In the same way that the triumph of spirit over adversity was a beautiful thing watching someone's soul shatter into so many pieces when the realisation dawned on them that they didn't have what it took to carry on was a tragedy. This was what happened to Oran, the strongest member of our team the night he simply couldn't take it any more, the night he abandoned us and how we in turn abandoned him.
The two of us had the midnight to two a.m. shift in the bunkers overlooking the road. At that time of night the checkpoint was closed and there was nothing to see on the road, the fact that it was raining made being there even more miserable, the wind howled so loudly that we weren't even able to shout words of encouragement to one another. The rain blew into our bunkers and the chill left us both shivering, there was no way of getting out of the weather and the two of us, separately, had to stand there and suffer through it while waiting for our relief to come and switch us over, but they never did. We stood there waiting in our positions as five minutes passed and then ten minutes, which became twenty and then thirty. The only thing on our minds was that the delay was cutting into our sleep time and that all too soon we would have another shift. We couldn't abandon our positions to find out what was going on and there was no one on the end of the radio, we had to just stand there hoping it would be okay.
Eventually my relief arrived in the form of a soaking wet member of the Sayeret, he came up to the bunker, "sorry man but it's the storm all the tents have been blown down!" I didn't believe him, I figured they had overslept, that there was no way the storm was bad enough to have made all of the tents housing all three of our units collapse and anyway it was a rule never to believe anything that the guys in the Sayeret said. On the way back Oran said "well if they have blown down I'm going to sleep in the toilets." "yeah me too!" I jokingly agreed as we sloshed through the mud back to our encampment.
The scene was carnage, all of the tents had in fact collapsed just as we had been told my thoughts immediately jumped to my bag of once dry clothes now underneath that big, leaky square of canvas with water running through it. Haim called me over, I ran to our tent and along with the others worked to get it back up. It was no easy task, in order to make sure that the tent stayed up again we needed to fill sand bags with dirt and figure out a way to tie enough of them to the bottom of the tent to make sure that none of the pegs would be tugged out again by the strength of the wind.
Inside the tent there were two large wooden poles, one towards the front, one at the rear which basically served to hold the whole thing up, both of them had fallen because of the strength of the wind and the fact that there wasn't enough weight supporting the small pegs buried into the ground around the tent. I got to work shovelling dirt into sandbags and tying them to the fringes of the tent along with the others while Elad went under the canvas to lift up the two central beams and slot them back into place and still the rain poured and the wind attacked. We worked together and when the beams were up I knew that we were on our way to winning this tiny victory against nature...but where was Oran?
Someone had shouted out the question and for a moment we all stopped and looked around, in all the commotion I had completely forgotten about him but I soon realised I knew where he was. Several of the guys followed me to the bathroom where we found him fast asleep on a bench. Most of the guys were still outside working while he lay there refusing to move. We shouted at him, tugged him, kicked him and tried everything we could to get him up but he wouldn't budge...he was finished. Just like on the march when I knew that if I had given up the stretcher I would have been turned into an outsider so it was with Oran now, he had walked away when we had needed him the most. That's how it happened just that quickly, one minute he was an integral member of the team the next he was a ghost.
It was a shock, Oran was the biggest, toughest guy in the team, the one who had been a core member from the beginning but now he was nothing but a casualty of training. None of us had ever actually spoken about the rules of the group but somehow they were crystal clear and rule number one was always that you don't abandon your friends. Oran had put himself first, it was the greatest sin a soldier in training could commit and without even speaking of it to each other we all abandoned him. From that moment on no one wanted to be seen with him, to sit next to him, to talk to him. Eventually he was kicked out by Green but that wasn't for a good couple of months, it was right there in those filthy toilets during that storm that he had opted out, that he had made the decision that this wasn't for him. And we had decided that he wasn't for us.
The two of us had the midnight to two a.m. shift in the bunkers overlooking the road. At that time of night the checkpoint was closed and there was nothing to see on the road, the fact that it was raining made being there even more miserable, the wind howled so loudly that we weren't even able to shout words of encouragement to one another. The rain blew into our bunkers and the chill left us both shivering, there was no way of getting out of the weather and the two of us, separately, had to stand there and suffer through it while waiting for our relief to come and switch us over, but they never did. We stood there waiting in our positions as five minutes passed and then ten minutes, which became twenty and then thirty. The only thing on our minds was that the delay was cutting into our sleep time and that all too soon we would have another shift. We couldn't abandon our positions to find out what was going on and there was no one on the end of the radio, we had to just stand there hoping it would be okay.
Eventually my relief arrived in the form of a soaking wet member of the Sayeret, he came up to the bunker, "sorry man but it's the storm all the tents have been blown down!" I didn't believe him, I figured they had overslept, that there was no way the storm was bad enough to have made all of the tents housing all three of our units collapse and anyway it was a rule never to believe anything that the guys in the Sayeret said. On the way back Oran said "well if they have blown down I'm going to sleep in the toilets." "yeah me too!" I jokingly agreed as we sloshed through the mud back to our encampment.
The scene was carnage, all of the tents had in fact collapsed just as we had been told my thoughts immediately jumped to my bag of once dry clothes now underneath that big, leaky square of canvas with water running through it. Haim called me over, I ran to our tent and along with the others worked to get it back up. It was no easy task, in order to make sure that the tent stayed up again we needed to fill sand bags with dirt and figure out a way to tie enough of them to the bottom of the tent to make sure that none of the pegs would be tugged out again by the strength of the wind.
Inside the tent there were two large wooden poles, one towards the front, one at the rear which basically served to hold the whole thing up, both of them had fallen because of the strength of the wind and the fact that there wasn't enough weight supporting the small pegs buried into the ground around the tent. I got to work shovelling dirt into sandbags and tying them to the fringes of the tent along with the others while Elad went under the canvas to lift up the two central beams and slot them back into place and still the rain poured and the wind attacked. We worked together and when the beams were up I knew that we were on our way to winning this tiny victory against nature...but where was Oran?
Someone had shouted out the question and for a moment we all stopped and looked around, in all the commotion I had completely forgotten about him but I soon realised I knew where he was. Several of the guys followed me to the bathroom where we found him fast asleep on a bench. Most of the guys were still outside working while he lay there refusing to move. We shouted at him, tugged him, kicked him and tried everything we could to get him up but he wouldn't budge...he was finished. Just like on the march when I knew that if I had given up the stretcher I would have been turned into an outsider so it was with Oran now, he had walked away when we had needed him the most. That's how it happened just that quickly, one minute he was an integral member of the team the next he was a ghost.
It was a shock, Oran was the biggest, toughest guy in the team, the one who had been a core member from the beginning but now he was nothing but a casualty of training. None of us had ever actually spoken about the rules of the group but somehow they were crystal clear and rule number one was always that you don't abandon your friends. Oran had put himself first, it was the greatest sin a soldier in training could commit and without even speaking of it to each other we all abandoned him. From that moment on no one wanted to be seen with him, to sit next to him, to talk to him. Eventually he was kicked out by Green but that wasn't for a good couple of months, it was right there in those filthy toilets during that storm that he had opted out, that he had made the decision that this wasn't for him. And we had decided that he wasn't for us.
Marc
ReplyDeleteI read you blog with interest. Why did Oran bail out after completing so much?
ENSJSW
Because training was 12 months long and we were about 4 and a half months into it. The tent falling down was the straw that broke the camel's back, his own personal suffering outweighed his desire to make it to the end of the road and become a fighter. He ended up becoming a driver in the Parachute Brigade and was really happy about it.
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