In the IDF soldiers who serve without their families in the country are called lonely soldiers and that status comes with certain extras to allow them to do such things as rent their apartment and organise any administrative things that they have to do. Lonely Soldier is the name of the status and also the way that soldiers like me are etched into the popular consciousness. We are alone in Israel with nowhere to go and no one to talk to, it wasn’t until my team was preparing for field week that I really understood the implications of just how alone I was.
After having every moment of my life accounted for it had been a wonderful feeling to be able to sit down and take time for myself over the weekend without worrying about how long I would be able to relax before it was time to start running around again. But as soon as I was back in the army it was back to business, boot camp had settled into a routine for the first month. The shooting range dominated our days and our sergeant dominated our lives. The training staff never shouted at us, they never raised their voices but they did insist on making our lives difficult. We never walked anywhere on the base, we always ran, constantly on the clock. At the end of each day we stood for inspection in full combat gear while they checked that all of our equipment was connected to our bodies by cord so that if it fell it wouldn’t be lost. Every night we were punished for an infraction and every day our Sergeant would invent a new way to dole out punishments.
I celebrated Yom Kippur on September 16th 2002 on the base with the rest of my team. The majority of soldiers were allowed home but the Orev were left behind to guard. I preferred being on base for the Day of Atonement, I didn’t have anywhere better to be and the title lonely soldier struck home again. Ironically it seemed that the army base was the safest place in the country at the time, two days after Yom Kippur there were 3 separate terror attacks and the day after that was a suicide bombing in Jerusalem. While we were learning the art of war in the safety of the base the second Intifada continued to rage outside.
The marches were getting longer and longer each week, I hadn’t dared to take another piece of equipment on after having felt the agony of the jerrycan on my back. Other soldiers were even worse though. Some found the marches so difficult that they had to be half pulled and half dragged for most of the way the 90km march for the red beret seemed to be an impossible target. Surprisingly the guys who had the most trouble were never the guys who were kicked out, it was the ones who were perfectly able to complete a march but chose not to who eventually found their heads on the chopping block. The routine ground on, morning run, rifle range, working on equipment, punishments of various kind and then sleep. Every day I looked forward to the next day knowing that it meant that I was closer to the end of boot camp.
That routine was coming to an end with the end of our first month of boot camp, Field Week was fast approaching and our officer put us into high gear to prepare for it. Despite our Sergeant telling us that this was no gibush we all feared the onset of our first week in the field. Preparations began with all of our equipment being painted black, and making sure that everything was in perfect order. I didn’t know what to expect from this week but I dreaded it, even worse was that I watched the others prepare for it without having any sense of what I could do to help. Mainly due to the amount of punishments that we had all received on my account the guys had become adept at doing things for me. This was good in theory but it led to times when I felt utterly outcast from the group left watching helplessly while they did everything without saying a word to me.
The day before field week arrived the sergeant appeared and took 4 of us away from the tzevet. He marched us off towards the armoury, I had no idea why until my battered, long M16 was taken away from me and replaced by a shiny new M4 carbine complete with a Trijicon day scope and an Aquila night scope. The four us had been designated for training as marksmen. Our officer had decided that we were the best shots after a month of range work and this was our reward. Everyone in the tzevet was to receive a different piece of equipment and undergo a week long course in how to use it, the course was to take place after field week but someone had ordained that the shooters of the Orev were to receive their marksmen’s tools a week early, much to the chagrin of the soldiers in the Sayeret and that made it even sweeter.
The next day we were on coaches with no idea where they were taking us, I was dreading the whole experience. While I was on the base I knew what was happening and had become comfortable with the routine that had been established there, the week in the field that was coming up was an utterly unknown entity. After several hours the coaches came to a halt, we were somewhere in the Northern West Bank. Once I had alighted from the coach I saw an army base on one side of the road and hills on the other. All I could see of the army base were the concrete fortifications and the small checkpoint at which we had stopped. Instantly the sergeant was banging on at us about getting our equipment off the bus and on our backs and being ready to move. Within a couple of minutes we were already with packs on and well on our way towards the hills.
There were only 16 of the original 18 on our way into field week, 2 of our number had developed "medical complaints" and were doing some kind of guard duty. For the first day we walked through the hills with the weight on our backs. It was tough going but it was nowhere near as bad as that first masa. The pace was slow and we would halt regularly for one reason or another. Our officer led us and I followed, every time he stopped I thought that we had arrived at our destination but all he was doing was allowing the rest of the tzevet to catch up and then we would continue our march.
We walked and we walked, we walked through dry river beds until I was sure that the rocks and stones had penetrated through the soles of my paratrooper’s red boots. The officer walked up the hills and down the other side to more river beds. The more we walked the more frustrated I became, questions swirled around in my head; why we haven’t we stopped yet? where's our objective? And the absolute killer question; Is this how it's going to be for the whole week? I hated that the officer would stop, wait for us all to catch up and then simply rise and carry on moving. He never spoke to us, he just glared at us the whole time as if he couldn’t stand the fact that he was in charge of such pathetic people. My feet were in agony, I felt every tiny stone I stepped on up to the point at which I was absolutely positive that the soles of my shoes were torn up and I was stepping directly onto the terrain below. Each time the officer stopped I would check my boots for the tears in the soles that had to be there and every time there was nothing to look at.
After walking for hours we split up into our two squads, Ran taught us how to patrol as a squad, how to turn around, what to do if we noticed that one of the group was missing. We practised until darkness came and then we practised in the dark. The night was cold and the darkness so penetrating that it seemed as though I could reach into the blackness and touch it. Visibility was quickly limited to only a couple of feet, it was so cold that I didn’t want to stop moving in the knowledge that my sweat covered body would start to shiver immediately. The night scared me, I knew that should I have had to so much as tie up my shoe laces I would immediately lose sight of the rest of the group. We were deep in the West Bank and the extent of the fortifications I had seen at the now far away base had brought home to me just how far into harms way we had travelled.
The black night wasn’t about to end anytime soon, we continued to practise our newly acquired tactics as a complete team before our officer marched us around some more. The questions were still swirling around my brain tormenting me, the answers were nowhere in sight. Eventually the time came to go to sleep but we were told that before we could do so we had to dig foxholes to rest in. The Sergeant instructed us very carefully on how to create the foxholes and to what depth they needed to be before we could line the outer rim with rocks and then sleep. We took our shovels from our bags and started to dig, more and more dirt I shovelled that night, my eyes closing of their own accord. I dug until the foxhole was deep enough and then I set off to find the rocks to line it with. Sleep had caught up to me making the effort ten times harder than it should have been. My body was straining to be allowed to stop its work but I couldn't yet allow myself to descend into the world of slumber there was more to do.
When each foxhole was completed the Sergeant insisted on inspecting them all personally, I was petrified he wouldn't like mine and would tell me to dig deeper, that night he was merciful and he passed my hole as adequate. He lined us up and told us all we could now go to sleep...after the briefing. There was an uproar inside my head, a briefing now? Really? We all formed a three sided square with our officer standing in the space where the fourth side should have been. He read out the precautions that were to be taken during the night and told us that before we went to sleep we had to create a roster for guard duty and then he was finished but Alon had a speech of his own and so we stood still listening to more and more words I caught one part where he told us that if it became too cold in our foxholes we could always open up our tents and use them as blankets, we hadn't been allowed to bring sleeping bags with us but, I just wanted to lie down and let the accursed day end.
My last thoughts before sleep came were of my own personal tent that was filthy from being used for a night in the desert at an earlier point in training and determined that there was no degree of cold that could make me use it but rather than drift off into sleep I found myself shivering in my earthen hole. My uniform was wet from the sweat of my exertions and when you're only allowed one change of clothes for a week you have to think very hard about when to use them and there was no way I was going to succumb on my first night. Instead I found myself climbing out of my hole and feeling for my filthy tent, which I rolled out and used as a blanket before disappearing into the oblivion of deep sleep. It had taken me around 10 minutes of shivering before I had given in and decided to use it in exactly the manner that Alon had suggested. I was woken up 45 minutes later when it was my turn to stand guard and defend my sleeping comrades from whatever forces inhabited the night in that dreadful place.
The next morning we were woken at dawn by the last one to stand guard. Ran arrived from his own foxhole and took his squad down to yet another dry river bed. After negotiating our way through the scattered rocks at the bottom he told us to open the stretcher, told the heaviest soldier to get on it and then ordered us out of the river bed and up the hill. I didn’t think we were going to make it. The riverbed was incredibly steep and rocky, climbing out of it with a stretcher in the air seemed impossible and we dropped it many times in the attempt. I looked at Ran with pleading eyes and while making a half assed effort as did the other 7 of us. He looked back at us as if we were the most pathetic people he had ever seen. Recruits of such poor calibre that we were unable even to move a stretcher.
After struggling with the stretcher over and over and constantly dropping the unfortunate soldier strapped to it someone stepped up and took charge. It was Asaf, who despite living in Israel practically all his life still spoke with an East European accent.He was the only member of the team to go on to officer’s school, eventually becoming the deputy commander of the unit. He climbed up on to the rocks and dragged another soldier with him, while they pulled everyone else pushed and eventually we were out of the riverbed. Ran looked at us without an expression before simply turning and walk up the hill. We struggled to follow him, he never looked back at us.
The hill was littered with rocks making it impossible to walk in a straight line, the group zigzagged as one under the constantly slipping stretcher, at first we attempted an organised system but minutes later it was a shambles as the weaker fell behind leaving the rest of us to struggle forward through the rocks and thorny shrubbery. The weight of the stretcher pushing down onto my shoulders made taking every step a nightmare. We pressed forward, those at the back unable to see what lay before us, those at the front unable to communicate what lay in front quickly enough to prevent those at the back from pushing them right into it. The heat of the sun was upon us and the forbidding terrain ensured that this march up the hill dragged on and on.
We made it to the top exhausted from the exertion just in time to see the other squad get there before us. Next on the agenda was a camouflage exercise and I was starting to feel like I had had enough. A lecture was given by a member of the unit who had arrived specifically for the purpose but I couldn’t understand even the parts that I was able to stay awake for. It was impossible to concentrate on what he was saying and my eyes seemed to keep closing of their own accord. Whenever anyone fell asleep the Sergeant would order him to stand up and drink and this is how I spent most of the lecture. Unfortunately neither standing nor drinking served to alleviate the misery I was feeling along with the knowledge that I was stuck out in that awful place for several more days, doomed to be blisteringly hot during the day and freezing at night.
After the lecture I found myself hiding in a bush with a soldier called Elad. He was dark skinned and from a moshav in the north of the country, we hadn’t really spoken before, mainly because he didn’t speak English. We were supposed to have fashioned the bush to make it extra thick to disguise the giant hole that had opened up from the two of us struggling inside it but we didn’t bother. I plucked up my courage at that moment to confess to him that I had made a mistake in coming to Israel and the army. The feeling had been growing in me during the week. It was a combination of the difficulty of the exercises, the lack of sleep and the language barrier that had brought me to my end. Sitting there, in that bush, I had decided that enough was enough, it was time to go home. I looked at Elad, attempting to keep the tears that were stinging my eyes from dripping down my face. Months of training remained stretched out before me and it was only going to get progressively harder with each day, the weight of those months sat on my shoulders, even more heavily than the stretcher had.
He waited there patiently while I poured my heart out, for the most part he looked down at the ground and was playing with the earth under where I was sitting. He seemed to absorb it all in his stride before looking at me with blank, uncomprehending eyes. He hadn’t understood a single word I had said. For a moment I just sat there staring at him before bursting into a fit of laughter, it must have been infectious because a moment later he joined me in suppressed hysterics as the two of us sat there in our bush waiting for the soldier to come and find us. We were discovered and the two of us got in trouble for not disguising our bush properly.
Every passing minute brought the end of the my time on field week closer to an end. There was never a moment to rest during field week, even eating times were simply 15 minutes to eat while someone stood guard. Food consisted of a ration pack plus a loaf of bread and ensuring that the whole team was fed in 15 minutes was quite the challenge. Quickly we learnt how to do things most effectively, one would open each of the tins in a ration pack while another would make the sandwiches for the guard, Asaf had his stopwatch five set and would call out the time every five minutes. The tins would be passed from man to man as each one threw as much down his throat as possible. With five minutes to go the guard would be switched so that he could eat while the rest of us cleaned everything up and stored the rubbish in someone’s bag so that we were standing ready to move as soon as Asaf called 15 minutes. Even eating wasn’t a break.
The walks along the riverbeds and up the hills and back down to riverbeds on the other side became more intense as we put our newly learnt patrolling skills into practise during the day and night. I became obsessed with checking the soles of my shoes, it seemed impossible that walking could hurt my feet so much with shoes that were intact. We followed our officer each and every day as he moved on and on with no particular direction in mind. One night instead of sleeping in foxholes we slept in bushes, each of us in the squad in a line just above one of the winding riverbeds that we had been struggling through. We had learned how to camouflage them and all I had been interested in was slipping into one and falling into oblivion. It was forbidden to remove any of our equipment while we slept but that was no longer relevant to me, I was so tired that I knew nothing would keep me from falling into the darkness for which I had been yearning for the whole day.
The next morning I watched the soldiers emerge from their temporary shelters and get ready to move. They were leaving without me, Ran counted them all and, content that everyone was present began to move. They had forgotten me, I tried to call out to them but the words wouldn't come so I jumped up from my bush to tell them to wait but there was no one there and it wasn't the next morning it was still that night and I had dreamed the whole thing. It was still dark and there was no movement, I was confused and afraid almost too afraid to return to my slumber lest the dream come true. I lowered myself back down into my temporary home and closed my eyes, I dreamed dreams of abandonment until it was time to wake up for real.
On the final day we ran around practising all that we had learnt about patrolling. The stretcher was an ever present threat and all too often I felt the handle pressing down onto my shoulder with a weight that seemed to be pushing me down into the ground itself. Night emerged and the temperature dropped, we were to perform our techniques in a valley for the commanders to watch through night vision goggles. Our performance turned into a marathon test session that went from the practise to a race against the other teams from whom we had been apart for the duration of the week.
Stations had been set up, at one we would have to do pushups at another race from one place to another while carrying a member of the team in a fireman’s lift in a relay that was passed from team mate to team mate. The test finished with the weekly march which was 10kms long, it should have been harder than usual since it came at the end of such a tough week but actually it was such a relief to know that I was at the end of the ordeal that the march passed by in a flash. At the end of it all we were lined up facing the symbol of the Orev which the sergeant set on fire.
Facing that flaming symbol we were told that we had overcome yet another obstacle on our way to becoming Paratroopers and were given the symbol of the infantryman to be added to our berets. The impromptu ceremony took place in the field near the road where we had originally left the bus. Once the pins had been issued to us we followed our Sergeant towards the cement fortifications of the base. I took in the checkpoint in front of it, the raised pillboxes bearing down on the road and the barbed wire fence running along the side. In we moved, tired, filthy and stinking from our first full week in the field. There was a sense of foreboding about this base, an atmosphere of tension, here the soldiers manned a checkpoint and needed these strong fortifications for their own safety. They lived knowing that the enemy was nearby, this was the Paratrooper’s advanced training base and was to be my home for months 4,5 and 6 of my training.
We were shown to an empty gym which was to be where we slept that night. The showers consisted of taps set high up in a ‘bathroom’ that was so foul smelling entering was itself traumatic. The accumulation of a week’s worth of filth combined with the fact that loads of the other guys were using these ‘facilities’ led to me braving them and getting clean for the first time in too long. It was a good move, the water was hot and washed the week away from me, leaving me only with the cuts, bruises and blisters left over from the constant effort of my first week in the field.
After having every moment of my life accounted for it had been a wonderful feeling to be able to sit down and take time for myself over the weekend without worrying about how long I would be able to relax before it was time to start running around again. But as soon as I was back in the army it was back to business, boot camp had settled into a routine for the first month. The shooting range dominated our days and our sergeant dominated our lives. The training staff never shouted at us, they never raised their voices but they did insist on making our lives difficult. We never walked anywhere on the base, we always ran, constantly on the clock. At the end of each day we stood for inspection in full combat gear while they checked that all of our equipment was connected to our bodies by cord so that if it fell it wouldn’t be lost. Every night we were punished for an infraction and every day our Sergeant would invent a new way to dole out punishments.
I celebrated Yom Kippur on September 16th 2002 on the base with the rest of my team. The majority of soldiers were allowed home but the Orev were left behind to guard. I preferred being on base for the Day of Atonement, I didn’t have anywhere better to be and the title lonely soldier struck home again. Ironically it seemed that the army base was the safest place in the country at the time, two days after Yom Kippur there were 3 separate terror attacks and the day after that was a suicide bombing in Jerusalem. While we were learning the art of war in the safety of the base the second Intifada continued to rage outside.
The marches were getting longer and longer each week, I hadn’t dared to take another piece of equipment on after having felt the agony of the jerrycan on my back. Other soldiers were even worse though. Some found the marches so difficult that they had to be half pulled and half dragged for most of the way the 90km march for the red beret seemed to be an impossible target. Surprisingly the guys who had the most trouble were never the guys who were kicked out, it was the ones who were perfectly able to complete a march but chose not to who eventually found their heads on the chopping block. The routine ground on, morning run, rifle range, working on equipment, punishments of various kind and then sleep. Every day I looked forward to the next day knowing that it meant that I was closer to the end of boot camp.
That routine was coming to an end with the end of our first month of boot camp, Field Week was fast approaching and our officer put us into high gear to prepare for it. Despite our Sergeant telling us that this was no gibush we all feared the onset of our first week in the field. Preparations began with all of our equipment being painted black, and making sure that everything was in perfect order. I didn’t know what to expect from this week but I dreaded it, even worse was that I watched the others prepare for it without having any sense of what I could do to help. Mainly due to the amount of punishments that we had all received on my account the guys had become adept at doing things for me. This was good in theory but it led to times when I felt utterly outcast from the group left watching helplessly while they did everything without saying a word to me.
The day before field week arrived the sergeant appeared and took 4 of us away from the tzevet. He marched us off towards the armoury, I had no idea why until my battered, long M16 was taken away from me and replaced by a shiny new M4 carbine complete with a Trijicon day scope and an Aquila night scope. The four us had been designated for training as marksmen. Our officer had decided that we were the best shots after a month of range work and this was our reward. Everyone in the tzevet was to receive a different piece of equipment and undergo a week long course in how to use it, the course was to take place after field week but someone had ordained that the shooters of the Orev were to receive their marksmen’s tools a week early, much to the chagrin of the soldiers in the Sayeret and that made it even sweeter.
The next day we were on coaches with no idea where they were taking us, I was dreading the whole experience. While I was on the base I knew what was happening and had become comfortable with the routine that had been established there, the week in the field that was coming up was an utterly unknown entity. After several hours the coaches came to a halt, we were somewhere in the Northern West Bank. Once I had alighted from the coach I saw an army base on one side of the road and hills on the other. All I could see of the army base were the concrete fortifications and the small checkpoint at which we had stopped. Instantly the sergeant was banging on at us about getting our equipment off the bus and on our backs and being ready to move. Within a couple of minutes we were already with packs on and well on our way towards the hills.
There were only 16 of the original 18 on our way into field week, 2 of our number had developed "medical complaints" and were doing some kind of guard duty. For the first day we walked through the hills with the weight on our backs. It was tough going but it was nowhere near as bad as that first masa. The pace was slow and we would halt regularly for one reason or another. Our officer led us and I followed, every time he stopped I thought that we had arrived at our destination but all he was doing was allowing the rest of the tzevet to catch up and then we would continue our march.
We walked and we walked, we walked through dry river beds until I was sure that the rocks and stones had penetrated through the soles of my paratrooper’s red boots. The officer walked up the hills and down the other side to more river beds. The more we walked the more frustrated I became, questions swirled around in my head; why we haven’t we stopped yet? where's our objective? And the absolute killer question; Is this how it's going to be for the whole week? I hated that the officer would stop, wait for us all to catch up and then simply rise and carry on moving. He never spoke to us, he just glared at us the whole time as if he couldn’t stand the fact that he was in charge of such pathetic people. My feet were in agony, I felt every tiny stone I stepped on up to the point at which I was absolutely positive that the soles of my shoes were torn up and I was stepping directly onto the terrain below. Each time the officer stopped I would check my boots for the tears in the soles that had to be there and every time there was nothing to look at.
After walking for hours we split up into our two squads, Ran taught us how to patrol as a squad, how to turn around, what to do if we noticed that one of the group was missing. We practised until darkness came and then we practised in the dark. The night was cold and the darkness so penetrating that it seemed as though I could reach into the blackness and touch it. Visibility was quickly limited to only a couple of feet, it was so cold that I didn’t want to stop moving in the knowledge that my sweat covered body would start to shiver immediately. The night scared me, I knew that should I have had to so much as tie up my shoe laces I would immediately lose sight of the rest of the group. We were deep in the West Bank and the extent of the fortifications I had seen at the now far away base had brought home to me just how far into harms way we had travelled.
The black night wasn’t about to end anytime soon, we continued to practise our newly acquired tactics as a complete team before our officer marched us around some more. The questions were still swirling around my brain tormenting me, the answers were nowhere in sight. Eventually the time came to go to sleep but we were told that before we could do so we had to dig foxholes to rest in. The Sergeant instructed us very carefully on how to create the foxholes and to what depth they needed to be before we could line the outer rim with rocks and then sleep. We took our shovels from our bags and started to dig, more and more dirt I shovelled that night, my eyes closing of their own accord. I dug until the foxhole was deep enough and then I set off to find the rocks to line it with. Sleep had caught up to me making the effort ten times harder than it should have been. My body was straining to be allowed to stop its work but I couldn't yet allow myself to descend into the world of slumber there was more to do.
When each foxhole was completed the Sergeant insisted on inspecting them all personally, I was petrified he wouldn't like mine and would tell me to dig deeper, that night he was merciful and he passed my hole as adequate. He lined us up and told us all we could now go to sleep...after the briefing. There was an uproar inside my head, a briefing now? Really? We all formed a three sided square with our officer standing in the space where the fourth side should have been. He read out the precautions that were to be taken during the night and told us that before we went to sleep we had to create a roster for guard duty and then he was finished but Alon had a speech of his own and so we stood still listening to more and more words I caught one part where he told us that if it became too cold in our foxholes we could always open up our tents and use them as blankets, we hadn't been allowed to bring sleeping bags with us but, I just wanted to lie down and let the accursed day end.
My last thoughts before sleep came were of my own personal tent that was filthy from being used for a night in the desert at an earlier point in training and determined that there was no degree of cold that could make me use it but rather than drift off into sleep I found myself shivering in my earthen hole. My uniform was wet from the sweat of my exertions and when you're only allowed one change of clothes for a week you have to think very hard about when to use them and there was no way I was going to succumb on my first night. Instead I found myself climbing out of my hole and feeling for my filthy tent, which I rolled out and used as a blanket before disappearing into the oblivion of deep sleep. It had taken me around 10 minutes of shivering before I had given in and decided to use it in exactly the manner that Alon had suggested. I was woken up 45 minutes later when it was my turn to stand guard and defend my sleeping comrades from whatever forces inhabited the night in that dreadful place.
The next morning we were woken at dawn by the last one to stand guard. Ran arrived from his own foxhole and took his squad down to yet another dry river bed. After negotiating our way through the scattered rocks at the bottom he told us to open the stretcher, told the heaviest soldier to get on it and then ordered us out of the river bed and up the hill. I didn’t think we were going to make it. The riverbed was incredibly steep and rocky, climbing out of it with a stretcher in the air seemed impossible and we dropped it many times in the attempt. I looked at Ran with pleading eyes and while making a half assed effort as did the other 7 of us. He looked back at us as if we were the most pathetic people he had ever seen. Recruits of such poor calibre that we were unable even to move a stretcher.
After struggling with the stretcher over and over and constantly dropping the unfortunate soldier strapped to it someone stepped up and took charge. It was Asaf, who despite living in Israel practically all his life still spoke with an East European accent.He was the only member of the team to go on to officer’s school, eventually becoming the deputy commander of the unit. He climbed up on to the rocks and dragged another soldier with him, while they pulled everyone else pushed and eventually we were out of the riverbed. Ran looked at us without an expression before simply turning and walk up the hill. We struggled to follow him, he never looked back at us.
The hill was littered with rocks making it impossible to walk in a straight line, the group zigzagged as one under the constantly slipping stretcher, at first we attempted an organised system but minutes later it was a shambles as the weaker fell behind leaving the rest of us to struggle forward through the rocks and thorny shrubbery. The weight of the stretcher pushing down onto my shoulders made taking every step a nightmare. We pressed forward, those at the back unable to see what lay before us, those at the front unable to communicate what lay in front quickly enough to prevent those at the back from pushing them right into it. The heat of the sun was upon us and the forbidding terrain ensured that this march up the hill dragged on and on.
We made it to the top exhausted from the exertion just in time to see the other squad get there before us. Next on the agenda was a camouflage exercise and I was starting to feel like I had had enough. A lecture was given by a member of the unit who had arrived specifically for the purpose but I couldn’t understand even the parts that I was able to stay awake for. It was impossible to concentrate on what he was saying and my eyes seemed to keep closing of their own accord. Whenever anyone fell asleep the Sergeant would order him to stand up and drink and this is how I spent most of the lecture. Unfortunately neither standing nor drinking served to alleviate the misery I was feeling along with the knowledge that I was stuck out in that awful place for several more days, doomed to be blisteringly hot during the day and freezing at night.
After the lecture I found myself hiding in a bush with a soldier called Elad. He was dark skinned and from a moshav in the north of the country, we hadn’t really spoken before, mainly because he didn’t speak English. We were supposed to have fashioned the bush to make it extra thick to disguise the giant hole that had opened up from the two of us struggling inside it but we didn’t bother. I plucked up my courage at that moment to confess to him that I had made a mistake in coming to Israel and the army. The feeling had been growing in me during the week. It was a combination of the difficulty of the exercises, the lack of sleep and the language barrier that had brought me to my end. Sitting there, in that bush, I had decided that enough was enough, it was time to go home. I looked at Elad, attempting to keep the tears that were stinging my eyes from dripping down my face. Months of training remained stretched out before me and it was only going to get progressively harder with each day, the weight of those months sat on my shoulders, even more heavily than the stretcher had.
He waited there patiently while I poured my heart out, for the most part he looked down at the ground and was playing with the earth under where I was sitting. He seemed to absorb it all in his stride before looking at me with blank, uncomprehending eyes. He hadn’t understood a single word I had said. For a moment I just sat there staring at him before bursting into a fit of laughter, it must have been infectious because a moment later he joined me in suppressed hysterics as the two of us sat there in our bush waiting for the soldier to come and find us. We were discovered and the two of us got in trouble for not disguising our bush properly.
Every passing minute brought the end of the my time on field week closer to an end. There was never a moment to rest during field week, even eating times were simply 15 minutes to eat while someone stood guard. Food consisted of a ration pack plus a loaf of bread and ensuring that the whole team was fed in 15 minutes was quite the challenge. Quickly we learnt how to do things most effectively, one would open each of the tins in a ration pack while another would make the sandwiches for the guard, Asaf had his stopwatch five set and would call out the time every five minutes. The tins would be passed from man to man as each one threw as much down his throat as possible. With five minutes to go the guard would be switched so that he could eat while the rest of us cleaned everything up and stored the rubbish in someone’s bag so that we were standing ready to move as soon as Asaf called 15 minutes. Even eating wasn’t a break.
The walks along the riverbeds and up the hills and back down to riverbeds on the other side became more intense as we put our newly learnt patrolling skills into practise during the day and night. I became obsessed with checking the soles of my shoes, it seemed impossible that walking could hurt my feet so much with shoes that were intact. We followed our officer each and every day as he moved on and on with no particular direction in mind. One night instead of sleeping in foxholes we slept in bushes, each of us in the squad in a line just above one of the winding riverbeds that we had been struggling through. We had learned how to camouflage them and all I had been interested in was slipping into one and falling into oblivion. It was forbidden to remove any of our equipment while we slept but that was no longer relevant to me, I was so tired that I knew nothing would keep me from falling into the darkness for which I had been yearning for the whole day.
The next morning I watched the soldiers emerge from their temporary shelters and get ready to move. They were leaving without me, Ran counted them all and, content that everyone was present began to move. They had forgotten me, I tried to call out to them but the words wouldn't come so I jumped up from my bush to tell them to wait but there was no one there and it wasn't the next morning it was still that night and I had dreamed the whole thing. It was still dark and there was no movement, I was confused and afraid almost too afraid to return to my slumber lest the dream come true. I lowered myself back down into my temporary home and closed my eyes, I dreamed dreams of abandonment until it was time to wake up for real.
On the final day we ran around practising all that we had learnt about patrolling. The stretcher was an ever present threat and all too often I felt the handle pressing down onto my shoulder with a weight that seemed to be pushing me down into the ground itself. Night emerged and the temperature dropped, we were to perform our techniques in a valley for the commanders to watch through night vision goggles. Our performance turned into a marathon test session that went from the practise to a race against the other teams from whom we had been apart for the duration of the week.
Stations had been set up, at one we would have to do pushups at another race from one place to another while carrying a member of the team in a fireman’s lift in a relay that was passed from team mate to team mate. The test finished with the weekly march which was 10kms long, it should have been harder than usual since it came at the end of such a tough week but actually it was such a relief to know that I was at the end of the ordeal that the march passed by in a flash. At the end of it all we were lined up facing the symbol of the Orev which the sergeant set on fire.
Facing that flaming symbol we were told that we had overcome yet another obstacle on our way to becoming Paratroopers and were given the symbol of the infantryman to be added to our berets. The impromptu ceremony took place in the field near the road where we had originally left the bus. Once the pins had been issued to us we followed our Sergeant towards the cement fortifications of the base. I took in the checkpoint in front of it, the raised pillboxes bearing down on the road and the barbed wire fence running along the side. In we moved, tired, filthy and stinking from our first full week in the field. There was a sense of foreboding about this base, an atmosphere of tension, here the soldiers manned a checkpoint and needed these strong fortifications for their own safety. They lived knowing that the enemy was nearby, this was the Paratrooper’s advanced training base and was to be my home for months 4,5 and 6 of my training.
We were shown to an empty gym which was to be where we slept that night. The showers consisted of taps set high up in a ‘bathroom’ that was so foul smelling entering was itself traumatic. The accumulation of a week’s worth of filth combined with the fact that loads of the other guys were using these ‘facilities’ led to me braving them and getting clean for the first time in too long. It was a good move, the water was hot and washed the week away from me, leaving me only with the cuts, bruises and blisters left over from the constant effort of my first week in the field.
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