And so it was that the stinking pile of mud I had briefly visited during Field Week became my home for the next 3 months of my training. It was late October when we arrived and though the days were still warm during the nights one could feel the pinch of an approaching winter. We were assembled in the same gym that we had slept in the night Field Week came to an end so that the the officer in command of the base could come and address us. He was a short man at 5”6 and known to be a strict disciplinarian, his boots were polished until they reflected like mirrors and his red beret sat ramrod straight on his shoulder as if it had been ironed moments before he stepped into the room.
He let us know what we were in for while we were there but Yuval, Haim and I weren’t really listening, we were too excited that we had moved on from boot camp, the three of us whispered all of the way through the briefing about what was really to come next. I reasoned that if there was anything else that I really needed to know I could just ask Yuval. His nickname ‘Baby’ had already stuck to him earlier in boot camp and it was the only name I used for him from that moment on. He leaned over Haim to whisper to me “Parachute course in a month!!” He couldn’t conceal his grin as he whispered to me and I couldn’t conceal my excitement when I heard him. Parachute course meant silver jump wings, it meant that everyone around me would know that they were looking at a paratrooper! When a soldier starts his army service he is presented with an ugly, snot coloured beret that denotes to the rest of the world that he is merely a soldier in training, who hasn't earned the right to enter into a unit yet. I hated that beret and the 3 more months of training I would have to endure before earning the crimson paratrooper’s beret couldn't go by fast enough as far as I was concerned.
Our new commanders hovered over us casting an irritated eye in the direction of our whispers but unwilling to interrupt the base commander to tell us to shut up. My new squad leader was also called Marc, his family had made aliyah from Russia as soon as they could and had settled in Haifa. He had begun his army career in Israel's equivalent of the Navy SEALS but had been kicked out and had chosen to come to the Orev. It was good to have him there and during our one on one interview he told me that when he started his army service he hadn’t spoken a word of Hebrew either. Mine was starting to come along though, once I even found myself singing a song in Hebrew, I promptly stopped when a soldier on my team called Elad noticed and pointed everyone’s attention to it before endlessly begging me to sing the song again and again so that he could laugh at the way it sounded in my English accent.
The base was every bit as bad as my first impressions had told me it would be. This time we were all crammed into one 10 man tent, luxuries such as lockers were a thing of the past as there was barely enough room for all of the metal beds that they gave us and certainly no room for anything else, we put our bags under the beds and endured feeling them sticking into our backs at night. I need not have worried we weren’t to spend much time there. Our first night was spent on the base, the next night we had equipment on our backs, a stretcher loaded with boxes of bullets open and were on our way into the same dried up river beds and rocky hills that had made Field Week such a memorable experience.
The emphasis was no longer on shooting, now it was all about working together as a team, we spent our days and nights planning and executing assaults on various hills and then spending time carrying the stretcher with a ‘wounded’ member of the team around. As a benefit of finishing boot camp we were allowed to call our officer by his name; though he insisted we call him only by his last name; Green.
After week one we were told that the week was going to finish with a squad test, each of the two squads worked alone and we practised all the manoeuvres we had learnt over the week. One by one we demonstrated moving across open ground in the correct way, attacking an objective and moving as small groups of four providing mutual cover all the way. We moved on and on to various stations that were strung a couple of kilometres apart. On the way a gas attack was simulated and various instructors appeared and threw riot gas grenades at us. Our gas masks were securely fitted into our pouches on our backs and we had long since learned that the only way to get at them in time to survive that noxious gas was to run to the person in front of us and take their mask out for them. Over the past weeks we had experienced a lot of these gas grenade attacks at the hands of our commanders and we were well versed in doing it quickly.
The grenades were black balls a little bigger than baseballs and just as heavy. The gas was green and thick it didn’t just make you shed tears but irritated the skin and if it was breathed in it caused instant pain in the lungs. It also stuck to anything that was nearby when it escaped from it’s small, black prison including cans of food, water bottles, weapons just waiting for some unsuspecting soldier to get the irritant on his skin.
The first time we were exposed to it was in a tent during boot camp. We were called in one by one wearing our gas masks, then told to take them off. When it came to my turn I was determined to holdout longer than anyone before me. I had watched each of my friends walk into that tent only to run out coughing and spluttering, their faces red and their hands glued to their eyes. I walked in with my gas mask on to find Green sitting alone in the tiny tent, the hiss of gas escaping from a small machine in the corner was distinctly unnerving. He looked eerie in his mask though I could just about make out his words when he told me to take off my gas mask and I could hardly see him when I did. He told me to count from one to ten, at ten I made the mistake of taking a breath, the instant pain in my lungs came as a shock and I started coughing, “GET OUT!!” he roared and I didn’t need any further encouragement. I could hear my friends laughing at my tear stained face as I escaped, just as I had laughed at their red, teary faces when they had run out. Another IDF rite of passage had been survived.
The gas masks protected you from the gas but only if you had them tightly strapped onto your face which meant that the clips dug themselves into your skull when you put your combat helmet back on. After more than a couple of minutes the pain was so intense that it was difficult to know whether the gas would be preferable to the feeling of clamps pushing into your skin. Mercifully we marched away from the gas towards the next stage of the test and were allowed to remove the masks. We moved from station to station each one about 500m apart, after a while I realised I was quite enjoying this ‘test’, in fact I had quite enjoyed all of our advanced training up to that point. It was much more fun to run at the targets shooting like in the movies than to set up the Sergeant’s shooting range every day. We lived in the field but it wasn’t that cold yet, I was used to going to the bathroom in a bush and quite frankly anything was preferable to the facilities back at the base. By the time we reached 2a.m. my squad was cruising through, we had done all that was asked of us and now we had finished what I assumed was the final test.
“Fall wounded”
The command was directed at Oran, though for a moment no one moved, the test was over why did Oran now have to fall down and pretend to be wounded? He was the biggest and heaviest of the none of us. "Have him on the stretcher in 10 seconds or I'll tell another person to go down and you'll have to carry him too" were Mark's softly spoken words. We scrambled to put him on the stretcher and have it in the air once Mark marched forward and we lumbered on behind him. We were on flat, level ground which makes all the difference when you have the weight of a six foot Moroccan and his machine gun resting on the stretcher you’re carrying.
Oran was the strongest out of the 18 of us, he lugged the machine gun around as though it was nothing, was constantly flouting the rules and wasn’t one to be woken up for guard duty roughly. He was a central part of the tzevet and we were all glad to have him with us I had once seen him take the end of a stretcher on his own, carry both handles and just stomp forward with the rest of the tzevet in tow. Now we were carrying him and it wasn’t easy. The soft ground tended to absorb my feet and threw up the familiar powdery dust while we marched. Thankfully we were starting to learn the proper army way to carry a stretcher which meant four people, one for each handle moving for 30 seconds before then moving forward to the next handle and then, after handing off to the soldier behind running back to the two lines that were faithfully following. The problem is that when there are four people carrying the stretcher you are only really getting a minute's respite before finding a stretcher handle on your shoulder once again. We struggled on. We moved over the dusty ground after our commander who was walking purposefully towards what appeared to be an increasingly large hulking rock that was somewhere off in the distance.
The rock was in fact a mountain that was twisted and jagged like the rocks that it was composed of, the summit somewhere far off above, from the base I couldn't see it. Mark stopped at the foot of it and we stopped behind him. As one we stared up at this terror instinctively knowing the task that lay before us. Mark took a drink and he looked at us blankly as we looked at him pleadingly. Begging with our eyes not to lead us up the mountain, begging him to tell us that we had done enough and that the night was over. He gave me the exact same look that Ran had given me during field week when we were trying to get out of the dry river bed with the stretcher. A look of cold, calculated disgust yet simultaneously utterly detached from me, I was mere irritation, a nothing, I didn't even have a red beret and he wasn't interested in silent pleas. I had never seen so much conveyed without words. That simple look hammered it home. Being a paratrooper wasn’t going to be easy.
Mark started up the thin trail towards the summit and we followed him. The night had already been tough but now it was going to reach a crescendo of evil. The path was blocked in places by large boulders and the stretcher had to be pushed, pulled, raised and lowered. There were times when we dropped the stretcher, complete with Oran attached, onto the rocks and had to run to pick him up again amidst his cries of pain. The path was barely passable for two people walking side by side but we had to make do as best we could, the higher we climbed the tighter the path became until there were periods where it disappeared altogether.
I suffered all of the way through, I suffered the agony in my limbs as I pulled and pushed, I suffered the agony in my mind from the shock of thinking that the night was over only to be confronted by the evil of the stretcher and the darkness of the mountain. The shock was made worse by the fact that every 10 minutes I was certain that we had struggled our way to the top only to find out that we had only reached a small plateau with the real summit still being far above out of sight.
Eventually I found myself at the front, all thoughts of switching under the stretcher every 30 were seconds long gone, I was screaming at the others to push as I pulled. A mixture of English and Hebrew swear words escaped my lips as did a couple of Arabic ones that I had picked up along the way. I remember hearing Elad chuckle behind me as he pushed at the other end and I asked myself "what people are these with me that they can laugh even as we go through all of this?" I shouted at him even more loudly and everyone started giggling. How were they laughing? How did they have it in them to laugh? I couldn’t understand it and I lacked the energy to try as we lurched onwards and upwards with that accursed stretcher ever higher, over the sharp rocks towards our goal.
Asaf was limping from twisting his leg though he didn’t say a word as he carried his Minimi machine gun and pushed next to Elad. What people are these that they don’t quit even when they are hurt? Eventually the real question hit me like a silver bullet; What kind of man am I that I came all this way to carry a stretcher up a mountain in search of a piece of red material and silver wings? What kind of man am I that I am only now finding out for the first time the power that I have inside, that I can urge these other men on even when I have almost nothing left myself?
And there on the mountain the me that was to earn the Red Beret was born.
It was the same mountain that generations of paratroopers had climbed for years, it was the mountain that built Paratroopers and it was only the first of many times that we would climb it. Each time I climbed over those rocks and made my way over that too small pathway that marked the start of the ascent I remembered the first time, the time that I did something special, the time I found my voice and really my place in the team.
We finished after the sun had come up, the other half of the tzevet arrived just after us, upon reaching the summit we were immediately told that a helicopter was on the way in to pick up our ‘casualties’ and that we had to find cover while we waited for them. I crouched down behind a rock and covered the way we had come. My sweat soaked body shivered in the dawn as I battled my eyes to prevent them from closing in exhaustion. And there I knelt as the time ticked away and my eyelids became heavier and heavier only to be awoken by the words “gas attack!” shouted by Green. The black balls that are gas grenades rattled within range of us thrown by our commanders. We all ran about attempting to find one another in an attempt to free each other’s gas masks. In the confusion we forgot about the casualties still attached to their stretchers only to hear their now familiar cry of pain.
It was Ya’ar who bit the bullet and ran into the gas to give them their masks and untie them from their stretchers. He ran out of the quickly dispersing green haze with eyes streaming tears, he ran to Haim who promptly removed his mask for him from the pouch on his back. Once everything had settled down we were ordered to keep our masks on for the march back to base. We moved down a very gentle slope that was the other side of the mountain towards the base that I had so detested on my first encounter. Now that base was my saviour, it marked the final resting point and the end of all that had gone before. But where was it? With each movement my Kevlar helmet pushed the clips of the mask deeper into my skull but I would never think to loosen the clips without being told. So I plodded on with my skull aching, desperate for water though unable to drink and desperate to get rid of the pain though it wouldn’t abate and desperate for sleep though the base was still out of sight.
The further we walked the greater the pain in my head, a clip to the left of my temple, a clip to the right and one in the centre all forced into me by the tight fitting helmet and only the sound of my breathing echoing around the inside of the mask to keep me going. It was easy to trip over when moving with the mask on as there was no peripheral vision. The more we walked the greater the strain, the exercise was over, the only thing left to do was walk leisurely back to the base wearing a gas mask, yet the tears rolled down my cheeks, thankfully invisible to my comrades around me. Why did they had to add the gas mask? I screamed and shouted and raged within the confines of that Perspex and rubber prison. The pain in my skull only grew in intensity along with my frustration. It just never ended, now with the sun high up in the sky and a night of endurance behind me the army still demanded more from me. It wasn’t fair! How could I be expected to just keep on like this?
Still I put one foot in front of the other while I raged and whined and moaned to myself. The pain continued as did I until the base loomed large before me and we stopped at the road separating the field from the base. Standing there in a group around Mark I wondered what would happen if someone covered the air inlet to my gasmask. As I contemplated being suffocated a hand came from somewhere beyond my vision and did precisely that. Starved of oxygen for only a second I wheeled around on the attacker. The last straw had been placed and my camel’s back broke. I launched my strike on the offender and launched in with a kick that was followed up by punches. I didn’t get very far as once again, the sound of laughter, precisely when I didn’t expect it permeated through my senses. Everyone had removed their gas masks and I had attacked the wrong person.
It had been Elad who had covered the mask, though with the limited vision allowed by the mask I had missed him and dived on Sahar. The look of confusion on Sahar’s face immediately made me aware of my mistake while the laughter coming from Elad left me in no doubt as to who the real culprit had been. Hurt and confused I removed my own mask and stepped quietly back into the fold allowing Mark to once again be the centre of attention. He looked at me though I couldn’t quite decipher what he was thinking, he then shook his head suddenly as if to shrug off my little ‘incident’ and said something like the following; “Nicely done, it was a tough night and you came through it well, now we are going to finish the way Paratroopers always finish, with the stretchers out and on the run!”
I was going to kill him! We had just spent the whole night dragging the bloody thing up a mountain and now we had to open it again just to “finish the way paratroopers always finish”, the dick! He looked back at me and said “Marc, get on the stretcher.” I practically collapsed onto that blessed/cursed thing and felt the thrill of a paratrooper stretcher run from the VIP position.
Both squads re-formed for Green once we were back in the base, I had one eye on him and one eye on a very comfortable looking fold out cot with my sleeping bag on it. He gave us the usual good work routine and then told us to clean our weapons and prepare our equipment for inspection. The others immediately fell out and went to get it done while I just stood there. In shock at the fact that after everything we had just gone through they still couldn’t bring themselves to let us have any rest! Did I really now I had to go clean my bloody gun and sort out my stuff? It wasn’t possible, couldn’t be right and how the hell were the other guys accepting all this? I grabbed a rag, soaked it in the grease that we used to clean our weapon, sat down by my tent and dismantled my beautiful M4 rifle while trying my best not to fall asleep.
It was tough to clean the thing because I kept falling asleep while trying to clean a small pin over and over. While cleaning it I would nod off and drop the thing onto the ground only to jolt awake, see it lying there, pick it up and repeat the process all over again. Eventually the equipment was ready and we were all standing around it watching Green walk around our stuff examining it carefully. We didn’t get off lightly but we did get through it and when we did we were rewarded with a day and a half out of the army for what was left of the weekend.
It hadn’t even occurred to me that it was Friday and that we were due to go home having survived our first 2 weeks of advanced training. All of my first impressions of the base disappeared, I had come to love it since staying there was infinitely preferable to going out in the field and experiencing the constant nightmare of this hellish new phase of training, the hard times really had begun!
He let us know what we were in for while we were there but Yuval, Haim and I weren’t really listening, we were too excited that we had moved on from boot camp, the three of us whispered all of the way through the briefing about what was really to come next. I reasoned that if there was anything else that I really needed to know I could just ask Yuval. His nickname ‘Baby’ had already stuck to him earlier in boot camp and it was the only name I used for him from that moment on. He leaned over Haim to whisper to me “Parachute course in a month!!” He couldn’t conceal his grin as he whispered to me and I couldn’t conceal my excitement when I heard him. Parachute course meant silver jump wings, it meant that everyone around me would know that they were looking at a paratrooper! When a soldier starts his army service he is presented with an ugly, snot coloured beret that denotes to the rest of the world that he is merely a soldier in training, who hasn't earned the right to enter into a unit yet. I hated that beret and the 3 more months of training I would have to endure before earning the crimson paratrooper’s beret couldn't go by fast enough as far as I was concerned.
Our new commanders hovered over us casting an irritated eye in the direction of our whispers but unwilling to interrupt the base commander to tell us to shut up. My new squad leader was also called Marc, his family had made aliyah from Russia as soon as they could and had settled in Haifa. He had begun his army career in Israel's equivalent of the Navy SEALS but had been kicked out and had chosen to come to the Orev. It was good to have him there and during our one on one interview he told me that when he started his army service he hadn’t spoken a word of Hebrew either. Mine was starting to come along though, once I even found myself singing a song in Hebrew, I promptly stopped when a soldier on my team called Elad noticed and pointed everyone’s attention to it before endlessly begging me to sing the song again and again so that he could laugh at the way it sounded in my English accent.
The base was every bit as bad as my first impressions had told me it would be. This time we were all crammed into one 10 man tent, luxuries such as lockers were a thing of the past as there was barely enough room for all of the metal beds that they gave us and certainly no room for anything else, we put our bags under the beds and endured feeling them sticking into our backs at night. I need not have worried we weren’t to spend much time there. Our first night was spent on the base, the next night we had equipment on our backs, a stretcher loaded with boxes of bullets open and were on our way into the same dried up river beds and rocky hills that had made Field Week such a memorable experience.
The emphasis was no longer on shooting, now it was all about working together as a team, we spent our days and nights planning and executing assaults on various hills and then spending time carrying the stretcher with a ‘wounded’ member of the team around. As a benefit of finishing boot camp we were allowed to call our officer by his name; though he insisted we call him only by his last name; Green.
After week one we were told that the week was going to finish with a squad test, each of the two squads worked alone and we practised all the manoeuvres we had learnt over the week. One by one we demonstrated moving across open ground in the correct way, attacking an objective and moving as small groups of four providing mutual cover all the way. We moved on and on to various stations that were strung a couple of kilometres apart. On the way a gas attack was simulated and various instructors appeared and threw riot gas grenades at us. Our gas masks were securely fitted into our pouches on our backs and we had long since learned that the only way to get at them in time to survive that noxious gas was to run to the person in front of us and take their mask out for them. Over the past weeks we had experienced a lot of these gas grenade attacks at the hands of our commanders and we were well versed in doing it quickly.
The grenades were black balls a little bigger than baseballs and just as heavy. The gas was green and thick it didn’t just make you shed tears but irritated the skin and if it was breathed in it caused instant pain in the lungs. It also stuck to anything that was nearby when it escaped from it’s small, black prison including cans of food, water bottles, weapons just waiting for some unsuspecting soldier to get the irritant on his skin.
The first time we were exposed to it was in a tent during boot camp. We were called in one by one wearing our gas masks, then told to take them off. When it came to my turn I was determined to holdout longer than anyone before me. I had watched each of my friends walk into that tent only to run out coughing and spluttering, their faces red and their hands glued to their eyes. I walked in with my gas mask on to find Green sitting alone in the tiny tent, the hiss of gas escaping from a small machine in the corner was distinctly unnerving. He looked eerie in his mask though I could just about make out his words when he told me to take off my gas mask and I could hardly see him when I did. He told me to count from one to ten, at ten I made the mistake of taking a breath, the instant pain in my lungs came as a shock and I started coughing, “GET OUT!!” he roared and I didn’t need any further encouragement. I could hear my friends laughing at my tear stained face as I escaped, just as I had laughed at their red, teary faces when they had run out. Another IDF rite of passage had been survived.
The gas masks protected you from the gas but only if you had them tightly strapped onto your face which meant that the clips dug themselves into your skull when you put your combat helmet back on. After more than a couple of minutes the pain was so intense that it was difficult to know whether the gas would be preferable to the feeling of clamps pushing into your skin. Mercifully we marched away from the gas towards the next stage of the test and were allowed to remove the masks. We moved from station to station each one about 500m apart, after a while I realised I was quite enjoying this ‘test’, in fact I had quite enjoyed all of our advanced training up to that point. It was much more fun to run at the targets shooting like in the movies than to set up the Sergeant’s shooting range every day. We lived in the field but it wasn’t that cold yet, I was used to going to the bathroom in a bush and quite frankly anything was preferable to the facilities back at the base. By the time we reached 2a.m. my squad was cruising through, we had done all that was asked of us and now we had finished what I assumed was the final test.
“Fall wounded”
The command was directed at Oran, though for a moment no one moved, the test was over why did Oran now have to fall down and pretend to be wounded? He was the biggest and heaviest of the none of us. "Have him on the stretcher in 10 seconds or I'll tell another person to go down and you'll have to carry him too" were Mark's softly spoken words. We scrambled to put him on the stretcher and have it in the air once Mark marched forward and we lumbered on behind him. We were on flat, level ground which makes all the difference when you have the weight of a six foot Moroccan and his machine gun resting on the stretcher you’re carrying.
Oran was the strongest out of the 18 of us, he lugged the machine gun around as though it was nothing, was constantly flouting the rules and wasn’t one to be woken up for guard duty roughly. He was a central part of the tzevet and we were all glad to have him with us I had once seen him take the end of a stretcher on his own, carry both handles and just stomp forward with the rest of the tzevet in tow. Now we were carrying him and it wasn’t easy. The soft ground tended to absorb my feet and threw up the familiar powdery dust while we marched. Thankfully we were starting to learn the proper army way to carry a stretcher which meant four people, one for each handle moving for 30 seconds before then moving forward to the next handle and then, after handing off to the soldier behind running back to the two lines that were faithfully following. The problem is that when there are four people carrying the stretcher you are only really getting a minute's respite before finding a stretcher handle on your shoulder once again. We struggled on. We moved over the dusty ground after our commander who was walking purposefully towards what appeared to be an increasingly large hulking rock that was somewhere off in the distance.
The rock was in fact a mountain that was twisted and jagged like the rocks that it was composed of, the summit somewhere far off above, from the base I couldn't see it. Mark stopped at the foot of it and we stopped behind him. As one we stared up at this terror instinctively knowing the task that lay before us. Mark took a drink and he looked at us blankly as we looked at him pleadingly. Begging with our eyes not to lead us up the mountain, begging him to tell us that we had done enough and that the night was over. He gave me the exact same look that Ran had given me during field week when we were trying to get out of the dry river bed with the stretcher. A look of cold, calculated disgust yet simultaneously utterly detached from me, I was mere irritation, a nothing, I didn't even have a red beret and he wasn't interested in silent pleas. I had never seen so much conveyed without words. That simple look hammered it home. Being a paratrooper wasn’t going to be easy.
Mark started up the thin trail towards the summit and we followed him. The night had already been tough but now it was going to reach a crescendo of evil. The path was blocked in places by large boulders and the stretcher had to be pushed, pulled, raised and lowered. There were times when we dropped the stretcher, complete with Oran attached, onto the rocks and had to run to pick him up again amidst his cries of pain. The path was barely passable for two people walking side by side but we had to make do as best we could, the higher we climbed the tighter the path became until there were periods where it disappeared altogether.
I suffered all of the way through, I suffered the agony in my limbs as I pulled and pushed, I suffered the agony in my mind from the shock of thinking that the night was over only to be confronted by the evil of the stretcher and the darkness of the mountain. The shock was made worse by the fact that every 10 minutes I was certain that we had struggled our way to the top only to find out that we had only reached a small plateau with the real summit still being far above out of sight.
Eventually I found myself at the front, all thoughts of switching under the stretcher every 30 were seconds long gone, I was screaming at the others to push as I pulled. A mixture of English and Hebrew swear words escaped my lips as did a couple of Arabic ones that I had picked up along the way. I remember hearing Elad chuckle behind me as he pushed at the other end and I asked myself "what people are these with me that they can laugh even as we go through all of this?" I shouted at him even more loudly and everyone started giggling. How were they laughing? How did they have it in them to laugh? I couldn’t understand it and I lacked the energy to try as we lurched onwards and upwards with that accursed stretcher ever higher, over the sharp rocks towards our goal.
Asaf was limping from twisting his leg though he didn’t say a word as he carried his Minimi machine gun and pushed next to Elad. What people are these that they don’t quit even when they are hurt? Eventually the real question hit me like a silver bullet; What kind of man am I that I came all this way to carry a stretcher up a mountain in search of a piece of red material and silver wings? What kind of man am I that I am only now finding out for the first time the power that I have inside, that I can urge these other men on even when I have almost nothing left myself?
And there on the mountain the me that was to earn the Red Beret was born.
It was the same mountain that generations of paratroopers had climbed for years, it was the mountain that built Paratroopers and it was only the first of many times that we would climb it. Each time I climbed over those rocks and made my way over that too small pathway that marked the start of the ascent I remembered the first time, the time that I did something special, the time I found my voice and really my place in the team.
We finished after the sun had come up, the other half of the tzevet arrived just after us, upon reaching the summit we were immediately told that a helicopter was on the way in to pick up our ‘casualties’ and that we had to find cover while we waited for them. I crouched down behind a rock and covered the way we had come. My sweat soaked body shivered in the dawn as I battled my eyes to prevent them from closing in exhaustion. And there I knelt as the time ticked away and my eyelids became heavier and heavier only to be awoken by the words “gas attack!” shouted by Green. The black balls that are gas grenades rattled within range of us thrown by our commanders. We all ran about attempting to find one another in an attempt to free each other’s gas masks. In the confusion we forgot about the casualties still attached to their stretchers only to hear their now familiar cry of pain.
It was Ya’ar who bit the bullet and ran into the gas to give them their masks and untie them from their stretchers. He ran out of the quickly dispersing green haze with eyes streaming tears, he ran to Haim who promptly removed his mask for him from the pouch on his back. Once everything had settled down we were ordered to keep our masks on for the march back to base. We moved down a very gentle slope that was the other side of the mountain towards the base that I had so detested on my first encounter. Now that base was my saviour, it marked the final resting point and the end of all that had gone before. But where was it? With each movement my Kevlar helmet pushed the clips of the mask deeper into my skull but I would never think to loosen the clips without being told. So I plodded on with my skull aching, desperate for water though unable to drink and desperate to get rid of the pain though it wouldn’t abate and desperate for sleep though the base was still out of sight.
The further we walked the greater the pain in my head, a clip to the left of my temple, a clip to the right and one in the centre all forced into me by the tight fitting helmet and only the sound of my breathing echoing around the inside of the mask to keep me going. It was easy to trip over when moving with the mask on as there was no peripheral vision. The more we walked the greater the strain, the exercise was over, the only thing left to do was walk leisurely back to the base wearing a gas mask, yet the tears rolled down my cheeks, thankfully invisible to my comrades around me. Why did they had to add the gas mask? I screamed and shouted and raged within the confines of that Perspex and rubber prison. The pain in my skull only grew in intensity along with my frustration. It just never ended, now with the sun high up in the sky and a night of endurance behind me the army still demanded more from me. It wasn’t fair! How could I be expected to just keep on like this?
Still I put one foot in front of the other while I raged and whined and moaned to myself. The pain continued as did I until the base loomed large before me and we stopped at the road separating the field from the base. Standing there in a group around Mark I wondered what would happen if someone covered the air inlet to my gasmask. As I contemplated being suffocated a hand came from somewhere beyond my vision and did precisely that. Starved of oxygen for only a second I wheeled around on the attacker. The last straw had been placed and my camel’s back broke. I launched my strike on the offender and launched in with a kick that was followed up by punches. I didn’t get very far as once again, the sound of laughter, precisely when I didn’t expect it permeated through my senses. Everyone had removed their gas masks and I had attacked the wrong person.
It had been Elad who had covered the mask, though with the limited vision allowed by the mask I had missed him and dived on Sahar. The look of confusion on Sahar’s face immediately made me aware of my mistake while the laughter coming from Elad left me in no doubt as to who the real culprit had been. Hurt and confused I removed my own mask and stepped quietly back into the fold allowing Mark to once again be the centre of attention. He looked at me though I couldn’t quite decipher what he was thinking, he then shook his head suddenly as if to shrug off my little ‘incident’ and said something like the following; “Nicely done, it was a tough night and you came through it well, now we are going to finish the way Paratroopers always finish, with the stretchers out and on the run!”
I was going to kill him! We had just spent the whole night dragging the bloody thing up a mountain and now we had to open it again just to “finish the way paratroopers always finish”, the dick! He looked back at me and said “Marc, get on the stretcher.” I practically collapsed onto that blessed/cursed thing and felt the thrill of a paratrooper stretcher run from the VIP position.
Both squads re-formed for Green once we were back in the base, I had one eye on him and one eye on a very comfortable looking fold out cot with my sleeping bag on it. He gave us the usual good work routine and then told us to clean our weapons and prepare our equipment for inspection. The others immediately fell out and went to get it done while I just stood there. In shock at the fact that after everything we had just gone through they still couldn’t bring themselves to let us have any rest! Did I really now I had to go clean my bloody gun and sort out my stuff? It wasn’t possible, couldn’t be right and how the hell were the other guys accepting all this? I grabbed a rag, soaked it in the grease that we used to clean our weapon, sat down by my tent and dismantled my beautiful M4 rifle while trying my best not to fall asleep.
It was tough to clean the thing because I kept falling asleep while trying to clean a small pin over and over. While cleaning it I would nod off and drop the thing onto the ground only to jolt awake, see it lying there, pick it up and repeat the process all over again. Eventually the equipment was ready and we were all standing around it watching Green walk around our stuff examining it carefully. We didn’t get off lightly but we did get through it and when we did we were rewarded with a day and a half out of the army for what was left of the weekend.
It hadn’t even occurred to me that it was Friday and that we were due to go home having survived our first 2 weeks of advanced training. All of my first impressions of the base disappeared, I had come to love it since staying there was infinitely preferable to going out in the field and experiencing the constant nightmare of this hellish new phase of training, the hard times really had begun!
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