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.