צה''ל - The ultimate melting pot, Masaot, בוחן מסלול, l500 schnitzels, and tear gas!

Everyone always says that the Gdudim (regular infantry units) are the melting pot of Israeli society. You can’t really appreciate that fact until you experience it first-hand. My kita of 16 people consists of Olim Chadashim from Russia, North America, and Australia, Israelis, people aged anywhere from 18-24 (I’m not even the oldest!), mature and immature, religious and secular, kibbutznik and non-kibbutznik, and Ethiopians as well. I don’t think I ever expected this much diversity. Despite all this, everyone gets along for the most part (minus the occasional miscommunication due to a language/cultural barrier here and there) and helps each other out as much as possible. As these 3 weeks have gone by, I have already noticed that everyone is starting to work really well together.

Week one felt somewhat like I was back in high school – only with much less sleep and much more discipline. We had classes on the M16 and then began shooting at the shooting range. We started our מד''ס, or workouts, ranging from simple 15 minute runs with all sorts of strength training (all kinds of variations of pushups, ab workouts, and pull ups) to short runs with all our equipment on (vest with helmet, 6 full magazines, 1.5 L of water, and of course our guns).  We were also introduced to the בוחן מסלול, or obstacle course, which is a 1.5 km run including 500 meters of obstacles, run in full gear. The obstacles consist of a 2 m high wall, monkey bars, hurdles, crawling, climbing 3 meters up a rope, and then some. It may sound simple now, but for some people it’s moderately challenging doing the obstacles themselves, let alone attempting them in full gear, which is at least another 8 pounds. The whole 1.5 kilometer course needs to be completed in less than 10 minutes as part of training. We practiced the obstacles several times this week, and I managed to do the 600 meter run followed by 500 meters of obstacles in just under 7 minutes 30 seconds. For now, I think I’m on the right track, but I definitely need to improve my performance on the obstacles themselves.

After each of my first 2 weeks on base I was lucky enough to get the weekend off. Days themselves go by slowly because each day goes from wake up at around 5 AM to bedtime at 10 PM with only an hour of free time before lights out to shower, relax, and call friends/family. On the other hand, the week on the whole goes by fairly quickly because we’re so busy, especially come Thursday night when everyone knows that all that stands between us and home sweet home is a moderately intense cleaning session on Friday morning. One of the many perks of being a chayal boded (lone soldier) is that no matter where you live, you get to leave base 2-3 hours earlier than everyone else on Friday mornings in order to get home well before everything closes down for Shabbat and buy groceries for the weekend. As tough as it gets to be here every once in a while, the feelings come and go, and knowing that the worst, or should I say most challenging is yet to come helps a little bit – 80 km march in full gear and then some!! I can already see why Israelis on the whole are such amazing people – after going through the army, especially the approximately 7 months of training for a combat soldier, they have the ability to view anything as achievable and believe that nothing is impossible – as we are constantly reminded of everyday.

We have also started one of the most dreaded (or anticipated, depending on who you ask) parts of training: מסעות (marches). So far we have completed a 4, 6, and 8 km march. For the 8 km march, I had the honour of carrying the radio (yes it is considered an honour, all 20 pounds of it) for the entire march. As if the added weight on top of your basic weight of 8 pounds isn’t enough, carrying the radio means that you walk upfront with the commander and every couple minutes have to run back to everyone walking in the 2 lines behind you to fill them in on what the commander wants them to do. Doing so, you end up doing probably 20% more walking than everyone else. The walking is done at a fairly quick pace – 6-7 km per hour, and for the last kilometre of the masa, the stretcher is opened up and we load it up with around 70 kg of sand. At one point around halfway through, we reached a very steep hill. One of my friends who was carrying the stretcher on his back and was having a rough time the entire way starts to give up. He stops where he is, saying that he can’t do it and can’t make it up the hill. Immediately, my commander turns around to him, grabs him by the shirt, and starts pulling him up the hill, screaming at him “you are going to finish this masa... there is no such thing as I can’t... everything is possible.” He proceeds to drag him up the entire hill, along with the help of everyone else who pushes each other in order to help with the climb. I get the feeling that events like these will occur more and more frequently as training gets harder. Something viewed as impossible very quickly will change to a challenge and then once performed successfully will seem as no big deal at all. This is the kind of attitude being nurtured here, a good preparation for the 80 kilometre march which we will be doing at the end of our advanced training in 6 months, with some people carrying upwards of 30 kilograms on their backs. Even though it’s a bit uncomfortable during the march itself and of course a challenge, the feeling at the finish is worth it, especially arriving back to our platoon with tons of snacks waiting for us to feast on.

This past week we spent 2 full days in the classroom learning first aid, but with a more significant purpose in mind – each of us will be responsible for one another in the future and even something as simple as putting on a bandage to stop bleeding or a tourniquet if needed could save a friend’s life. Ironically, the next 3 days we spent at the shooting range, having advanced from calibrating our weapons to now practicing getting into different positions and firing 5 bullets on target in the span of 8 seconds. It is made much easier by the fact that we now have our scopes configured.

Each platoon in basic training takes turns contributing to the base itself in the form of kitchen duty and שמירות (guarding), and my second week on base it was our turn. We had already started on the previous Thursday night with a simple guarding shift from 12 midnight until 2 AM (of course after being awake since 5 AM doing other things). It was probably one of the more mentally challenging things I’ve done in the past 3 weeks forcing myself to stay awake, but I can definitely appreciate its significance. Not seeing or hearing a single person for 2 straight hours is something I’m definitely not used to especially after being in the army for 1 month already. It was almost like I had privacy for 2 hours. I then got to sleep for around 6 hours before I had to wake up for my next 2 hour guarding shift, which was many times easier considering I was guarding during daylight and after a normal (army) length of sleep. This was the first weekend I had the privilege of spending on base and it really wasn’t so bad. Friday night dinner reminded me somewhat of Friday night dinners at Chabad in London, only instead of a couple hundred people to feed, enough food/salads were prepared for 600+ people. Given the fact that we were around 100 people cleaning up the dishes (don’t forget we were still on kitchen duty), it took us only one and a half hours to clean up everything after dinner, including washing the dishes by hand because you can’t use the dishwasher on Shabbat, which is not so bad.

Having to spend the entire week doing guard duty and kitchen duty is probably one of the least interesting weeks you can have in the army. At one point during my day of kitchen duty, me and 3 other people were put into a room and assigned the simple task of preparing only 1500 shnitzels for the entire base. To top that off, the next day when those 1500 schnitzels were being eaten, me and my fellow soldiers were tasked with cleaning the dishes and cutlery needed for those 1500 soldiers to eat – not a simple feat at all. However, it was not bad at all because people here know how to have fun doing anything – even making 1500 schniztels. Anyone who came into the room must have thought it was some kind of audition for American Idol or Kochav Nolad, with the amount of singing going on there. Even when one person got fed up someone immediately jumped in with some words of encouragement to keep them focused on the task. The work was made much more doable by the fact that we were right beside the bakery part of the kitchen where they were baking fresh buns, which we would conveniently have someone bring in for us to taste test very frequently.

Every time you have a week of kitchen and guard duty, you get 1 day of the week to complete a part of your training that you did not get to complete, or work on something that needs more practice. For us, this meant finally throwing a grenade! As part of a combat soldier’s basic training, each soldier is required to throw a grenade. After having several hours of classes on the theory behind grenades, types of grenades, safety, etc, we were all geared up to throw them 2 weeks ago. We even had to throw rocks several times to practice the throwing technique and practice what to do if a grenade is accidentally dropped or thrown close by. However, only 4 people ended up throwing because too many grenades were being thrown and not exploding due to some unforeseen technicality. Throwing the grenade was VERY exhilarating, and gives a huge adrenaline rush, especially when required to run up a huge hill to the fortified area where you throw it. I was so caught up in the moment that after throwing the grenade and running back down the hill to the waiting area I realized that in all the excitement I still had the safety pin on my finger, so I decided it would make a nice keychain...

Finally, one of the last things we did this third week on base is אב''כ, or biological and chemical warfare. We had classes on how to prepare for a chemical/biological attack, and learned how to properly use our gas masks. In order to truly test our gas masks and be sure that they really are sealed tight, we were brought to the ‘gas tent’. After putting on our masks and running around for 5 minutes to get us breathing heavy, we had to enter a tent filled with tear gas. A couple push ups later (to keep us breathing hard), and after making sure we didn’t feel anything with our gas masks on, we had to take them off. At first I thought it was a joke, that there wasn’t anything in the tent. Then after a couple seconds I felt my eyes start to burn, and a burning sensation at the back of my throat. The commander inside the tent then asked me the simple question: what is your army identification number? I tried to list the 7 digit number, but got stuck after 3 digits, and really had to struggle to say the last 4. By the time my 10 seconds in the tear gas were up, I was gagging and coughing like never before, and proceeded to run outside the tent. There, my fellow soldiers who had just done it were waiting for me, with huge smiles on their faces, laughing at the hideous face I must have made when I emerged from the tear gas filled tent. Nonetheless, they approached me and helped me run into the wind to help clear it out of my system. Although it was a very uncomfortable experience, it only lasted 5 minutes, and going through it with friends made it much more bearable.

In the coming weeks, I have several things to look forward to. First, this upcoming week, is parents day on base. Me being a lone soldier and all, I am going for a “day of fun” outside the base along with the many other lone soldiers, while all the Israeli soldiers have their families visit them on base, giving them a tour and probably enjoying a huge home cooked meal. Second, in less than 3 weeks, I will be having my swearing in ceremony at the Kotel, which promises to be a meaningful and very moving experience. Finally, how could my army experience be complete without a week in theשטח  (field). Rumour has it that it is one of the roughest weeks during basic training, but I’ll leave that for my next update!