We all returned from the course with smiles on our beaming faces. We had silver jump wings on our uniforms and we were the first on the base to get them, giving us an immense though temporary feeling of superiority over everyone else there. The wings now also had a huge amount of symbolic value, you see soldiers in training are issued with a snot colour beret to wear until they qualify as fighters, it's also a beret that administrative soldiers wear for their entire service. So wearing it either tells the world that you've only been in the army for a very short period of time or that you are as far away from being a combat soldier as it's possible to be while wearing the colour green. The silver wings on our chests served to say that although we still had to wear these awful berets at the least we were on our way to becoming Paras.
So when we arrived back at the base it was in the spirit of hope, able to see the light at the end of the tunnel that resulted in us gaining the red beret and being treated more like real people than raw recruits. That hope was ripped from us with barely a word spoken. All three units were gathered together simply to hear "we are now going to be guarding the base, I am confident that you will carry out this duty in a way that best represents the traditions of the Paratoopers." And that was that. The captain had spoken and our immediate future had been set in stone. The Captain was a tall man, about 24 years old he originated in the Orev and once out of officer's course had originally been in charge of training within the unit. Administrative changes to the way that all three Paratrooper reconnaissance units were trained ensured that he was promoted and assigned to be in charge of the overall training for the August 2002 intake to all three special units. I had barely heard him speak and had almost no contact with him.
When I heard that we had guard duty coming up I was ecstatic, we all were, even Yuval hadn't heard anything negative about what was coming up, unfortunately he couldn't predict the lunacy of our Captain who had decided that guard duty would be conducted in two hour rotations. This meant that for 24 hours a day, every day we would spend two hours guarding and two hours resting. Green then made that worse by insisting that it was forbidden to go to sleep between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m.
Day and night the area rang with the sound of small arms fire, it was eerie in the night to hear weapons being fired constantly by one group of soldiers or another. When you're the one doing the shooting you notice the sounds of gunfire a lot less.
Guarding brought with it its own challenges, it was to be the first time I would have any contact with Palestinians as it included manning the checkpoint outside the base. There were a lot of different positions to be manned and the checkpoint was only one of them albeit the most interesting. Guard duty began with a whimper and continued in that fashion. The weather went from bad to worse which made me glad not to be in the field but since all of our tents seemed to be Korean War vintage and had US Army printed on them they provided little shelter for us, the holes in them ensured that when it rained we all got wet, when the wind blew we got cold and when both were happening at the same time the tents collapsed altogether.
At first I liked guard duty, no one was fucking with me and usually there was someone else in a guard post so nearby that we could chat. Each two hour shift finished quickly and after a quick nap it was off to the next one, no stretchers and climbing up hills or mountains and no assaulting dummy enemies at the top of a hill. After 24 hours of two hours on and two hours off guard duty I felt the pressure. The fact that we weren't allowed to put our heads down during the day ensured the maximum amount of sleep I could get at any one time was about one hour and forty five minutes. Soon I was counting every minute of my two hours off, weighing up every action on the basis of the amount of sleep I would lose doing it.
It started off with counting the amount of time it took to get from my guard post to my tent and trying to run in order to get there as quickly as possible but as time moved on other things would be entered into the equation. Do I spend the five minutes that it takes to brush my teeth? Do I spend the three minutes that it takes to get my uniform off? Do I spend the one minute that it takes getting my boots off? The longer the week dragged on the more every action simply became an obstacle to sleep, the first thing to go out of the window was showering. There was simply no way that I was going to give up on a massive 10-15 minutes of my sleep time in order to get clean only to stomp out of the filthy showers into the mud and get dirty all over again, it just wasn't going to happen. The next thing to go out of the window was brushing my teeth and I waited as long as humanly possible before wasting time going to the toilet.
After about three days I wasn't sure if I was awake or asleep at any given moment in time, entire shifts of guard duty would fly by leaving me unsure as to whether I had been asleep on my feet the entire time or genuinely guarding. Other times guard duty would seem to take hours and hours as I fought a mental battle to force my eyes to remain open. Once I was guarding at a position in the rear of the base along with Netanel the medic. There were two medics in our team and by the end of our service two more of our number would pass through medic's course and one of the two that started at the beginning would have been kicked out, but whenever anyone needed to call for a medic we always shouted out his name. I guess he simply fit the role. His parents had moved to Jerusalem from Canada and had insisted on speaking to him mostly in Hebrew so despite his heritage his English was halting. He was quiet and reserved but not shy, he earned the nickname Snake when Haim noticed that in some strange way he actually looked like one, the name stuck, I thought it was a much cooler nickname than 'Brity' which was what everyone called me.
We arrived at our guard posts covering the rear of the base, they were close enough to each other that we could chat from our positions but after a couple of minutes Netanel stopped answering. I brought my rifle up to bear and crept over to his position. I found him sitting on the concrete floor of his position hugging his legs with his knees up under his chin fast asleep. I tried waking him only to have him open his eyes briefly only to close them again, he was finished. Now it's utterly unacceptable according to the army for a soldier to fall asleep on guard duty but I could see that he was too exhausted to carry on so I spent the remaining time wandering between my post and his constantly shaking my head and slapping myself in a desperate attempt to keep myself from falling asleep in the same way Netanel had, I got him up a couple of minutes before our replacements arrived and we headed back to the tent to lie down.
Time went on in this way, we were kept awake during the day with various activities like races to field strip our weapons and put them back together again or working on our equipment and then at night we slept as best as we could in between shifts. When it looked like someone was falling asleep during the day time sessions he would have to stand and drink water, sometimes I watched guys fall asleep while standing up, when they did so we'd all stop what we were doing and watch them until someone started laughing and then we all started laughing and the noise woke them up.
The only really interesting place to guard was the checkpoint on the road in front of the base. We would open the road at about 4 a.m. when it was still dark and close it at around 10 p.m. The checkpoint consisted of a concrete barrier narrowing the road into just one lane and a position for a soldier to stand at and provide cover to another soldier who would check the vehicles and question the people in them. Both soldiers outside were covered by more soldiers sitting in bunkers at the entrance to the base giving them a panoramic view over the road, each was able to provide covering fire should it be needed. Next to guarding the checkpoint itself these were the next two most interesting positions to be in as at least there was something going on outside. If the checkpoint were closed they were every bit as boring as every other position.
It was while standing in one of the bunkers overlooking the road that I heard an explosion. I had been standing in there watching the road trying my hardest to stay awake. It wasn't easy but I had developed a trick, I told myself to look at a fixed object, to tell myself details about it. "look at the rock, how would you describe it?" I asked myself, "well it's mossy and has plenty of stones around it, there are weeds around it too and it has a whitey grey colour." Unfortunately at a certain point I would become aware of the fact that my eyes were closed and that I had moved from thinking about the rock to dreaming about it. I blinked my eyes back open again and tried to find something else to stare at.
The scenario played itself out over and over again during the shift until I heard the crash! I opened my eyes and climbed off the floor, rifle at the ready and searched for the source of the explosion. Mark the commander was still on the road checking cars with Netanel backing him up, neither of them seemed to have heard anything. I turned and looked down at the ground that I had just been lying on and understood that the sound of the explosion had been my helmeted head hitting the concrete floor and that I had fallen asleep on my feet and collapsed. I drank some water and tried to focus on the road and on Mark checking the Palestinians and on Netanel covering him.
When my first time manning the checkpoint finally arrived I was backing up Mark who was doing the questioning. I was standing about 20 feet away from him behind a concrete block with a couple of sandbags on it. I was locked and loaded and aiming my weapon at real people for the first time, I aimed my weapon at everyone he spoke to, young men of military age, fat middle aged men, old women, young women, pregnant young women. Who was a real threat and who wasn't? Was that bump a real pregnant belly or was it a cover for carrying a bomb, was the car going to blow up when Mark stopped it? Questions endlessly went through my mind when I was on guard, circumstances and scenarios endlessly played themselves out while I stood their aiming my rifle at everyone who went past.
The routine was pretty simple, the cars were all lined up in both directions and Mark would work the cars travelling from East to West or vice versa depending which direction had the heaviest traffic. One by one they showed us their orange ID cards and we looked at them pretending that they meant something to us before waving them through the check point. By four in the morning when we opened the checkpoint opened there was already a line of cars waiting to move from East to West and when we closed it at night the road was already deserted.
More often than not the cars were beaten up pieces of rust and metal that somehow seemed to chug their way down the asphalt roads to their destination, more often than not they were filled way beyond capacity. One time Mark summoned me from my post to inspect the rear of a vehicle. He lifted up the boot and exposed no less than seven sheep stuffed into the rear of the car. We looked at each other attempting to stifle our smiles while the moustachioed owner of the car stood awkwardly by.
There were mini buses and regular buses and beaten up cars and even the odd horse and cart and Palestinians, the first Palestinians I had ever met, the only people I had ever pointed a gun at and I pointed it at each and every one of them. Most of the time I saw them through the cross hairs of either my day or my night scope while I waited for one of them to make a move and earn one of my bullets. But no one did, I stood there time after time, concentrating as hard as I could while the boredom and the frustration and fatigue attempted to take me away to neverland.
I loved working the checkpoint it made me feel like I was doing something useful with my time rather than staring at the fields outside the back of the base listening to the snap crackle and pop of small arms fire coming from the units in the field carrying out their infantry drills. The week dragged on and on and on, everything was a battle, by the end of it I wasn't taking off my uniform or my boots before collapsing onto my cot, every guard shift was a test of will as to whether I would be able to stay awake and it was while guarding that we lost Oran.
So when we arrived back at the base it was in the spirit of hope, able to see the light at the end of the tunnel that resulted in us gaining the red beret and being treated more like real people than raw recruits. That hope was ripped from us with barely a word spoken. All three units were gathered together simply to hear "we are now going to be guarding the base, I am confident that you will carry out this duty in a way that best represents the traditions of the Paratoopers." And that was that. The captain had spoken and our immediate future had been set in stone. The Captain was a tall man, about 24 years old he originated in the Orev and once out of officer's course had originally been in charge of training within the unit. Administrative changes to the way that all three Paratrooper reconnaissance units were trained ensured that he was promoted and assigned to be in charge of the overall training for the August 2002 intake to all three special units. I had barely heard him speak and had almost no contact with him.
When I heard that we had guard duty coming up I was ecstatic, we all were, even Yuval hadn't heard anything negative about what was coming up, unfortunately he couldn't predict the lunacy of our Captain who had decided that guard duty would be conducted in two hour rotations. This meant that for 24 hours a day, every day we would spend two hours guarding and two hours resting. Green then made that worse by insisting that it was forbidden to go to sleep between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m.
Day and night the area rang with the sound of small arms fire, it was eerie in the night to hear weapons being fired constantly by one group of soldiers or another. When you're the one doing the shooting you notice the sounds of gunfire a lot less.
Guarding brought with it its own challenges, it was to be the first time I would have any contact with Palestinians as it included manning the checkpoint outside the base. There were a lot of different positions to be manned and the checkpoint was only one of them albeit the most interesting. Guard duty began with a whimper and continued in that fashion. The weather went from bad to worse which made me glad not to be in the field but since all of our tents seemed to be Korean War vintage and had US Army printed on them they provided little shelter for us, the holes in them ensured that when it rained we all got wet, when the wind blew we got cold and when both were happening at the same time the tents collapsed altogether.
At first I liked guard duty, no one was fucking with me and usually there was someone else in a guard post so nearby that we could chat. Each two hour shift finished quickly and after a quick nap it was off to the next one, no stretchers and climbing up hills or mountains and no assaulting dummy enemies at the top of a hill. After 24 hours of two hours on and two hours off guard duty I felt the pressure. The fact that we weren't allowed to put our heads down during the day ensured the maximum amount of sleep I could get at any one time was about one hour and forty five minutes. Soon I was counting every minute of my two hours off, weighing up every action on the basis of the amount of sleep I would lose doing it.
It started off with counting the amount of time it took to get from my guard post to my tent and trying to run in order to get there as quickly as possible but as time moved on other things would be entered into the equation. Do I spend the five minutes that it takes to brush my teeth? Do I spend the three minutes that it takes to get my uniform off? Do I spend the one minute that it takes getting my boots off? The longer the week dragged on the more every action simply became an obstacle to sleep, the first thing to go out of the window was showering. There was simply no way that I was going to give up on a massive 10-15 minutes of my sleep time in order to get clean only to stomp out of the filthy showers into the mud and get dirty all over again, it just wasn't going to happen. The next thing to go out of the window was brushing my teeth and I waited as long as humanly possible before wasting time going to the toilet.
After about three days I wasn't sure if I was awake or asleep at any given moment in time, entire shifts of guard duty would fly by leaving me unsure as to whether I had been asleep on my feet the entire time or genuinely guarding. Other times guard duty would seem to take hours and hours as I fought a mental battle to force my eyes to remain open. Once I was guarding at a position in the rear of the base along with Netanel the medic. There were two medics in our team and by the end of our service two more of our number would pass through medic's course and one of the two that started at the beginning would have been kicked out, but whenever anyone needed to call for a medic we always shouted out his name. I guess he simply fit the role. His parents had moved to Jerusalem from Canada and had insisted on speaking to him mostly in Hebrew so despite his heritage his English was halting. He was quiet and reserved but not shy, he earned the nickname Snake when Haim noticed that in some strange way he actually looked like one, the name stuck, I thought it was a much cooler nickname than 'Brity' which was what everyone called me.
We arrived at our guard posts covering the rear of the base, they were close enough to each other that we could chat from our positions but after a couple of minutes Netanel stopped answering. I brought my rifle up to bear and crept over to his position. I found him sitting on the concrete floor of his position hugging his legs with his knees up under his chin fast asleep. I tried waking him only to have him open his eyes briefly only to close them again, he was finished. Now it's utterly unacceptable according to the army for a soldier to fall asleep on guard duty but I could see that he was too exhausted to carry on so I spent the remaining time wandering between my post and his constantly shaking my head and slapping myself in a desperate attempt to keep myself from falling asleep in the same way Netanel had, I got him up a couple of minutes before our replacements arrived and we headed back to the tent to lie down.
Time went on in this way, we were kept awake during the day with various activities like races to field strip our weapons and put them back together again or working on our equipment and then at night we slept as best as we could in between shifts. When it looked like someone was falling asleep during the day time sessions he would have to stand and drink water, sometimes I watched guys fall asleep while standing up, when they did so we'd all stop what we were doing and watch them until someone started laughing and then we all started laughing and the noise woke them up.
The only really interesting place to guard was the checkpoint on the road in front of the base. We would open the road at about 4 a.m. when it was still dark and close it at around 10 p.m. The checkpoint consisted of a concrete barrier narrowing the road into just one lane and a position for a soldier to stand at and provide cover to another soldier who would check the vehicles and question the people in them. Both soldiers outside were covered by more soldiers sitting in bunkers at the entrance to the base giving them a panoramic view over the road, each was able to provide covering fire should it be needed. Next to guarding the checkpoint itself these were the next two most interesting positions to be in as at least there was something going on outside. If the checkpoint were closed they were every bit as boring as every other position.
It was while standing in one of the bunkers overlooking the road that I heard an explosion. I had been standing in there watching the road trying my hardest to stay awake. It wasn't easy but I had developed a trick, I told myself to look at a fixed object, to tell myself details about it. "look at the rock, how would you describe it?" I asked myself, "well it's mossy and has plenty of stones around it, there are weeds around it too and it has a whitey grey colour." Unfortunately at a certain point I would become aware of the fact that my eyes were closed and that I had moved from thinking about the rock to dreaming about it. I blinked my eyes back open again and tried to find something else to stare at.
The scenario played itself out over and over again during the shift until I heard the crash! I opened my eyes and climbed off the floor, rifle at the ready and searched for the source of the explosion. Mark the commander was still on the road checking cars with Netanel backing him up, neither of them seemed to have heard anything. I turned and looked down at the ground that I had just been lying on and understood that the sound of the explosion had been my helmeted head hitting the concrete floor and that I had fallen asleep on my feet and collapsed. I drank some water and tried to focus on the road and on Mark checking the Palestinians and on Netanel covering him.
When my first time manning the checkpoint finally arrived I was backing up Mark who was doing the questioning. I was standing about 20 feet away from him behind a concrete block with a couple of sandbags on it. I was locked and loaded and aiming my weapon at real people for the first time, I aimed my weapon at everyone he spoke to, young men of military age, fat middle aged men, old women, young women, pregnant young women. Who was a real threat and who wasn't? Was that bump a real pregnant belly or was it a cover for carrying a bomb, was the car going to blow up when Mark stopped it? Questions endlessly went through my mind when I was on guard, circumstances and scenarios endlessly played themselves out while I stood their aiming my rifle at everyone who went past.
The routine was pretty simple, the cars were all lined up in both directions and Mark would work the cars travelling from East to West or vice versa depending which direction had the heaviest traffic. One by one they showed us their orange ID cards and we looked at them pretending that they meant something to us before waving them through the check point. By four in the morning when we opened the checkpoint opened there was already a line of cars waiting to move from East to West and when we closed it at night the road was already deserted.
More often than not the cars were beaten up pieces of rust and metal that somehow seemed to chug their way down the asphalt roads to their destination, more often than not they were filled way beyond capacity. One time Mark summoned me from my post to inspect the rear of a vehicle. He lifted up the boot and exposed no less than seven sheep stuffed into the rear of the car. We looked at each other attempting to stifle our smiles while the moustachioed owner of the car stood awkwardly by.
There were mini buses and regular buses and beaten up cars and even the odd horse and cart and Palestinians, the first Palestinians I had ever met, the only people I had ever pointed a gun at and I pointed it at each and every one of them. Most of the time I saw them through the cross hairs of either my day or my night scope while I waited for one of them to make a move and earn one of my bullets. But no one did, I stood there time after time, concentrating as hard as I could while the boredom and the frustration and fatigue attempted to take me away to neverland.
I loved working the checkpoint it made me feel like I was doing something useful with my time rather than staring at the fields outside the back of the base listening to the snap crackle and pop of small arms fire coming from the units in the field carrying out their infantry drills. The week dragged on and on and on, everything was a battle, by the end of it I wasn't taking off my uniform or my boots before collapsing onto my cot, every guard shift was a test of will as to whether I would be able to stay awake and it was while guarding that we lost Oran.
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