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