Helmet for my pillow: my first week in the field

My body aches.  Every part of it is cut up, scratched, bruised and beaten.  I just finished a week training in the shetach (field) (for glossary of Israeli military jargon, click here).  This was nothing like my few days in the field during my service at Mikveh Alon.  Or rather, Mikveh was nothing like this.  Actually, Mikveh was really nothing like anything.  Even the Tzanchanim gibbush (tryout) was absolutely nothing like the past five days.  I was warned beforehand that this past week would probably be the hardest of my training, not necessarily just the physical aspect, but being our first field experience would make the week a trying experience, to say the least.  But from the beginning...

In the Diaspora (outside Israel), Jews observe two days of holiday at the beginning and end of Pesach.  As an American, I, and other lone soldiers, was able to return to base on Wednesday, a day later than the Israelis.  What was the first thing I did for my first day back on base?  Initially, we learned about chemical, biological and atomic weapons and attacks.  We learned how to use a gas mask in the event of such an attack.  And then we did a little more than that.

The entire plugah gathered just outside the base's fence near a tent filled with a form of tear gas.  Every few minutes, a soldier or two would be seen scrambling out, clawing at the ground, coughing, slobbering, trying to regain control over himself.  Just being within twenty meters of the tent made my eyes sting and start to tear.  A few soldiers at a time were ordered to put on their masks.  First, however, I had to take out my contacts and since glasses don't fit inside the mask, I pretty much did this exercise blind.  Then, with a partner, our Sammel (sergeant) tells us to do ten pushups, then run to a pole and back, then some more pushups.  The point?  To get us out of breath and panicked.  I was certainly already there.  For one thing, I literally could not breathe with the mask on.  Secondly, I knew I was going into a tent filled with tear gas.  

I pulled aside the flap and stepped inside.  The gas that filled the tent and the few Mefakeds (commanders) in full chemical protection regalia made the scene very eerie, like something out of X-Files.  My Mefaked turned to me and knocked me on the arm a few times, trying to pump me up.  He told me to just start talking in English, tell him a lesson about anything in English.  I could only think of one thing: the Cubs.  After a minute, in which, surprisingly, I found it relatively easy to breathe, he told me to take my mask off.  Now, I hear that the Commanders then ask for you to repeat your personal number.  I didn't get that far.  I ripped the mask off and the gas rushed to my face, my eyes, inside my mouth.  I couldn't hear or see anything; I didn't want to be in there.  My Mefaked tried to grab my shoulders and keep me inside but I shoved him off and stumbled outside, falling on my hands and knees, eyes streaming tears, nose running, saliva drooling from my mouth.

It took my a good twenty minutes to recover from the intense gas concentration.  The smell of the gas stayed with me for the rest of the day, it was in the fabric of my clothes, in my hair, in everything I did and everywhere I went.  It was not a fun experience, but it was certainly pretty cool.  I would probably do it again, but just one more time.  It's just another thing that you can do in the army but never outside.

That night we had another masa (hike).  These six kilometers were harder than the previous four kilometer masa, not because of the extra two kilometers, but because I was in front of the unlucky guy who had to carry the twenty or so liters of water on his back.  He was struggling.  The entire three kilometers on the way back, I told him to hold onto the back of my combat vest for support.  I was practically carrying him the entire way.  But he's a trooper and made it through.  For completing the masa, everyone in my plugah received watch covers with our draft, plugah and Tzanchanim logo on it.  It's one of the pieces of swag every soldier looks forward to receiving to prove he's less and less of a rookie; it indicates experience.

Thursday and Friday were two very forgettable days doing kitchen duty or practicing marching for hours.  But again Friday night came and the formalities between soldiers and commanders went.  After services and before dinner, our plugah, as usual, formed a chet outside the dining hall, getting ready to go in.  Some guys started singing what has become our plugah's anthem: כל העולם כולו/Kol Ha'olam Kulo/The Whole Wide World.  (Please, click here to hear it.)  This is one of my favorite songs: it's short, simple, and has a great message:

כל העולם כולו         Kol ha'olam kulo               The whole world
גשר צר מאוד           Gesher tzar me'od             is a very narrow bridge

והעיקר                  Veha'ikar                         And the main thing to recall
לא לפחד כלל           Lo lefached klal                is not to be afraid at all

And people get riled up when they sing it (click here).  This time, we start singing and before we know the commanders are egging us on and have brought out a Tzanchanim flag and they give me an Israeli one.  And we're all jumping up and down in a huge dog pile, like a football team getting pumped up before a game.  The scene is a crazy frenzy.  Another gdud comes by, and we go back and forth, shouting all our songs at each other.  A friend picks me up on his shoulders and I'm waving the Israeli flag furiously back and forth, shouting at the top of my lungs words I don't know to a song I've never heard.  It was a great time.  Finally, a pep rally that means something.

Shabbat came and went.  And then a hell storm came, and didn't leave for five days.

All day Sunday was spent preparing for the upcoming week in the field.  That evening, the entire plugah gathered in a large chet to be inspected by the MemPay (company Commander).  He came around and would speak a few words to a couple soldiers.  He stopped when he saw me and asked how everything was.  I replied 'it's all good, but I can't feel my left arm.'  And that was certainly true: the bag's straps are bly (ruined) so they don't hang on the shoulders properly, thus putting undue pressure where the padding ends, and cutting off circulation.  Within minutes of putting the bag on my back, I couldn't feel my arm.  The MemPay moved on, spoke a few words to the entire plugah, emphasizing the difficulty of the week ahead, and offering encouragement to each soldier.

So, what exactly is shavuah sadehoute (week in the field)?  It is...

• carrying over 45kg of weight on your back for kilometers at a time
• not changing uniforms for the entire week, and never taking your boots off except to change your socks one time
• after wearing your combat vest every minute of every day, even to sleep, having it start to feel constricting 
• being woken up after sleeping for ten minutes by rifle fire and your commanders screaming at you to get your packs ready to leave camp and hike to a random spot on a mountain, dig yourself a hole, and sleep in it with three other guys
• getting the worst, coldest, most sleepless nights of sleep of your life
• trying to find a comfortable position to sleep in, even with the canteens in your combat vest digging into your kidneys
• using your helmet for a pillow, and shifting it's position every thirty seconds to make something that can stop a bullet a suitable substitute for a soft pillow (I feel a link is necessary here, to a book I read when I was younger about a Marine's experience in the Pacific during WWII, from which I took the title for this post)
• not taking your contacts out from Sunday night to Thursday night, not brushing your teeth and certainly not showering
• being able to identify the six or seven different types of foliage of the Judean Desert by how much pain they inflict on your body when you crawl through or over them
• having foreign bugs crawling over your clothes and packs, and starting to say 'hi' to them
• suddenly appreciating the thick leather of your boots when dozens of thorns penetrate the soft fabric of your running shoes as you go for a 4k run, the last 2k carrying someone on a stretcher
• crawling 200 meters up a mountain to get to your breakfast
• realizing that nighttime crawling is better than crawling during the day because at night you can't see the rocks, thorns, spikes, roots, depressions, inclines that will hurt you, make you cut, bleed and bruise 
• learning different troop formations while on patrol, learning hand signals, how to conceal one's self, how to build a firing post, how to capture a hill, how to cross a road, how to determine your direction...all in Hebrew
• suddenly fearing the sight of your Sammel because you know he will make you do things you don't want to do, like crawl for hours up and down a mountain
• having a friend tell you that his machlekah's Mefakeds laughed at my citah for how hard my Mefaked was making us work compared to the rest of the plugah
• learning how to operate at night, with strict silence observance, donning camoflauge face paint, keeping tighter formations
• fourteen people getting ten to twelve minutes to ration food from a box, with always four people on guard duty
• being paired up with another soldier so you share a personal bag, sleep together, and if one went off to relieve himself, the other had to follow
• hiking kilometers a day, sometimes just for the sake of hiking, going up mountains and down mountains
• learning how to handle hiking with heavy load on your back, learning to cope with weight, learning to put the pain and discomfort out of your mind and focus on something, anything, maybe the mission, the country/desert, a song lyric, trying to grasp how it is you came to be doing this, anything
• after being asked where would be be right now if you weren't here, responding, 'איפושו יש בירות קרות ובחורות יפות/Anywhere there's cold beer and beautiful girls'
• being conditioned to the point that whenever a Commander picks up a stone, you automatically spring from the lulled slumber you've drifted off to into a crouched position, ready to sprint if he tosses the rock and shouts "'Aza" to mimic a grenade
• learning to pick up your wounded buddy from the ground and carry him up a mountain, which, let me tell you, you won't be able to do your first dozen times
• being on a patrol or hike, and ordered to jump into schiva (prone) position, try to find a comfortable place for your elbows amid the thorns, reorganizing rocks so they don't stab you in the groin, stay there for fifteen minutes, then get back up, all with over 40kg of weight on your back
• being outside, in the beautiful land of my people, with my military gear, praying with other soldiers
• always sweating, constantly, and consequently being freezing at night, but knowing that at any given hour, you will be doing physical work again that'll get your body temperature back up
• trying to climb a mountain with your partner during the day to steal a Commander's hat, or at night to grab a stick light; doing it stealthily, crawling slowly, not attracting attention
• laughing when your Commander tells you on the last night at 8:30 to go to sleep, knowing that it's crap and he will 'unexpectedly' wake you up within minutes, which happens and you have to carry all the citah's gear, hike a few kilometers, and gather with the rest of the plugah for the beginning of a physical test on what we learned during the week
• waiting almost two hours because we are the last numbered citah in the plugah, grabbing some shut-eye, and then starting to hike at 2:00 in the morning
• two hours of constant physical work: crawling, trying to navigate walking up, down and across steep mountain sides, only seeing dark and light shades, not knowing what you are stepping on, not caring, constantly twisting your ankles, keeping your gun cradled in your arms high up on your chest, which provides the best support for your back with the heavy weight, but does not provide the best balance
• sprinting the last few hundred meters as you walk into the base at 3:00 in the morning, full of energy and excitement for completing the test
• taking off all the gear, resting, stretching, being given an hour's free time before bed
• stripping down and getting in line for the shower when all of the Sammels and Mefakeds in the plugah suddenly run crazy all over the building, gas masks on their hands, brandishing sticks, beating walls, poles, beds, people, tell us to get the hell out of the bathrooms, the bedrooms, get our gear on and be downstairs with our masks
• wearing the masks and carrying the stretcher with sandbags to the gate of the base, then hiking back into the field, and up into some woods behind the base, finishing there at 5:15 to sleep as a citah under the pine trees
• waking up at 6:00 for morning prayer, eating breakfast, falling into an uncomfortable sleep for a few hours, then eating lunch and returning to base at 2:00 in the afternoon, finally ending the week

But our work didn't end.  All I wanted to do at that point was take off my clothes and jump into a nice long, cool shower.  That wouldn't happen for another five hours.  Over that period, we had to organize all our equipment, return items, take stock of what we lost, what's broken, put everything away properly in our lockers and bags, thoroughly clean our guns (even though we didn't shoot even one bullet), have our feet, legs and arms inspected by a doctor, and, of course, each citah in the plugah went on a four kilometer jog around the base.  (I mean, why not, right?  It's not like we were just on our feet for 20 hours a head the past five days.)  Finally, we were given an hour to calm down, shower and change.

Throughout the week, I was constantly pulling tiny thorns, some no longer than a few centimeters, out of my clothing.  I could feel them scraping against my body, against my arms, my elbows, back, legs, ankles, some even poked through my boxers!  Every time we sat down in the field or jumped into schiva, whenever we stood up, we would quickly brush off any twigs or anything in our uniforms and equipment.  During our lessons, I would found myself absentmindedly feeling around my clothing and my skin for thorns.  Not until I got into the shower did I realize how much damage the week had done to my body.  I found bruises high up on my legs, a line of cuts around my ankles where the boots end, splinters galore on my palms, and raised welts from thorns or bug bites all over my legs and arms.

Fortunately, I didn't have any serious problems during the week.  My feet weren't overly cut up; some people had popped blisters, skin peeling on their heels or Achilles' tendons, or other serious issues.  About halfway through the week, standing up and sitting down started to become a struggle.  Late Wednesday, my feet began to let me know they didn't want to keep moving.  On Thursday, simply moving any part of my body brought pain and discomfort.

After the jog and shower, my citah gathered to discuss the week in a sort of end-of-the-week therapeutic review session.  Then we had a half hour before dinner.  What better to do than let the Sammel have his way with us and make us do countless pushups.  But it was ok, but the dinner experience was nothing short of spectacular.

Special for my plugah, our Rassap (a position under the Rassar [Master Sergeant]) had managed to host a nice meal outside our building.  There were long tables with red and white table cloths.  It was like a Shabbat meal, with better-than-usual food: hummus, pitah, different kinds of meat, juice and pop.  Oh, and did I have pop.  For some reason, I was absolutely craving the sugar and carbonation; I easily drank at least a liter.  And then, just like on Shabbat, we started singing our gdud's songs.  Quickly, one of the commanders rushed in to shut us up.  "Stop that singing!" he yelled at us with a serious face.  "What do you think you are doing?  If you are going to sing, I want the entire base to hear you!"  We laughed and gladly shouted at the top of our lungs.  Again we sang Kol Ha'olam Kulo, among other anthems, which I am still learning.  It was a great end to the week!

This was certainly a very trying week.  It was the hardest in Tzanchanim, the hardest in the army, and probably the hardest in my life.  I learned a lot of things, but perhaps the most important weren't about where to stand in formation, or how to capture a hill, or how to stay quiet at night.  Yes those are all very critical, but I can and will learn them anyway; in fact, they are all things I can learn in a classroom.  Instead, what I gained most from this week was a better sense of what my body is capable of: how much weight I can carry, how I can press on when I don't want to, how I can split hikes up into ups and downs of mountains.

There were plenty of times when I was like: I don't know why I'm not sitting comfortably in some library right now study for a law school final exam.  But you don't focus on that.  You focus on the guy in front of you and the mission at hand.  I'm no longer fearful that my back won't be able to handle over 100lbs of weight.  Suddenly, the masas of the future, with its increased distance, don't seem as daunting.  I can do this.

It quickly became mentally difficult to constantly wear my combat vest, constantly sweat, constantly be in discomfort from the heat or the cool evenings.  But there were those times during dusk, when the sun was setting and the temperature cooled, the light was less glaring and you could look at a mountain top and see the silhouette of Israeli soldiers practicing formations, just like in the propaganda pictures and videos you've seen dozens of times.  Then you think that those same soldiers are looking back at you and thinking the same thing about you and your group of guys.  And the world makes sense.