How & Why

One year.  Really, at this point, I have fifty-one weeks left in my IDF service.  At times, it doesn't seem like a lot.  But then again, I've only done six months and have a lot more training and difficult experiences ahead.  What makes it also seem long is the fact that because six months/one year is a benchmark, it stays in my head and my friends and I talk about it more, which makes time go slower.  It's a terrible cycle.

Every country has its place it would like to hide from the world; a location it is either ashamed of or has recognized that location as the pit of all evil.  Chicago has 333 West 35th Street (US Cellular Field), the US has....New Jersey (?), the world has Afghanistan, Iran, Joseph Conrad thought the Congo, others?  And Israel has Machanah Natan, a place in Beer Sheva where the units that train in the south gather on Sundays before buses transport us to our respective bases.  In the holiest land, it is the unholiest place.  Nobody likes being there.  Sundays have become very hard; battling to wake up and find the will to put on your uniform to start a long week or two or three; impossible to find a seat on the train to Beer Sheva.  It's amazing: there are so many people (mainly soldiers) on that train, yet it is the quietest ride the entire week.

All of these things make Sunday mornings very difficult.  On the bus ride from Machanah Natan to my base, I sat next to my friend Adam, a lone soldier from New Jersey.  He's in 202 with me but in a different machlekah (platoon).  We've become very close as the two lone soldiers who speak the least amount of Hebrew and consequently are equally lost and utterly confused at times.

We sat next to each other on the bus ride from Machanah Natan to our base.  Our conversations of late have revolved a lot around the passage of time and how much we have left in our service.  The thirty minute ride got me pretty depressed as we talked about our hard week ahead, wanting to see home and family and friends, thinking about when we're going to take our month off, frustrated with the continued pettiness of the things we do in tironut, and everything else at once.  It was one of those times, even sitting comfortably on an air-conditioned bus, that I needed a little pick-me-up and remember why I'm here.

That week was "pakal" week.  A pakal is the soldier's assignment or specialty.  To this point, we've all trained with our M16s, but in combat, not everyone has the same role or responsibility.  For example, each citah (squad) needs to have unit commanders, sharpshooters, grenade launchers, light machine gun, anti-tank rockets, medic, communication, etc.  What assignment did I get?  מא''ג the MAG, a machine gun with some serious kick-ass power.

Developed by FN, a Belgian company, in the 1950s, it came to Israel in the 1970s and in 1994 Israel started to produce it's own design of the machine gun.  Each citah used to have a MAG, but in 1996, the Negev, a light machine gun, replaced it and now there is one MAG per machlekah.  Two people are assigned to the gun; the guy who shoots it and his partner who carries extra equipment, including a stand.

And this gun, for a mobile weapon, is powerful.  (A soldier on my kibbutz works on a tank and he says he fires this gun mounted on the tank.  I carry it around.)  It weighs 10.85kg and shoots a 7.62mm caliber bullet (compared to the 5.56mm of the M16 and the Negev).  In theory, it can rattle off between 600-1100 bullets/minute, but in reality you only shoot 60-120 bullets/minute.  In the prone position, I can accurately kill up to 600 meters away and hit a truck 800 meters away.  With the stand, the distances lengthen to 800 and 1200 meters, respectively.  And this gun has one firing setting: automatic.  Mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm (toasty).  The first time I pulled back on the trigger, I was completely amazed by how relatively smooth the gun fires.  I expected a lot of recoil and to struggle to keep the barrel pointed at the target.  Instead, even shooting in bursts of three or four, with a little strength, it was pretty easy to shoot within a half meter of the target, even at distances of 100, 200 or 300 meters.  Of course, if you lost concentration, it was not uncommon for every few bursts to find a stray bullet or two land wildly past the target.  Some guys weren't strong enough to keep the gun steady and numerous rounds would hit halfway up the hill at the end of the range.  So long as you have your partner telling you to keep your barrel down or angle it up, you hold it steady, and shoot in bursts, then you have a powerful weapon in your hands.  As my friend in Golani wrote on his blog, "shooting a MAG is like nothing else: the sound, the power...this weapon  DESTROYS things.  DESTROYS.  People, tanks, hummers, puppies, rainbows, even God himself wouldn't $%#@ with a Magist."  Thanks Mike, I couldn't say it better myself.


So what did we do all week?  Carry weight and shoot.  Carried lots of weight and shot a lot.  The Magist has to be the guy in the machlekah that provides covering fire and destroys an area for the rest of the platoon to enter.  He carries a lot of bullets, there's two soldiers per gun, and the weapon itself is heavy.  So, to break us into this gun, the Mefaked (commander) who was in charge of the Magists all week had us carrying targets, equipment, bullets, everything to and from the shooting range, a distance of at least a kilometer and a half.  Monday was one of the hardest days of my life.  The night before, we were in class learning everything about the gun.  Monday was our first day actually using the weapon.  We sprinted with it, crawled with it, jumped over walls, held it over our heads, practiced the different firing positions, and more.  It was tough.

After that first day, I honestly thought it was going to be the longest week of my life.  Especially after Sunday, my mental fortitude wasn't so strong.  But the next few days weren't as bad.  There were certainly hard moments; like Tuesday evening when it took us two hours to clean up the shooting range and haul everything back to storage.  It would've been so simple to have a truck help us out, but no, we're Magists, we need to carry the weight.  It was, in short, a hellish time.

But there were definitely cool moments.  Shooting the gun is awesome.  Also, we had night firing exercises where the shooter wouldn't be able to see anything (because, obviously, it's dark out) but his partner had night vision goggles on and would turn on the laser attached to the gun to see the target downfield, then tell him to fire.  With the gun on the stand, it was easy to keep it steady.  The belt had about fifteen bullets, firing in bursts of two or three, with maybe one bullet reversed to create a problem that needs to be fixed.  The guy with the night vision could see the bullets hitting the target, the shooter would just see sparks fly 300 meters away.  Pretty awesome.

The whole week, we were looking forward (with dread, apprehension, excitement, a mix?) to the 300 meter crawl.  It's something the Magists and Negevists have to do.  Crawl 300 meters with their weapon.  Why?  Why not.  Seventeen minutes and thirty seconds later I was done.  How do you crawl with a nearly twenty-five pound weapon, who's bipod legs always get stuck on rocks or foliage?  You grab it by the barrel and throw it as far as you can (maybe ten feet) then crawl to it.  Fun.  My time almost beat the base's record of seventeen minutes.  But there were two other guys who were faster than me.  No big deal.

The best part of the week came right before the crawl.  The eight of us came out to the fifty meter line and were handed a belt of about fifty or sixty rounds.  The instructions?  "Don't let go of the trigger."  We didn't have enough working MAGs left so we shot in two rounds.  I was the last guy to shoot.  The MemMem (platoon commander) in charge of us waited until I had loaded the belt into the gun and stood up.  "MAG mayuchan!" (MAG ready)  "MAG mayuchan!" I shouted responsively.  "Aish!" (Fire)  I lined up the barrel with the 100 meter targets, steadied my arms, and "Aaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiisssssssshhhhhh!"  Within ten seconds, the bullets had completely emptied out. I tore up that target, Rambo style.

At the end of the week, I was told that in the competition between me and three other guys in my machlekah, I was chosen to carry the MAG.  It's an honor of sorts.  It's a very important weapon, but also very difficult because of the weight that I'll be carrying on weeks in the field, masas (hikes) of thirty, forty, fifty kilometers, and it already puts stress and pressure on my back.  I'll either come out of this very strong or strong and a little injured.

I had requested a Yom Siddurim for that Thursday and got it.  I left in the morning, went to Tel Aviv to take care of some personal issues, get away from the rough week, and re-energize a bit before going back to close Shabbat.

----------

"Those who do not know the past are doomed to repeat it." -George Santayana

Isn't that a haunting quote?  It makes you realize how easy it is, as an individual and as a people, to become trapped in an endless cycle.  If you don't learn your history, you will take the same steps as before and stunt, if not completely nullify, any chance of progress.  Then what's the point?  Why is capitalism better than communism?  Because it creates the conditions for human progress.  Why is the United States, Israel and a few other Western, capitalistic, democratically-inclined countries better than every other nation?  Because they create the best environment for individual and social progress.

The IDF takes this idea to heart and has each soldier learn about Israel's history during tironut (basic training).  I've written before about visiting Ammunition Hill, the City of David, and retracing the retaking of Jerusalem during the Six Day War.  While at Mikveh, we went to Yad Vashem, Har Herzl and Gush Etzion.  This past week was another time for cultural education and understanding.  And it was a great week.  We left base Sunday morning and drove to a place just outside Jerusalem, where we stayed until Thursday.  We were dressed in our Aleph uniforms all week.  We learned in classes.  We had an hour of exercise each day.  Compared to the previous week, it was glorious.

So what did we discuss and learn?  A variety of topics about Israel's culture, social identity, and history.  What does it mean to be Israeli?  (I used to think that it'll take a long time for me to feel like an Israeli and really have a strong connection [aside from my Jewish identity] to the State of Israel.  Then this week I just wizened up and thought: I pledged to put myself in danger to protect this country.  How can I feel nothing but the strongest connection?)  How does Israel reconcile its Jewish identity with being a democratic state?  What is the Israeli narrative?

We also discussed ethics in combat.  We watched videos, some based on truth, some fabricated, on what would you do in different situations.  How would you respond?  A lot of this has to do with human rights.  The word for respect in Hebrew is כבוד kavod.  Our MemMem actually taught us that kavod has three different meanings in English: respect, honor and dignity.  I thought that that was really interesting, how he would use English to help explain the idea of human rights in Hebrew.  An intensive discussion followed this, as was the case most of the week, and, with the debates, I quickly became lost.  My Hebrew is improving, but certainly not enough to keep up with a bunch of energized, shouting Israelis.  As the "resident university grad" with a degree in history and political science, the commanders often asked me to expound on things they would say about the history of Israel or the Arab states.  This was in part to keep me involved in what was going on and also for more background information.  It was nice that my degree is recognized but also extremely frustrating that I can't explain things as well in Hebrew.  One day, we started off with what the word "democracy" means.  A commander who was helping translate for me told me to speak up because I studied this.  True, while I can give everyone hours long lesson on what democracy is, I was completely hopeless in this setting.  Frustrating.

Then on Thursday we visited Kastel, an area outside Jerusalem that has a storied history with battles from before the War of Independence, Yad Vashem and Har Hertzl.  We were let go in the late afternoon for a chamshush (Yom Chamishi [Thursday] and Yom Shishi [Friday]), which is always great.  I went to the central bus station in Jerusalem to take a bus back to Tel Aviv, but was unable to because there was a suspicious package on the top level by the buses and everyone was evacuated.  While it turned out to be harmless, it's just another example of the reality of living here.  Last night, a soldier in my unit invited me to have dinner with him and his family.  It was really nice and I had a great meal with an Israeli family.  Went to the beach yesterday and today.  David, Amy and the kids left for a two month vacation in Europe and America so I will finally be without any family connections here.

----------

Despite the difficulty of each week, I always look forward to that train ride back home, but not for the same reasons from when I was at Mikveh Alon.  Instead, I look forward to looking clean and awesome in my Aleph uniform with my gun hanging over my shoulder, but feeling beat up, cut up and bruised.  A great sense of accomplishment comes over me as I play back through my head all that I had done that week.  My hands are different than what they looked like even three months ago.  I have several semi-permanent cuts and scars on them; they're calloused and sun-burnt.  Pain and discomfort is temporary.  A sense of pride and accomplishment is forever.

From beneath the cows to above the clouds

I dropped to the ground, covering my head with my hands as my unit began to count the seconds until the light stick "grenade" would explode. The mefakedets were screaming to get down and lie still. After our counting, the MemMem yelled to start crawling, forward towards the front of the two lines. It was a free-for-all; if you were faster than the guy ahead of you, you tried to maneuver around him without having his boots kick you in the face. You didn't pay attention to what you were crawling over (mud, rocks, cow shit); you just focus on getting to the front as fast as possible, ignoring the pounding of your heart, muscles screaming for relief, and stones cutting into your knees. What were we doing in the middle of the night, slogging through a heavily muddied path, through cow fields, carried people on stretchers? It's called a 'masa', a hike led by a commander intended to practice and simulate patrols, complete with springing into different firing positions, shouting orders, and running. The night was cloudy and I had no idea if I was about to step onto somewhat solid ground or plunge my boot into a foot of water. I had my head down, looking at the guy's boots in front of me. I knew if we were about to sprint based on the sound of the soldiers ahead of me; the quickened pace sounded like an oncoming rush of water. In total, we hiked about six or eight kilometers. That's not significant distance by any stretch of the imagination, but what made it difficult were the conditions. And personally, I had also just completed a two hour shmirah shift.

As I mentioned in my last post, I was going to spend two straight weeks on base. It was time for my plugot to do shmirah, or guard duty. After a month with no guns, we went to the armory on Tuesday to receive our weapons. For the next week, the guns were not to leave our side. What's more, we had to always have our combat vests on, complete with two filled canteens and three magazines, each with twenty-nine rounds. Yes, I was packin' heat all week: eighty-seven 5.56 caliber bullets, ready to be locked and loaded if I noticed something suspicious while on guard duty. Every day, the MemMem spoke to my machlekah about guard duty: protocols, tips, sanctions, etc. In total, I pulled six, two-hour guard shifts. Twice I was the solo guard for the armory, another two times I was by myself at a post overlooking a valley, and another two times I was with another soldier at the "bunker", an isolated location on top of another hill, protecting Mikveh Alon's ammunition cache. Shmirah is good and bad. At some times I feel very proud to be protecting something, even if it is only Mikveh Alon (I swear, if Israel's enemies ever find it necessary to launch an assault on Mikveh, then Israel is already lost). It is also probably the only opportunity to be alone and have time to think. But the bunker is a great place, too. Its isolation makes it easy to see if a commander is coming to check on you, but, as in my case, I was paired with Russians both times and for two hours we spoke Hebrew. Shmirah, in general, is boring. It's also a huge pain in the @$$ getting up at 3:30, after four hours of sleep, to be ready for guard duty from 4-6 in the morning. After one of these shifts, I got back to my room at 6:15, we were to get up at 7:15. I just took off my vest, laid my gun down on my bed, sat down, leaning against the wall, and closed my eyes for an hour.

So what's the protocol if someone suspicious shows up at our guard post? If we don't recognize the person, we first ask, in Hebrew, "who is it?" If there's no response, or the individual appears to be a threat (pulls a weapon, starts running towards you, or, frankly, is Arab), we shout "stop!" in every language we know. They taught us how to stay "Stop or I'll shoot" in Arabic. The next step is to cock our gun twice, although without it loaded. Hopefully, the sound itself will frighten the individual. If that doesn't work, then we can load our guns with a magazine. Then we're allowed to shoot two warning shots into the air. If still that doesn't work, then we can shoot the threat in the legs. Thankfully, I never saw anyone I didn't know and never had to go through those steps.

For the two hour shift, we're only allowed to sit for the last ten minutes of each hour. The rest of the time I either stand in place or pace back and forth, counting the number of tiles on the ground, cows in the fields, or street lights in nearby towns. It is an automatic Shabbat (meaning you stay on base for the weekend) if you're caught sleeping, sitting, smoking, eating, or drinking (anything but water) during your shift. A friend had given me a candy bar before my first shift when I was solo at the armory. After the first hour I was bored of pacing back and forth and was starting to get really tired, so I made it a challenge to secretly open the candy bar with one hand in my pocket and break off small bites. The whole operation took a good twenty-five minutes. Quality use of time.

Throughout the day we had our normal Hebrew classes. Soldiers would leave in the middle of the day to report for shmirah duty. That's why we had to have our vests on at all times. One afternoon, after our MemMem gave us our daily shmirah briefing, the siren sounded. If that happens, we have exactly seven minutes to get from wherever we are (even if we're sleeping) to a predesignated spot and form a chet with the machlekah. After the formation, with our helmets on and canteens filled, we were told to run to the perimeter of the base. We spring to our designated spot, shouting war cries and running over people who are too slow; our excitement in pretending to be doing something important is evident. I run to some brush and lay down in prone position, aiming my gun at some random things in the distance. The drill was fun, if pointless. We were told we did a good job, and that was it.

The day after our nighttime masa, we had a competition between the nine tzevets in the plugot. This was one of the highlights of the week. First we had a "jeep" run: one soldier wrapped his arms around two others and draped his legs over the shoulders of a third. We sprinted about fifty meters, then had to answer a question in Hebrew from a mefakedet. Then we were to run to the next location around a bend. We started at a full on sprint, then realized it was a good quarter mile away. Most of us made it huffing and puffing. After another question, we had to crawl fifty meters over hard pavement, littered with rocks. I still have scabs on my hands, two weeks later, from the cuts. People's knees were bruised for days. Crawling isn't supposed to be as "bloody" as it was for us, but because we have no training, we just do whatever it takes to get to the finish line. Then we had to consume a can of beans, write "tzevet 3" with sticks, and spring to the flag for the final leg. In total, the competition was about twelve minutes, but it was fun. I always enjoy getting my blood pumping with competition and sport. We haven't had much of it over the past two months, so this was really enjoyable.

Finally, on Tuesday morning of the second week, we woke up at 2:30 AM for the masa of the MemPay, the officer in charge of the whole plugot. This turned out to be the easiest thing. We were bused about forty-five minutes to a random spot in the road, formed our two lines, and starting marching....on the road. In total, we walked about two kilometers, sometimes running, but never dropping down to a firing position and never crawling. At the end, we finished on top of a mountain overlooking the Kinneret, a lake in the north and Israel's main source of freshwater. The MemPay talked about the area, we grabbed some photos, then had a ceremony in the parking lot with the higher ups of the base present. It was nice, but unnecessary to wake up that early just to see the sunrise.

At the beginning of the two weeks, I was excited to do shmirah and spend my first Shabbat on base. A lot of guys were apprehensive about the two weeks without a break. The truth is, during kravi service, it is common to spend two to three weeks at a time on base. And Shabbat was fun. We had a great Friday night meal, and Saturday (aside from waking up at four for shmirah) was a lazy day. No one could order us to do anything. If we wanted to sleep, we could. If we wanted to exercise, it was no problem. Some people watched movies on their iPods, I read a book ("Brotherhood of Warriors" by Aaron Cohen, it's about Cohen's experience as an American in the IDF [sound familiar] in the mid-90s when he was a part of Duvdevan, an elite unit charged with infiltrating the West Bank), or we just talked about nothing. When Sunday and Monday rolled around, I felt completely at ease on base, as if we had not already spent seven or eight days there. It became routine. So long as you're with your friends, life becomes a whole lot easier.

Finally, after our week of shmirah ended, we left our base to go to Jerusalem. On Wednesday, we boarded a bus and drove to Har Hertzl, Israel's Arlington Cemetery. I was there a year ago on Birthright, but this time was completely different for me. I looked at the graves and the most off-putting thing about the place, is that most of the soldiers who lay forever on that hillside were between 18 and 23 years of age. When I say most, I mean if there's a row of ten graves, seven will be in their late teens or early twenties. One guy was born three weeks before me and was killed in action in 2006 in Lebanon. I remember a year ago thinking about the young age of the soldiers. I now thought....well, I'll keep that to myself.

Next we went to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum. Again, this was my third time within a year. But it's always an important place to go to if in Israel. If you haven't been to a Holocaust museum, please find one to visit. There's a great one in Washington, DC, and one recently opened near my town in northern Chicago. Yad Vashem, and my tour guide, really hammered home the point that the Nazis made the Jews out to be non-human, something aside from humanity. I could talk for hours about the museum and the Holocaust, but suffice it to say, as I've mentioned before, it reinvigorates me with a renewed sense of purpose in my service.

Afterwards, we went to Gush Etzion, an area in the Judean hills in the West Bank. The story behind Gush Etzion, briefly, is this: during the aliyahs of the early 20th century, many Jews wanted to settle this land that is believed to have been a passageway for Abraham and Isaac before they reached Mt. Moriah for the binding; King David slew Goliath in these hills; and other biblical stories. The climate was difficult, the soil rocky, and the surrounding people hostile. During the War of Independence, one day before the State of Israel was created, all the defenders of Gush Etzion were massacred by the Jordanian legions. The children of these Jews, having been evacuated weeks earlier, grew up and vowed to one day resettle the land. That opportunity came in 1967 when Israel reclaimed control of Judea and Samaria. Now, there are a few thriving communities in the area and a yeshiva for the study of Torah. It is a great testament to the will of the Jewish people to reclaim their land, a story of yearning and a hope fulfilled.

The next day, we were given a "tour" of Jerusalem's Old City, courtesy of our mefakedets. Hardy the best tour of anything I've ever received. I've lost a lot of respect for my mefakedet. At the yeshiva, my tzevet sat in a chet and our mefakedet asked us about our day, what we thought of Har Hertzl, Yad Vashem, Gush Etzion, etc. I told them, point-blank, "I feel like I'm on Birthright" not in the freakin' IDF. I'm sorry, but I don't really care to talk about what it was like to see twenty year olds buried in the ground with an eighteen year old girl who doesn't know anything about me, what I'm thinking, or who I am. What a load of crap this place and these people can be at times.

But on a high note, we were given time to ourselves at the Kotel, the Western Wall. And as the sun was setting, my entire plugot formed a big chet on the plaza in front of the Wall. We're about 100 soldiers, plus thirty or so commanders; needless to say, we took up a considerable area. We're standing with our berets on, at attention in formation, tourists stopping to take pictures or video, wondering what was going on. We all shout responsively in unison at the appropriate times, creating a small, thunderous echo off the surrounding buildings. The MemPay spoke some words, which I couldn't hear, but at the end of the ceremony, we were each given a military-issued Tanach, a book of the Torah, Prophets and Writings, essentially Judaism's entire Written Law. And its pretty awesome because it has the IDF insignia on its cover. This is just another example how I can be face-down, crawling through cow droppings one day, and standing in formation, in front of the eyes of Jerusalem, receiving an IDF edition Tanach.

Finally, that night, I ate dinner with another soldier with a family who lived in the area. Before we left base, the HaSammelot asked us who would want to eat dinner with a family who wants to get to know lone soldiers for Thursday night. I volunteered, and it was great. I got a great meal, spoke Hebrew the whole time, and now have some people who were genuinely interested in helping make my life here easier. Israelis can be incredible people.

A lot happened over the past two weeks. I'll leave the heavy thoughts, feelings, and emotions for next week. I'll just say that now it's getting to crunch time to deciding whether I want to go to the Tzanchanim gibbush, try to get into Nahal with my medical profile, or go to Totchanim (Artillery). The HaSammelot gave us a presentation about each of these units before we went to Jerusalem. I think we're going to learn more this week, but that is still to be determined. And I feel completely out of world events. Apparently the Arab world is on fire. We'll see what that means for Israel in the comings weeks. 'Til next time, you stay classy!

PS- if you want to get a quick look into what my life is like, check this out:http://www.jpost.com/VideoArticles/Video/Article.aspx?id=207527