to.

 im having a lot of visitors this month. todd was just here, we went to eilat and petra the day after i found out i didnt make it into the paratroopers. it was a nice distraction. We went to petra on an organized trip that included me, todd, a nice canadian girl that was volunteering with an organization called rabbis for human rights, and two japanese semi-conductor engineers wearing indiana jones style hats. We had a funny jordanian guide who seemed to know every single person in petra. Even though we have peace with Jordan i still felt like a stowaway on a pirate ship, there was definitely a novelty to it, and now i have a jordanian stamp in my israeli passport, so thats exciting. 

my sister got into town last week, shes staying for most of june, and a few more people are coming to visit this month so between them and selling ice cream ill have my hands full till my draft date. i think i might have to quit my job soon to make time for everyone. 

in other news, i may have found a place to live in tel aviv, dont want to jinx it so ill fill you in when the details are settled. 

i guess lastly, my draft date is set for july 6th and its not going to change anymore. the army is retarded so their drafting me on a special date for recent immigrants to the country, even though i speak hebrew and i lived here for 6 years, hah. so basically my draft date is 3 weeks earlier than the normal combat draft, i get to improve my hebrew (90% of the people in this course are russian so i think the only thing i will be improving is my ability to curse in russian, blat) and learn some zionist history. on the upside, i hear people in this course get priority for picking their placement in the army, so perhaps something good will come out of it after all. 

anyways, its 2 3o in the morning and i should be sleeping so im gonna get to that. 

happy birthday katia 

another one bites the dust

so i just found out i didnt make it into the paratroopers. bastard coated bastards with bastard filling. hah. ill write more when i stop sulking. 

i scream, you scream, we all scream for...

 

so i started selling ice cream at a place called vaniglia in a swanky part of tel aviv. selling ice cream is hard! the job turned out to be a lot less laid back than i had originally thought. surprisingly though, i have barely touched the stuff, except of course while serving it to customers. when i was living in ny i would go through a pint of ben n jerrys every other night, sometimes with todd's help, usually on my own. now that im surrounded by the stuff i dont really think about it. which leads me to believe that maybe the best way to get over alcoholism is to become a bar tender. i could be completely wrong about that though. 

by now you must be thinking, enough with this ice cream talk, we want to know what happened with the paratroopers. well, guess what? so do I! hah. still no word. it will probably come this week though... so im as a nervous as a high school kid in april. (thats when we heard back from colleges wasnt it?) 

in other non news, i still havnt found a place to live in tel aviv. slim pickins, but the search must go on. 

i was in jerusalem this weekend. i went to a "beer and sing along" party in a moshav, pretty surreal. Today i saw todd and his birthright harem at his hotel for a bit and had a meal on the company dime. Even terrible kosher food tastes better when its free. it was really nice seeing todd though i felt like a wedding crasher the whole time, and not the cool vince vaughn, owen wilson type either. 

at one point the kids at my table got into a discussion about the soldiers that had joined their trip and which ones had killed people and which ones hadn't, and then another kid came along and practiced his "ma koreh yafa" or "whats up beautiful?" routine to confirm he had the words right. i wonder if this is what Bronfman and Steinhardt had in mind when they started the trips...  

hurry up and wait

So did i mention the army is slow? well it turns out its VERY slow, and obnoxious to boot. 

First the slow part: i called to find out what's happening with the results for the paratroopers because they said 2-3 weeks from the date of the tryout. Well, now their saying its going to be another month maybe. It's like college admissions all over again. Im trying to just go with the assumption that i didn't make it, that way if i make it i will be happily surprised, and if i don't at least i wont stress this whole month for nothing. 

As for being obnoxious, i checked my personal profile for the army on the web and found out they pushed my draft date back to october again. they did this to me once before in march, and i sent them a fax which took care of the problem and i got a july date again. But now they did it again, which for a complicated and uninteresting reason might screw me out of getting into the paratroopers. So i sent them another fax explaining the situation and requesting to get my original draft date back and now i wait...  

funny story: when i asked the girl at the office in charge of drafting paratroopers whether the date change was going to affect my acceptance she said "i dont know" and then i asked if i could speak to someone who did know and she goes "i dont know." I imagine her sitting there, twirling her ponytail with one hand, twirling gum with other, rolling her eyes and then continuing to read the latest issue of US weekly or some Israeli equivalent. This army is run on the coffee breaks of 18 year old brats. I think I've used that line before, and I'm proven more right every day. 

and so... 

"i am a patient boy 

i wait i wait i wait i wait 

my time is like water down a drain"

Tryout for the paratroopers

So I tried out for the paratroopers on the 29th/30th of April. This was 2 days after i landed in Tel Aviv. Here's what happened:

The tryout was held on a military base near Tel Aviv. The first day was mostly "hurry up and wait" so ill just give you the highlights. I walk in around 8 am and there were somewhere around 200 17/18 year old guys sitting on rafters filling out paperwork. I started filling out paperwork too, and people kept coming until all the rafters were full and people were sitting on the floor. Im guessing by the time we got started there were 400-500 high school seniors...and me.

We all checked in by showing our summonses and our medical permission slips from our doctors and then we got split into 7 or 8 groups of 60 kids each. At some point during this time the officer in charge of the whole tryout came and described what was going to be happening over the next 2 days and then the head doctor came and told us to be honest about any illnesses we may have, especially recent ones, as kids have died of heat stroke recently doing these tryouts and just the day before us a kid got heat stroke and was taken to the hospital and the chance of surviving is only 40%.

On that happy note some of the groups got taken to get their uniforms (the tryout is done in army uniforms) and then they went to see a doctor so he could clear them to participate. my group was one of the last ones so i sat around forEVER. I spent most of the time reading Even Cow Girls Get the Blues, which is funny because what i was doing was pretty much the exact opposite of everything advocated by the book. (i just finished it yesterday by the way, thanks Todd)

After waiting around forever, we went to get our uniforms, which were all either comically large or ridiculously small, and all in pretty bad shape. We looked like little kids playing soldiers, (which reminded me of slaughter house five and "the children's crusade") though i suppose even when we get our real uniforms we'll still be little kids playing soldiers, but thats a topic for another day.

Once we were all dressed in our olive green finest, we waited to see a doctor so he could clear us to participate in the tryout. The doctor could'nt speak, i guess he had a sore throat or something, so he spoke through a younger soldier, it was like sitting with the godfather, pretty funny. It became less funny when he decided i might be jet lagged and i shouldn't participate in the tryout. I told him i flew all this way and that i felt fine and i don't get jet lagged etc. He ended up letting me go.

At this point we had to drink some more water. That doesnt sound bad right? wrong! the water drinking regimen was one of the hardest parts of the whole tryout. Each person was issued a dirty ass 3/4 liter water canister that we had to fill to the brim with rank, hot water and drink within a couple of minutes, 3 or 4 times a day. When we were done we had to hold the bottle over our head to show it was empty. This is done to prevent dehydration, which has caused a few deaths in the past. This is the army in it's polish mother best. So much over-protection it literaly makes you puke. After the water we got a "meal" consisting of 2 slices of bread, some spread, and few fruits and vegetables to share.

The meal was followed by more waiting, and then finally around dusk we went out for the 2k run, the first part of the tryout. It was done on a long trail in the field near the base, i had so much pent of energy from waiting all day i almost looked forward to the run. I did alright, i was a bit behind the first group to finish, i think i did it somewhere around 8:40. Anyways that was day one. We put our shit in a tent with like 10 people and went to sleep around 9, froze through the night, and woke up at 3 am, though im not sure anyone slept much. this is when the real fun began.

at 3:30am everyone sat together in a courtyard and our names were read, splitting us into new groups for the rest of the tryout. i was in group 1 so i didnt have to wait long, but i feel bad for the people in the last group, because they read the names until everyone who passed the first day was put into groups, and then if your name didnt get read you knew you got cut. so it was a long nerve racking wait for some people. Im not sure how many people got cut at that point, somewhere around 30 maybe.

so now i was with my new group of 30, we each got a number to tag on so the people watching us could differentiate us and then we got half a slice of cake for breakfast, drank another disgusting bottle full of water, and off we went to the field to start the actual tryout. The guy in charge of us was this overweight, mean looking, no-nense reserve officer. He got us out to the field around 5 am and started making us sprint to this poll, maybe 100 meters round trip. then we sprinted to a sand bag and had to round it and come back. we did this for about 40 or 50 minutes, i was ready to caugh up a lung and he kept saying this was a warm up and that the tryout hadnt even started yet and we should quit and stop slowing down our friends because theres 30 of us and he only needs the first 4. it was tiring and demoralizing but then it was over.

on to station number 2, where i think we did more sprints but the first 8 people each time had to do the next lap with a stretcher on their shoulders. we did that for maybe half an hour. then we did military crawls in the dirt, my mouth became one with the desert, i was spitting dust for hours. we had a couple of group exercises where they gave us some impossible mission like crossing an imaginary river with a big log of wood and a barrell and a tire, it was impossible but they just wanted to see us argue. after all this we had the circuit that really almost broke me. it was sprinting, crawling, 10 sit ups, sprint crawl, 10 push ups, sprint, crawl, 10 "down ups". we did this over and over again to the point where i was doing "girl" push ups and barely able to do those. i almost died, but then we stopped and the worst was over. then i puked, hah, then i collected myself.

After all this we had the final stage, the trek with the stretchers and water canisters and everything. we would jog behind the officer and he would start walking faster and faster through hills and dunes and when he raised his hand if the two stretchers werent right behind him he would turn around and make us walk back in the wrong direction. i carried the stretcher a good deal during this, the stretcher is weighted down with sand bags, this thing is heavy and it rips your shoulder to shreds. it was not fun. when i wasnt carrying the stretcher i was carrying this water container that had broke off of its base so you couldnt carry it on your back anymore and it was ever worse than the stretcher. this went on for maybe half an hour and then we got back to the gate, 9 am, 4 hours after it started, it was over.

After all that we did some clean up, and then i waited around for 4 hours until i had my interview, the interview went alright i think, i took a bus home, never felt sicker, got home, took off my shoes, discovered my toe nail was black, took a shower, went to sleep at 4pm, woke up at 2am to puke, went back to sleep and woke up at 8 am.

So there it is. a week later, and im almost fully recovered. my toenail is still black, my knees are scraped up a bit and my shoulders are still bruised, but all in all im fine. ill find out if i got in next week or the week after. Im not too hopeful, because not as many people quit during the tryout as usual so a lot of people made it to the interviews. But we'll see what happens. i'll keep you posted...(posted...get it?) hah.

Prelude to a post

hello friends,
i know this is just one in a long list of blogs about Americans who went off to Israel to join the army, what a tired genre really, but in my defense, i started this blog for one pretty selfish reason. Namely, i dont feel like repeating the same stories 15 times to each and every one of you. I also didnt want to mass email all of you eveyrtime i think something interesting happend, because (those of you who have heard me tell a story can attest to this) odds are it wont be that interesting. so i think this is a happy compromise.
There is also the added benefit that perhaps this will be my first successful attempt at keeping a journal.
so here goes...