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.