Anti-Semitism Jews and the UK | Marc Goldberg | Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel

Anti-Semitism in the UK is back on the radar and rightly so. It started two days ago when David Ward the Liberal Democrat MP for Bradford East became the latest person to use the Holocaust Memorial Day to lambast the Jews, 

Anti-Semitism Jews and the UK | Marc Goldberg | Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel:

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Beyond the Green Line: The Bad Jump

You'd think that after the first jump the worries about parachuting would have disappeared but it didn't work that way. For some reason the fear grew greater before each and every jump that I made. Perhaps it was the length of the long drawn out process that involved getting up in the early hours before dawn, the wait to get the parachute, the bus ride to the base and the wait to get on the plane followed by the flight and then the shuffle towards the door. All of it together served to cut up my nerves till they were red raw and serve them back up to me. I hated it, all of which served only to make the descent on the parachute that much more enjoyable. The float through the air and the knowledge that I had fought against my fears and overcome them made the trip down a gift I could enjoy from start to finish.

At the start of the course they had told us that each jump would be harder than the one before and that was true. The first jump had been without any equipment, the second had been with a bag containing all of my infantry equipment including my rifle. That bag sits in between the paratrooper's legs until after the jump, once the parachute has deployed there is a lever on the parachute rig that trooper pulls enabling the bag to drop down three meters. The bag is attached to the parachute harness by three meters of cable ensuring that it simply dangles there and actually serves as a marker for the paratrooper to know when he should brace himself for impact with the ground. Once on the ground he takes his gear out of the bag and is ready for war.

For my second jump I shuffled up to the door of the Hercules aircraft complete with bag between my legs and rather than waiting for me to jump of my own accord the jump instructor pushed me. Out I went screaming "21,22,23" and when I opened my eyes I found once again that the canopy had deployed, unfortunately something had gone wrong. One of the parachute cords had somehow twisted around my leg and I was suspended upside down. This realisation provoked a long moment of panic during which I started screaming at the parachute to "Give my leg back!" There was some fighting during which I pulled on my leg and reached up with my arms to try and get a grip on the offending cable long enough to release my foot. All the time this is happening I had this big bag of equipment pressing down into my nether regions and I was screaming at the parachute rig for being a complete asshole!

After a superhuman feat of exertion I managed to free my leg and immediately fall the right way up. Now all I had to do was pull the lever below my reserve chute and allow the equipment bag to drop down the three meters until the cable connecting it to the parachute rig went taught. This was precisely what my brain ordered my hand to do but my hand had an opinion all of its own. "Are you sure that this lever does actually drop the bag down three meters?" it asked back to my brain, "Yes I am, pull the lever" my brain responded, but still my hand wasn't so sure, "Are you sure that this isn't a special release lever for the whole rig and that pulling it won't simply see us fall out of the harness and to our deaths below?" "Ermmm, yes I am sure, pull the lever" the brain replied,"well you kinda hesitated for a moment there brain, are you sure there's nothing else you want to tell me?" The argument between arm and brain continued for a couple of moments until I pulled the lever and felt the reassuring drop of the bag from between my legs and the somewhat less reassuring tug on the rig as the cable went taught with the thing dangling beneath me.

I then hit the ground, rolled, released the chute and jumped up ready to fight another day.

The next jump was a night jump and the jump after that another day jump, the fifth jump was cancelled due to bad weather. Apparently four jumps was enough to qualify from the course and I had my silver wings and a ticket back to an evil pile of mud in the North of the West Bank.

Beyond the Green Line: Into the Slipstream

The last man on guard was Elisha who woke us up at four a.m., in darkness we scurried around getting our stuff together with the knowledge that our first jump into the abyss was upon us. Once dressed we assembled at the hanger where the parachutes packed by the pretty girls were distributed to each and everyone of us. We murmured to one another while we waited, shuffling along as one by one each soon to be paratrooper received their parachute rig.

Buses were waiting for us outside and we loaded everything up before setting off on the short drive to the Air Force base next door. It was my first experience with the Air Force and I hadn't considered the possibility that they had bases so big that it was actually possible for the bus to drive around inside for about 20 minutes before dropping us off next to the Hercules' aircraft that were to, in turn drop us over the nearby sand dunes.

We were safely deposited by the side of a runway next to a small corrugated iron shelter, we put on our rigs and then stood there waiting. Dawn had long since broken and the guys were chatting excitedly, for Yaar it was to be his first time ever on a plane and he was positively beaming. After a while a van pulled up and a couple of Air Force guys pulled out a trestle table and loaded it up with bread, cheeses, yoghurt, vegetables and a huge flask of hot, sweet tea. I had heard rumours that the Air force knew how to live and now they had proven it.

The others tucked in but somehow the thought of being dropped out of a big aeroplane from 300 meters up put me off, somehow I was the only one though, I stood aside and watched the others eat while trying to look as happy as they clearly were. Eventually the Hercules' aircraft lined up and taxied over to the various knots of soldiers waiting for their ride over to the drop zone. One Hercules stopped next to us and we ran on board just as we had been instructed, the hold eventually filled up with us and the Sayeret as well as some extra men sent on the course as a reward for impressive service elsewhere.

The noise was phenomenal while the Hercules taxied and sped towards a take off from the airbase and yet guys were singing, I didn't join in. Yaar still had that toothy grin on his face, I sat there listening to the huge propeller engines, my friends singing, Yaar smiling (which I could somehow hear) and my own heartbeat which was able to drown out the lot of them. The co pilot of the plane was Haim's next door neighbour and he stepped out of the cockpit with a camera, everyone leaned in to smile and I put the best of British effort into offering what ended up as a kind of petrified movement on the side of my lips that may have passed for a smile or look of terror depending on how kind the person the viewing the picture decided to be.

All too soon those iconic jump lights clicked on near the doors at the rear of the plane, these light look like mini traffic lights. When amber came on we all stood up and faced the doors at the back. The aircraft were circling the drop zone and I knew my time was coming. The light turned green and I could vaguely see the first soldiers jumping as I shuffled forward for my turn. Then there was a scuffle at the front and suddenly a soldier rushing towards the back of the plane. It was Omer, a soldier in the Sayeret he was rushing away from the open door with a look of pure terror in his eyes. I wasn't quite sure where it was that he was trying to get to and wherever it was he certainly didn't get there as no less than five jump instructors jumped on top of him, dragged him to the open door and threw him out.

This actually served to calm me down as at least now I knew that I didn't have to pluck up the guts to jump out of the plane myself but could rely on someone to kick me out of the door.

My turn came and I was standing at the door looking down on the sand dunes that constituted the drop zone far below. There was no pressure to jump as I stood there looking down, the jump instructor next to me was in his 50s and had a smile on his face. "Just put one hand on each side of the opening and don't look down!" he roared, don't look down? Too late for that but otherwise I did as I was told, the tips of my toes resting over the edge of the abyss. "Now push out just like you've been taught" and so I did and the slipstream had me, I was out of the aircraft screaming at the top of my lungs; "21, 22, 23" I had brought my knees up to my chest and my hands on my reserve parachute while I counted. With the three second free fall over I looked up to find, to my everlasting joy that the parachute had deployed exactly as it should and I was floating ever so gently towards the sand below me.

The build up had been a nightmare but the floating descent made it all worthwhile, I stared down past my dangling feet at the ground that was lazily coming closer beneath me while marvelling at the fact that I was being given this opportunity by the army. I could hear my friends shouting to one another, some had brought their cameras with them for the ride and were busy taking pictures. This was what it had all been about, all the fear and worry of the morning now exorcised by the ecstasy of floating through the air and the joy of knowing that I was doing so with the aid of a parachute that opened exactly as it was supposed to.

Soon enough the ground was rushing up to meet me, Shteelman had told us that the fall after a parachute jump is equivalent to jumping from a height of about three or four meters. I remembered all that I had been taught and simply allowed my knees to bend at the first impact with the ground, I rolled, hands on my head and my first jump was over successfully, save for the fact that a gust of wind had been caught by my parachute and I was now being dragged across the sandy ground. That wasn't a problem either, tugging on the release clips, one beneath each shoulder released the parachute leaving me only to fold it up, throw it over my shoulder and join my beaming comrades on the march back towards the road and the waiting vehicles.

The second jump was a different story altogether...

Israel Elections 2013

Well it's all up for grabs now and although the exit polls are known for giving an accurate picture the difference between Left and Right wing blocs is so tight that it is worth waiting for, with that in mind it's not too early to make a couple of preliminary observations.

For pretty much the whole election campaign supporters of the Right have been under the impression that they were going to win the election with a huge margin. It is possible that this attitude along with the lurch to the hard Right of Likud and the rise of Naftali Bennett and his Jewish Home party were enough to scare voters all over Israel to the ballot boxes out of fear of their policies.

The big surprise of the night has been Yair Lapid with an estimated 19 seats putting him right in the political centre and arguably giving him the most leverage in the horse trading that is to come, he can work with Likud and he can work with Livni and he can work with Labour he is his own man and is already being courted by Netanyahu for a position in the next government.

Netanyahu is now in an incredibly weak position, his own party faithful are likely to be livid with him for leading them to a massive fall in the number of Members of Knesset that they can draw upon for the next four years. Israel Beiteinu already announced that the two parties were going to separate after the general election and now nothing is certain.

After the internal strife wrought upon the Labour party (who I voted for) by Barak it's a miracle that they've been able to dust themselves off enough to pick up their predicted 17 seats. Although their leader Shelly Yachimovich has already announced that she won't join any government led by Likud in the horsetrading of Israeli politics it's entirely possible that we will find her in one nevertheless. As I am writing this I am listening to her promise to block efforts by Bibi to form any kind of government, if she is successful or at least if all parties to the left of Likud refuse to join him in a government Bibi will be forced to form a government so religious and so far to the Right that it will likely collapse under it's own weight within months. It was only Barak's decision four years ago to join Bibi that ensured his government lasted the distance. I doubt that he will find someone to provide him the same degree of unflinching support as his former military commander.

The situation will become clearer over the next couple of days, I am pleased to see the extent to which the belief that Israel has shifted to the Right are untrue and hope that a more representative government will end up in power.

Beyond the Green Line: Jump School

The bus took me all the way up to the gate of the base and with a smile on my face I marched through the drizzle to the guard post and presented my ID, after a cursory check the sergeant on guard let me in. It didn't take long to bump into Yuval who was jumping about and talking at 6000 words a second as if he was on speed. He couldn't stop smiling and although I couldn't understand anything he said I gathered that he was as happy to be there as I was. All the guys were hanging around chatting animatedly amongst themselves. It dawned on me that it was the first time that I had been on an army base that wasn't located in the West Bank since my induction, it was a nice feeling not to have to feel like being on enemy turf the whole time.

There were loads of different units there for jump training including the Sayeret, Duvduvan and Maglan. It really made me feel as if I was a part of the Special forces community to be going through the course with these guys. They had all come through the same gibush that we had and so we already knew a lot of them anyway and we quickly started swapping stories of our training. 

The base was located right next to a large Air Force base which was where we would go to board the aircraft that we would soon be jumping out of. All of the new units were ushered into a briefing room where a solid looking Colonel let us know that the first week of the course was where we would learning how to parachute and the second week was devoted to the five jumps that we would make to qualify as Paratroopers. Each jump was to be in some way more complex than the jump before, though the officer didn't elaborate exactly how that was to be the case, it seemed to me that a jump was a jump but apparently not.

It was December ensuring grey skies and the constant threat of rain, despite the fact that we were on a 'real' base instead of the mud hole of the advanced infantry training we were still sleeping in tents. The ground around the tents quickly turned into mud, it was as if the weather felt an obligation to ensure that even on parachute course we had to feel some level of discomfort, it was still advanced infantry training after all. 

We were given a jump instructor to teach us all of the necessities of landing on the ground or more precisely how to hit the ground after jumping from an aeroplane with a static line parachute. A reservist was responsible for the team's training, his name was Shteelman and he behaved exactly according to his name. I imagined him as the kind of Paratrooper that may have existed in Israel's past, the kind of man who would look at the mud filled tents we were sleeping in and shake his head at the luxury new recruits were allowed. He stood erect as though unbreakable and barked orders to us constantly, he looked as though a smile would have cracked his face apart.

At first it was easy, we just stood and practised how to fall, or rather how to hit the ground correctly. It wasn't complicated the trick was to let your knees go absolutely limp but behave as though both knees were connected so that when hitting the ground both legs immediately buckle and then go in the same direction, the rest of the body follows with hands up around my head. I can't lie it was a pretty civilised way to pass the time and there wasn't a stretcher in sight. 

Once we'd learned how to hit the ground we had to learn how to jump and there were a whole bunch of different harnesses and zip lines for us to use in order to practise parachuting. All of them involved being strapped into a rig that's exactly the same as a parachute only the straps are attached to a zip line or simply a spring high above giving a very small bouncing, bungee effect when jumping. Of course when it came time to start practising on these rigs it had never occurred to me that I might actually be afraid of heights, when it came time to jump from a height of three meters from the ground in a harness that my brain knew in no uncertain terms ensured I would certainly not hit the ground my body found itself unwilling. This was problematic to say the least, it was also hysterical to the rest of the guys.

And so I found myself standing on a platform above the ground in all my rigging supposed to jump off and yet hesitant. This was an obstacle to be overcome, a paratrooper who can't jump out of a plane is not a paratrooper. As one by one soldiers in the harness next to mine were strapped in and jumped I stood there gawping. In the end I closed my eyes and forced myself from the platform into the space beyond and was promptly supported by the 'bungee harness'. From that point on every jump was a problem but something that I was going to overcome or else risk never seeing my red beret.

The toughest obstacle was a ten meter high tower where we'd put on our rigging, jump and be carried along by a zip line. While moving down the zip line we'd have to execute a range of different manoeuvres such as releasing the reserve parachute that sat snugly on my stomach. We'd have to jump from this tower more times than I could count and every time I had a problem doing it. One time I was about to jump only to hear the instructor shout after me "no wait we haven't attached the harness properly!" It was too late, my centre of gravity had already shifted and I tumbled out of the tower with a scream only to be safely carried along by the zip line as I saw the instructors rolling around laughing in the tower out of the corner of my eye, in fact everyone down below was laughing too. I deployed my reserve parachute while muttering curses under my breath.

Despite the fact that we were in a real base with an actual functioning kitchen the food was awful, every meal seemed to consist of dried rice, hard boiled eggs and cream cheese. Once again I had taken the bed nearest to the tent flaps and so when the rain blew in it blew in on me. At one point we noticed that every time we entered the tent there was the worst smell in there. At first we all blamed Elad but he adamantly insisted it wasn't him, at which point I saw it on my sleeping bag. The cat that insisted on nesting on my sleeping bag clearly wasn't a big fan of the food on the base either and was responsible for the smell and another problem for me to have to deal with after he had insistently deposited a present on my sleeping bag time and again.

It rained, it rained often, the sky was grey and the weather gloomy and everyone decided it would be funny to talk to me in gibberish instead of Hebrew knowing that I couldn't tell the difference. I couldn't understand why everyone was suddenly shouting at me for not understanding various words, finally Yuval let me know why it was so funny, they found it hilarious but I just felt isolated. To make things even better Mark found me while I was on my way to the vending machine when everyone was supposed to be asleep. He wordlessly bid that I follow him to the tent housing our equipment, he took my M4 carbine from me and handed me a MAG machine gun. "This is your personal weapon now Marc, you take it with you everywhere when you sleep, eat and shit." That was the end of the conversation, I took my punishment silently and trudged through the mud back to my diarrhoea stained sleeping bag.

There was a plus side to having to carry the MAG around with me, the short British guy carrying around a gun that was as big as him made me a minor celebrity amongst all the other fighters. People would stop me to talk about what a ball breaker of a commander I had for making me carry the weapon around with me everywhere, I got the nickname 'plus' because I looked like a plus sign with the weapon on a strap across my waist and the guys stopped their teasing, even promoting me to the others as their friend with the MAG. So this was the first week of jump school, the second beckoned and so did those all important silver jump wings and all I had to do to get them was jump from the sky.

Beyond the Green Line: Proving Myself

By Sunday I was back on the base preparing to spend another week in the field. We wouldn't be seeing the base again for five days when we would get back in time for Shabbat with the knowledge that on Saturday evening as soon as Shabbat left us behind for another week we would be heading back out into the world beyond and whatever misery awaited us. That evening I stood with a pack on my back and the handle of a stretcher resting on my shoulder along with three others in my team. The stretcher was laden with ammunition and rations all a growing soldier needs for a week in the mud. We stood there not moving and barely talking all of us sensing each other's fear in front of the back gate of the base. 

Adrenaline was coursing through my veins, that evening and every single other evening before our descent into the wilderness I felt that same fear. I only knew that the week to come would be harder than the week before and since the week before had invariably been the hardest of my life the thought of the road not yet trodden was enough to get the adrenaline flowing. It's funny how I never realised what luxuries I had in the army until they were taken away from me. During boot camp we had two big tents for the 18 of us, with nice lockers in between each bunk and an entire hour at the end of each day of free time, not to mention the rule that we would each get at least 6 hours of sleep every night. That was completely forgotten on advanced infantry training, we lived in the field, our lives were cut down into constant infantry exercises at the end of which two of our number would be told that they had been wounded in the assault and now needed to be carried by stretcher. That was my life, 15 minutes for food and if we were lucky sleeping bags would be brought out to us by jeep at the end of the night so that we could sleep warm for a couple of hours, that was if let us sleep at all. Towards the end of the advanced training even that luxury was denied us and we had to make do with one blanket between two in the Winter Cold.

The shift in the training regimen meant that marches were now fewer and each was much longer than the one before. There was one march per month the first was 45km, the second 60km and the third and final march was from The sea to Jerusalem and was the 90km march where we would be awarded the red beret of the Paratroopers at the end. That was still a long way off, it was November and my fourth month in the army and the 45km march loomed large. The cold had set in and the fields around us had turned into mud, in the mornings mist and fog clung to the ground until what little sun there still was burned it away.

One morning I opened my eyes to the sight of the back of a pair of boots in front of me. It was Green and he was standing in the middle of the team. I instantly knew we had screwed up, whoever was last on watch was supposed to have us all awake and ready at a preset time and yet there Green was and we were still asleep. I did the only thing I could think of and closed my eyes, trying to go back to sleep, pretending it was all a nightmare, that Green wasn't there and that I still had hours to keep my eyes closed and my body still. 

When his voice came it was a mere whisper, "within 30 seconds you have packed everything up and the stretcher is in the air with Oran on it." I can't have been the only one feigning sleep because as one we all leapt up, stuffed the sleeping bags away, pulled our packs on and had the stretcher in the air. We had screwed up and now we were going to be punished. Off we went, Green led us up one hill and then back down and then back up and then back down. We struggled on and on, by this time we all were carrying bags on our backs, this was advanced training and we were in the field for a week, everything we would need we carried from the base into the field. 

We walked and we walked and we walked until the strain had me, until the pain in my shoulder was the only thing on my mind and all I yearned for was a couple of minutes to rest and a sip or two of water. We slept in our uniforms, we slept in our boots and with our weapons and we ate food that had been sealed in cans before we were born, this was life on advanced infantry training. I got through it by imagining what everyone back in London would say when I told them about the things I had done, I imagined how their faces would both light up and darken as I told them my various stories, my lips would silently move as I constructed my day dreams and my fairy tales while carrying that god awful stretcher. In all that time I never once considered quitting, my new mantra was "if the red beret was easy to get, I wouldn't want it!"

As the training worsened the atmosphere lightened, the bond between us grew and magnified as we witnessed each other under the greatest of stress. Those of us who could handle helping the others were in turn helped by the others, those who couldn't were left by the wayside. And so of the original 18 of us, two were lost by the end of boot camp, one at the start of advanced training and more would be gone by the end. 

When the 45km first march of advanced training came around and that awkward moment where we all looked down at the equipment arrived I figured my time had come. I reached down and picked up the stretcher, admittedly the lightest piece of equipment there but I had some serious fears to overcome. More pieces of equipment had been added since boot camp. There was now another jerrycan weighing in at 20 litres and another radio to be taken.

We had 45 km to go and the next day they would be letting us home again, we had survived our first month of advanced training and our reward was this march and then two weeks of jump school. Everyone knew that jump school was easy, that there was a dining room there with a kitchen which would serve us hot food every day and that we could take a shower there every day too and of course that we would be jumping out of an aeroplane five times!

The march began at dusk and at first everything was fine, I was at the front of the group with Green marching merrily along. He didn't stop or deviate from his route for anything, there was the occasional animal carcass on the ground and he would happily step on it and continue his mission to get us to some unknown place that was an ever diminishing number of kilometers away, though he would never tell us how many. And so we moved for 55 minutes of the hour and drank for the other five. It was around a third of the way in that we started to march up, and up and up. The incline was getting consistently greater and the straps of the stretcher were biting consistently deeper into my skin. It didn't matter how I adjusted them it was always problematic, too loose and the whole thing swung to the side pulling me off balance, too tight and I cut of the circulation around my shoulders, I was fading fast.

After twenty kilometers I had Omer pulling me by one arm and Elisha by the other, it was standard on a march for this to happen but it hadn't happened to me and it was what I had always dreaded. All feelings of self respect and dignity left me, I would cry out and shout at the people around me, Elad just laughed, Elisha ignored me while pulling my left hand and Omer constantly told me to give him the stretcher only to hear me shout back "NO!" To which he would shout something unintelligible back at me. Omer had passed the test for the Navy SEALS and they had wanted him badly but although he had passed the test it had also destroyed his motivation to serve with them. He had been so cold that the thought of spending the rest of his military service wet and shivering had sent him in the direction of the Paratroopers. He was tall, thin and bespectacled and an utter nerd more importantly he was half of the reason I was still able to move. The other half of the reason was Elisha, who was also tall, also a nerd and had found the strength to put his hand on my back on the very first march and propel me forwards, now, when I needed him once again he was there to pull me forwards.

So we continued, I sought out Haim at one point only to find him moving forward one foot after the other slogging the machine gun with him and I could hear Yuval jabbering away to Yoni at the back of the group as he tugged him forward. I had long since fallen towards the back of the team but I could still see the long antenna extending from Yaar's radio at the front of the group as he marched alongside Green as his radioman. 

We were a team now and we were all in this together.

I finished that march in a dead man's state, exactly the state that I remembered Yuval being in when he had carried the radio. I was groaning and my eyes were wandering around in my head but I still had the presence of mind to answer the questions put to me and to respond when someone spoke to me. I could feel an iron inside me, steel in my soul, I reached a point where the body demanded that I quit but my mind refused and ordered the flesh to continue. 

Everything was at stake, giving the stretcher up was out of the question, not because I couldn't do it, Omer would have taken it without saying a word, but everyone would have known. I would have broken the code, it would have been the same as the guys who chose to do push ups instead of run the sprints during the gibush my number would have been marked and the group would forsake me for those of our number, like Yuval, who could carry their load from start to finish even though they thought it might kill them. I didn't give up the stretcher and at 35kms in I somehow found my strength returning. I had gotten past the point of no return and made it to the other side. 

The march had taken us in a massive circle around the base, five kms from the end the evil stretcher came off my back, we put Oran on it and ran the rest of the way carrying him. The pillboxes were soon in view as we ran towards them in the black of night. Cheers came from the soldiers manning those pillboxes, the soldiers within them knowing that their turn at the 45km was the next day, they opened the gates for us while shouting encouragement as we ran through them stretcher still in the air, we ran all the way in and lifted the stretcher three times up and down while cheering our own achievement, month one was over, parachute course was coming and the next step on the path to becoming a paratrooper was upon us!

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Beyond the Green Line: The Only Good Arab is a Dead Arab

 For the other guys ‘home’ was everything that the word implied but for me it just meant going back to an empty apartment. I didn’t mind and in many ways saw it as an advantage of sorts. While they spent every spare moment talking about what they were going to do when they got home mine never really seemed to be much of a draw. The others were always going on about ema’s cooking and catching up with friends, when I went back to my flat I usually fell asleep straight away only to cart myself off to a bar on Tel Aviv beach where, too shy to actually talk to anyone, I got myself ludicrously drink and passed out on the cool sand. Only to wake up the next day wondering why I had bothered while patting down my pockets to make sure my valuables hadn’t been stolen while I’d been lying there.

That had begun to change with my first weekend out of the army but I still found myself shying away. This weekend Haim had told me that there was already a plan for the weekend and all I had to do was go with the flow. To that end I found myself standing outside my apartment on Ben Yehuda Street right near Tel Aviv beach waiting for him to pick me up on the very day that they let us out. I had passed out on my bed as soon as I made it home though I still felt my limbs aching from the hell of advanced training and didn’t want to be there, but I was the outsider and I needed their friendship a lot more than they needed mine. Someone had told me early on that your tzevet was everything and you had to give them everything. For me that meant when out of the army too. And so I waited outside in the balmy Tel Aviv autumn.

Before long Haim pulled up in his dad’s car and I jumped straight in. We were heading out to Friday night dinner at his aunt and uncle’s house in a Tel Aviv suburb. We entered into the house as the light from the dying sun filtered through the leaves of the trees lining the street. Haim’s parents were sitting in the house talking to their family and two other middle aged couples who I later found out were friends of his aunt and uncle. Everyone seemed to jump up when we walked in, everyone was smiling and warm hugs by way of introduction were plentiful, I was immediately treated like one of the family despite the fact that I had never even met the hosts. The table was already filled with hummus and other delicacies that were once known only in the Middle East. Haim’s aunt ushered me to my seat at the table and his uncle read out the blessings over the wine and the bread before we sat and began to eat.

There was something comforting about hearing those blessings, everywhere around the world families would be standing reciting the same words together. The Hebrew words spoken in Jewish houses the world over every Friday night around sunset are a part of what brought so many of us from the four corners of the world together in Israel. Here in this unfamiliar home amongst strangers I felt a continuity, a kinship with these people who performed the exact same ritual that my own family would be performing that same night all the way over in London. We sat together and broke bread. I was seated opposite one Haim's aunt's friends.

Haim had 2 cousins there, one of whom was a combat medic in the Sayeret he had already gone through his training and was on active duty operations in the West Bank, the other was a non-combat soldier. Despite the fact that the atmosphere was light and jovial talk quickly turned to a recent terrorist attack, being in the army I hadn’t heard anything about it. A terrorist had broken into a kibbutz in the centre of the country and gunned down five people, including a mother and her two sons, one was just five years old and the other only four. The woman sitting across from me looked me straight in the eyes and said to me “I’m utterly Right wing, as far as I’m concerned the only good Arab is a dead Arab.”

Beyond the Green Line: Hell

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!

Beyond the Green Line: Within Sight of Advanced Training

Whereas everything before Field Week had been difficult everything afterwards was easy. The second two months flew by, the weekly marches got longer and harder but we quickly fell into the routine of getting through them as best we could. The small missions were also easier as we fell into the rhythm of completing them. It became a known fact that every time Ran or Alon or the Sergeant gave us a time frame Asaf would immediately be in charge of keeping time, there was no question that we wouldn’t be able to be standing back in the same formation that we had been in when the task was handed down.

The culmination of Boot Camp was a 30km march with full equipment which included the dreaded jerrycan the weight of which had so devastated me at the start of training. The day of the march a ritual had emerged, one of the commanders would come to us each hour for several hours and stand with us while we each drank a pint and a half of water. The day would consist of light activities such as preparing equipment or some kind of classroom lesson on radios or weaponry and also we would be given time to work on our equipment. Although it’s easy to say work on equipment was never complete, each and every one of us worked hard to personalise the standard kit that the IDF had issued us with to make it more comfortable for use. Laces were tied to magazines to make them easier to pull out from the pouches, anything that could fall off the combat vests that we were issued was clipped or tied to us in some way so that once we were in combat no one would find any piece of equipment left behind. We even burned away the manufacturer’s logo from the outer soles of our boots.

Once the march was upon us we would all stand around the extra pieces of equipment staring at them waiting for one of our number to be the one to step and take them. It was always an awkward time. Those who had already carried a piece of equipment felt less pressure to carry anything on the next march but as time went by the length of the marches grew and therefore so did the strain of carrying these extras. There was a radio, a 10 litre jerrycan and a stretcher and an uncomfortable silence as the 18 of us looked at them. Awkward, pained expressions and eyes that flitted from face to face of the rest of the team characterised the few minutes it took for the brave ones to step forward.

On the 17km march Yuval had opted to carry the radio on his back, the march was carried out after a week in the field and the terrain wasn’t the flat of the desert but the hills of the North. I remembered the strain he was under as one person took each of his hands and pulled him forward. I could hear him even though he was being pulled and pushed at one end of the group and I was at the other. He wasn’t the only one, once the equipment was on your back it wasn’t coming off, on the first march I had made the mistake of removing the jerrycan but it wasn’t something that ever happened again. It didn’t matter how much pain you were or how much the straps bit into your skin as the equipment slipped and slid around on your back. It didn’t matter that no matter how much you tried to tighten the straps or loosen them you would never find any degree of comfort just hours of pain.

Seeing a soldier being pulled and pushed by one or sometimes more of his comrades was a familiar sight on a march, even when you didn’t have an extra piece of equipment you were expected to help those who did. The marches went on through the night and sometimes they never seemed to end. I would hope and pray for the light of dawn so that I would know our time on the move was coming to a close, but during the darkest moments of the march it felt as though the night would stretch on forever. The pace was unrelenting; 55 minutes of movement, 5 minutes to drink and then on again until the objective was reached. The worst part was that for our commanders it all seemed so easy, they could run from the front of the group to the back, they could talk to any one of us along the way with even breath and a voice that screamed just how free of any real effort this was for them.

When it came to the final march of Boot Camp we had that uncomfortable moment where everyone looked at the equipment lying on the ground, I was still too scarred by that first march to take anything. Eventually another three stepped forward, took the equipment and we were ready to go. The small hills and dunes of the area surrounding our base made it an easy march, the knowledge that we were getting a week off starting the next day also helped. I remember turning around and seeing that even Yoni, the one who had the greatest difficulties on each march was in a sound state with his head up and was even able to talk normally!

With Boot Camp over I had a week to go back to London and visit my family and friends, but when I came back I knew that I had the horrors of Advanced Infantry training to come and it was going to be during the Winter.

Italian mobsters could be freed due to faulty printer - Europe - World - The Independent

Italian mobsters could be freed due to faulty printer - Europe - World - The Independent:

Dozens of convicted Italian mobsters face early release thanks to an administrative error caused by a faulty printer.

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Israel President Warns of New Palestinian Uprising - ABC News

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A Shadow Falls

I can feel it coming, the darkness descending upon us and I don't know from where to find the light. The use of patriotism as an excuse for cruelty is being broadcast all around me and there's nothing I can do about it but stand idly by and steel myself to vote for the other guy, or in this case woman. You never know, you can never foretell who is going to be infected by the ideas of hatred, it could be a self made millionaire it could be a university professor, the old model of the mass of poor people clinging on to the promises of politicians no longer holds water it appears. The very leaders of our ancient religion are in many cases the inspiration behind laws that would cause suffering and pain to many.

When the Right wing was elected four years ago things were set in motion that can still be undone, a vote for fear is what brought them in but the fear did not stop with their election. Indeed the very fear which they trumpeted as an election technique continued throughout their rule aided by a leader of the Left who betrayed his own voters in order to be rewarded with a position of power. We pay the price for his short sighted nonsense.

The fear didn't stop and the economic catastrophe that has befallen us since and the fear of the people has only grown. But of what is everyone so afraid? Is it Europe? The economy? Palestinians? Iranian nuclear weapons? An unfriendly American Defense Secretary?

These are not our real fears, our fears lie far deeper, they are more substantial than any fleeting terror, our fears are for our country, we fear that we will wake up tomorrow and it will not exist. These fears are more likely than any of the above to make this scenario come true. As we work harder to force a solution on our terms we'll find that the peace we so desperately seek eludes us even more and the fears that are so ingrained become a self fulfilling prophecy.

Beware of those offering the quick fix, the smooth talkers with their simple, though nonsensical solutions that will drag us all too willingly down their slippery slope towards nothing shy of evil.

So as per usual in the name of all things that are great and wonderful the country looks set to bring in politicians who tell us to our faces through smiles just what kind of extreme intentions they have and we are going to give them a mandate to do it. They wave our flag and smile their smiles and underneath it all is divisive politics, an 'us' and a 'them' and when their plans inevitably fall to pieces 'they' will be to blame. It's not too late though, it's possible that the 31% undecided voters can make the difference. This isn't about Left and Right any more, it's about Right and Wrong, it's about those who would lead us to catastrophe and those who can  pull us back from the brink and it's by no means certain what the outcome will be but it's not looking good.

Beyond the Green Line: Purity of the Rifle

With Field Week behind us it was time for everyone to receive their own particular special weapon and learn how to use it. The team was broken up for a week of training, I was with my marksman’s day and night scopes, Haim was given a big Belgian FN MAG machine gun, Asaf a Russian made RPG and Yaar was utterly disappointed when presented with a radio set and told that he was to become the radioman. Other pieces of equipment included Negev machine guns and the uber cool looking M203 grenade launchers that sit under the barrel of the M16.

For me the week involved classroom lectures about how to use the different scopes especially concentrating on the way that the crosshairs were setup to tell the marksman where to aim for various ranges. We shot day and night at the range shooting at various different distances and different positions. There were four of us there from the Orev, another 4 from the Sayeret and another from the third unit being trained with us in the plugah called the Palhan, this was the unit that dealt with explosives.

So the 12 of us were pitched against each other every time and I was desperate for us to come out on top. Everyone had volunteered for the Sayeret at the start of their service but now that we were in our various places we were all about proving that we were the best despite not being chosen for the most ‘elite’ unit. We started on cardboard targets 50 meters away and worked through to metal targets at 250 meters. There was nothing as satisfying as hearing the loud ping bounce back from such a distance telling me that aiming well above the target had ensured a hit at that distance.

Shooting at night was the most exciting, the walk to the range was nothing like when following the sergeant, for this one week of boot camp we were all treated like normal people. Times were given for tasks but they were actually long enough to get the job done. The punishments never came and for the first time I was actually having fun. At meal times the whole plugah ate together at the base and we swapped stories about the courses we were on. Yuval was particularly excited by his new grenade launcher. Usually me, him and Haim ate together. Yuval was a baby faced soldier who grew up in the same area as Haim and who was desperate to prove that despite his baby face he could make it through the training. He strutted around the plugah with his new M16 and under slung grenade launcher like he was Rambo, he loved his new weapon every bit as much as I loved mine. Later on he would be nicknamed “Baby” not just because he looked liek a newborn but for his habit of whining, he also had a natural talent for finding out information, both during boot camp and throughout our army service. If I wanted to know what was going to happen in the next week I asked Yuval, if I wanted to know how to get hold of something I asked Yuval.

The weapons courses were a good way of getting through another week of boot camp and they were followed by yet another easy week. We were bussed up north to the same base that I had spent 3 weeks in before my service to learn about the concepts of “purity of the rifle”. Ultimately the week was to teach us in what circumstances we were permitted to open fire over and above the rules of engagement. Our officer showed us video clips I clearly remember one from the film Platoon where the soldiers run amok in a Vietnamese village. One of their friends had just been killed and they took out their aggression on nearby civilians. Our officer pointed out the lack of control that commanders exercised over their men, the lack of discipline. It seemed odd to hear him talk of discipline, seeing as how I never so much as had to march in step, or shine my shoes, even saluting had been dropped after a couple of weeks. But he was referring to a different kind of discipline, a discipline that comes into effect when a soldier stands before a civilian and there is only his own sense of morality preventing him from doing wrong.

I had never before considered myself in that position, as holding power over the life of a civilian. My fantasies of war had involved being locked in mortal combat with an enemy who I would ultimately and heroically vanquish, the thought of dealing with civilians hadn’t entered into the equation. There is a written code for the principals of the soldiers in the IDF, a code of conduct that stresses the sanctity of human life and emphasises the responsibility that soldiers have when in the field. We were each given a laminated business card size document that outlined the principals we were being taught to keep with us at all times.

Outside of these lessons the Sergeant was in charge. He delighted in devising innovative ways to keep us awake and alert. One of his methods was to place a plastic bag in a large bin, fill the bin with ice and water and then time how long we were able to hold our breath underwater. I lined up for my turn surprised by how bad the records being set by my friends were. When it came my turn I happily dunked my head into the bin utterly unprepared for the fact that the moment my head entered the water the freezing cold forced the breath from my lungs. I held on for another 10 seconds but had to come up for air only when I tried a hand on the back of my head prevented me from rising, only for a moment, before allowing me to grab the desperately needed air.

That was just one of his in between lesson tools, he had other methods in mind for punishment. When we lost a football match against the Sayeret he lined us up and walked up the line hitting each of us with a tree branch. “My team lost!” he shouted, “utterly unacceptable”. Ran joined in with the action with a branch of his own. The really strange part of this was that it made us love him even more. Instead of cries there were suppressed giggles as he walked past us with his branch, we were all in it together and the Sayeret was watching. There simply wasn't anything so sweet as knowing that we were having a harded time during training than they were. There at that base our Sergeant made a mockery of the level of discipline imposed on the supposedly ‘better’ Sayeret by physically beating us and he always did it while they were watching.

This was the genius of our Sergeant, he didn’t shout at us nor did he attack us with malice, he simply imposed illegally harsh standards upon us precisely when we, the soldiers who weren’t accepted to their unit of choice, needed it. There was no difference between the man who whispered the answers to me in that first test and the man who ruthlessly punished us for losing a football match, his intent was always to make us better soldiers and he did. Once, when we were in the push up position on our fists and he walked up and down the row of us kicking us in the stomach he simply said “do you think Hezbollah would go easier on you?”

By the end of boot camp he was no longer with us, word had got out to the powers that be what he had been doing to us and he was sent to prison a couple of months for it, I never saw him again during my army service yet he influenced me all of the way through. Alon and Ran also left us behind at the end of boot camp, they went on to officer school. So we were left with our officer and 3 new commanders who were to put us through the horrors of advanced infantry training.

What's Wrong With Chuck Hagel? | Marc Goldberg | Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel

What's Wrong With Chuck Hagel? | Marc Goldberg | Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel:

If all of the speculation is to be believed President Obama is likely to appoint former US Senator Chuck Hagel as his next Secretary of Defense. Although this is still just speculation it is being reported in just about every media outlet and has caused more than a little controversy among the pro-Israel lobby.

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Beyond the Green Line: Into the Field

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.