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.
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"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.
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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.
