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

i was born to be a soldier boy

so i've had the Mason Jennings song "soldier boy" stuck in my head for the past 2 weeks, thanks doron. 

Im home from another 2 weeks in the army and it seems really hard to recap it all but ill give it a go. 

the first week back was pretty interesting and tiring. we had a couple of days in "the field", which involved hiking a couple of kilometers in all our gear (vests, water bottles, gun, sleeping bag) to the shooting range, and then hiking to another spot where we slept and did exercises the next day. 

its funny the things you learn about yourself that you never really thought about before you tried shooting a gun. For instance, im right handed, but i could only wink with my right eye, i couldn't shut my left eye independently of my right, which makes aiming extremely difficult... hah. at first i used a piece of cloth as a patch to shut my left eye so i could aim, i looked like a friggn pirate, or a war casualty with a head wound, take your pick. After the first shooting session, which was just used to fix the aim on the gun, i started practicing winking with my other eye, because i figured the muscles are there, i just need to learn how to use them, and within a couple of hours i managed to do it. "hakol barosh" (its all in your head) is the favorite saying of our mefakdim when people are breaking during physical exercises, in this case it turned out to be true. 

after the aiming session we had a night shooting session where we shot targets from a shorter distance in darkness, i hit A target with all 5 bullets... the only problem was it wasn't MINE! hah. when i was aiming i focused in on the target of the guy to the left of me by accident (they were all pretty close in my defense). so that was a bust... but the next day we had another shooting session where we did a standing position (called instinctive shooting) and the laying down position, and i hit my own targets, which was nice for a change 

Aside from the shooting range we also did exercises where we practiced walking in team formations in the field. The fun part of this exercise was when the mefaked decides a mortar went off and half the soldiers are injured and need to be evacuated in 30 seconds. you have to carry them one on one, meaning you throw their gun over your shoulder, throw one hand under their armpit, one between their legs, throw them over your shoulder and start running. carrying and being carried both suck in their own way, one hurts your back and legs,  the other hurts your balls, no one gets off easy. 

Another fun game was AZAR. Throughout the day the mefakdim would randomly throw rocks in our direction when we were just sitting around relaxing and yell "AZAR" (initials for "enemy threw a grenade") and everyone had 3 seconds to run as far as possible and jump for cover. At one point one kid accidently ran directly towards the grenade, so he became designated as the grenade cover and had to jump on the grenades whenever they were thrown to save the other soldiers. (there's a famous story of an officer doing that during the past lebanon war, he saved his whole team by jumping on a grenade and absorbing all the shrapnel and impact. he screamed the prayer "shma israel" as he did it, sounds like something out of a movie, but its a true story)

At the end of our 2 days in the field we played a night time army version of capture the flag with the mefakdim. we had to steal a sticklight from them that was hidden somewhere on a hill covered in brush and trees. If we were too obvious or loud they would flash a flash light on us and wed have to climb down and start over. no one got the sticklight...hah, but it was a cool exercise. 

oh i forgot to mention the best part of the field days, nothing but battle rations. well to be fair we had bread too, and even vegetables sometimes, like i said before, its army-lite, but still it was basically just field rations. These rations included the israeli version of spam, called "ful" (pronounced like fool) a can of tuna (reminded me of the good old days on the road trip) a can of halva, and a can of non-dairy chocolate spread (even the battle rations have to be kosher after all). it wasnt all bad, i would mix the tuna with the ful to try to mask the taste, but after 5 of those meals in a row it grew old. 

after we got back to the base late on wed night the mefakdim felt we were being too slow so they made us run 100 meters carrying each other on our shoulders like we did earlier in the day, except they did it over and over again. i thought my back was going to snap in half. after that i took the best shower of my life. when i got out of the shower i noticed the face paint they put on me earlier wouldn't come off the area around my eyes so i looked like a girl doing the walk of shame on a saturday morning in santa barbara. 

Pre-Shower

on friday we had a really nice shabat dinner on the base, everyone was singing and it was really festive, it was one of the coolest shabat dinners of my life. it also took on a special meaning because we were all in our ceremonial uniforms, not the dirty ones we train in. well actually everyone was in their nice uniforms except me and 3 other guys who had to go straight to guard duty after dinner. 

speaking of guard duty, that friday afternoon there was a big fire on the base that got sparked from the heat apparently and took out a bunch of brush near the entrance to the base. the fire got put out in about an hour, or so we thought. i had guard duty at a weapons storage facility near the base, me and 3 other guys had to stay there over night and switch off guarding. Right when i get back from shabat dinner and i get my boots and shirt off my buddy comes running in screaming FIRE FIRE FIRE. For a second i thought he was kidding but then i saw him sprint off so i realized it was real and i threw my boots, shirt, vest and gun back on and went sprinting after him. we started dragging fire hoses and trying to replace all the ones with holes in them to keep the water pressure up, we quickly ran out of good hoses so 3 of us just stomped down on the holes and kept our boots on it while another guy sprayed water on the fire. i got soaked. exciting times. in retrospect it was a pretty small fire, a little left over from earlier but at the time my adrenaline was pumping like crazy and i felt like a fire fighter. Also the fire was just across the road from the gas depot where the army keeps a shit load of gas reserves for its vehicles, so it seemed pretty hectic.  

so that was the exciting portion of the 2 weeks. the 2nd week was mostly guard duty and nothing. They were running out of things to do with us. i was put on an emergency response team with 5 other guys, so for 2 days we couldnt be more than a few ft from each other at all times and we couldnt take our boots off so we couldnt shower, and we had to carry a stretcher around all day. at any time they could call us on the radio and we had to be at a certain spot on the base within 5 minutes. we made it in 2:40 when they called us for a practice run despite the fact that 3 of our guys were injured. (only the army would put 3 guys with foot and back injuries on an emergency response team, brilliant) the shower i took after those 2 days rivaled the glory of the shower after the field days. 

the second week was pretty uneventful but it was full of laughs. the funniest part of the army so far has been the creative punishments. a few kids got caught with cell phones on them, so the mefakdim gave them new cell phones (blocks of concrete or rocks) to carry around all day. for one kid they drew the numbers and everything on the block and wrote "no service" on the top. they also come up with stress positions with funny names for us to stand in. the best one so far has been the kwala stance. this is where we each had to pick a tree and hug it like a kwala bear so that our feet were off the ground for 3 minutes, but every time someone put their feet down the clock started over so it took a while. after this little exercise we had to stand in the push up position for a while and the guy next to me kept yelling out the mefaked that he had to take a dump and was about to shit his pants, i was laughing so hard i almost peed myself. 

Im the Kwala on the right                                      

Me about to Pee

well thats about two weeks worth of stories from the army. next week im going back to the induction center and finally finding out where im going to serve. basic training starts the week after. i should be back next weekend so ill let you know how it went. 

i miss you guys 

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.

d day

its is now the 6th of july in israel, its 1 am, i have to get up in 5 hours and ill be a soldier in 8 hours. be back in a week i hope with some interesting updates and if im very lucky, some idea of where im going to serve for the next 2 years. 

the day of reckoning

so i finally did it, i shaved my head. 

now i feel like a person whose joining the army in 3 days. people here have been giving me gifts for the army non stop, so i have an entire new wardrobe consisting of olive green and white t-shirts, army socks, new underwear, new toiletries bag and a new monstrous backpack to carry it all in. im fully equipped to sit on my ass and do nothing for three weeks at a special base for recent immigrants... 

on the bright side, the army restored my faith in them for the first time since i started this seemingly endless process. They called me this morning on their own initiative and informed me that they realized it was retarded for me to drive all the way to haifa (over an hour north) just to get on a bus to take me back to tel aviv, so i could go to the induction center myself and i just have to be there by 9 am. maybe theres hope for this country after all. 

anyways, heres the haircut i will sport for the next couple of years, and heres cece.