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...