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
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