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... 

 

my life is a joke

me: sorry

  i just had a gigantic fridge delivered to me

  my life is a joke

  i just dont have enough distance from it to laugh

1:34 PM Meredith: hah ohh arie

 me: this little russian guy walked up the stairs to my apartment with an industrial size fridge on his back

  he gets in my apt

  pushes it through the hallway

  only to discover its so fucking big it wont fit through the doorway to the kitchen

  now my room has a really wide door for some reason, so we end up putting it in my room

1:35 PM so now i have a bed, a sort of closet, no furniture to speak of, and a monstrous fridge in my room

  which

  i cant connect to the electricity because i only have one outlet in my room and the ac/comp and every other electrical thing in my room is hooked up to a powerstrip on this one outlet and im afraid if i hook up the fridge it will burn down the building

1:36 PM so i have a monstrous useless fridge in my room now, thank you very much army

 Meredith: hahahah

  so you can just copy and paste that storry for the blog

1:37 PM me: good idea, i have been slacking on that

  ill do that right now

  

care of you

Some pics from the past couple of weeks:

The real army experience...

getting ready for the sergeant's trek

Leshnick taunting me with a coke i can't drink because im guarding


Aside from fridges, what else is new? well i flew in a black hawk helicopter a couple weeks ago, that was exciting, felt like a real soldier for a second. I got to shoot from a sharp shooter's gun and a machine gun, new toys are always fun. i had a 9k trek the other night at the end of which we got our infantry pins for our berets, one more thing you have to scratch and cut before wearing so it looks like you've been in the army forever and your not fresh out of your mommy's tummy.  The trek was pretty funny, its called the "massa samal", which i think translates to sergeant's trek, and its infamous because its very fast paced and its a tradition for the sergeant to fuck with you along the way. Did i mention the army is exactly like pledging for a frat? Anyways, back to the trek, after many delays a bus takes my unit with all our equipment to a field in the middle of nowhere. we get dropped off, we sit around for a good while and then finally the fun begins. Our sergeant gathers us in walking formation, does a little warm up, and then says with a devilish smile on his face: "this wont be hard, it wont be easy, welcome to the sergeant's trek" (this rhymes in hebrew and sounds much more devilish) and then he breaks out in a sprint and we start sprinting behind him in full gear for a good while and were thinking oh fuck were gonna sprint for 9k, but then inevitably he slows down a bit and we gather ourselves and realize its not so bad. The rest of the trek is still done at pretty much jogging pace, and after about 3k i switched with someone carrying the emergency water supply so i had all my equipment plus 15 liters of water on my back for a 6k jog. The last kilometer is done with open stretchers up a monstrous hill, at the top of which the sergeant turned around, had us go down the hill and jog back up it, with 3 open stretchers and the base in sight, it was one of the more demoralizing moments of the trek, but like all things, good or bad, it came to an end. We had a little ceremony, got punched in the chest, given our pins, and now were that much closer to being real soldiers, supposedly...

bullets over birthdays

ive been slacking, i know, but in my defense ive only been home for like 3 days this month and i spent half of those days recouping the many hours of sleep and layers of skin i lost during the week. I think today i found my muse though. I'm sitting on my porch over looking yehuda halevi street, the sun is setting, the clouds have a pinkish hue and there is a cool breeze blowing. it rained this morning randomly, first rain since i got here in april, perhaps fall is finally here. The prospect of replacing my dirt training grounds with mud is not particularly uplifting. 

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 

l

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