The training pace is picking up. The hikes are getting longer, there's more running and crawling and we are shooting more and more. The specific details of how various training is carried out is classified, but can easily be imagined. We generally get 6 hours of sleep, so exhaustion is not as much of a problem as it could be. When my squad guards at night, each person has to wake up to do his half hour. In those cases 5 hours of sleep is the most you can hope for. We are all getting more and more comfortable in our vests, learning to use the pouches, and attaching strings to everything. Most items that one puts in one's vest, and some that go into the pants pockets, have to have strings attached for convenience and to lessen the chance of losing the item. Tape is also widely used to tighten up loose ends. Between two types of tape, string and a lighter, one can pretty much "improve" all of one's equipment. This "improvement" is mainly to save time when the equipment is used, and time is probably one's most precious commodity. If you can get ready to do something in 4 minutes instead of 5, that's pure gold in the army environment.

Of course, there are also the duller aspects. There's kitchen duty, generally a full day once every two weeks. A lot of people, including myself, view kitchen duty as a break from working hard and we rather enjoy it, especially the long breaks we are able to get away with. There's also the rotational duties of guarding the base itself, which is quite boring and has little actual use aside from accustoming us to wearing the equipment and using the radio.

Everyone is expected to become at least a decent shot, so we have been spending quite some time at the shooting range. It takes some time to get used to one's gun, as not all guns are identical. They need to be adjusted and you have to develop a feel for the gun and for how you position your body. As my commander put it, in an ever-so-cliche manner, "you have to be one with the bullet." I don't know if it's my Russian connection (Russians are the best shots) or if I just get a lot out of my religious observance, but I am doing as well at the 50 meter distance as I did at 25, and that should mean success at 100 meters as well. There's only one guy in my company who is a better shot, but only in daylight. We have started practicing twilight and night time firing, which is obviously much less accurate, but clearly highly applicable. Apparently, I can see at night, because most people can't even hit the target, and I seem not to have those problems.

We have still not gotten our sighting mechanism and are shooting with the naked eye, although that is about to change. The kids who are having problems are taken to shooting simulators, where they basically play an arcade type video game and a sophisticated computer monitors every detail of their body positioning. They can then adjust accordingly. Aside from some special cases, the majority of guys will end up being accurate enough.

Aside from pure military content, there has also been a good dosage of classes that emphasize Zionism, Israeli military history and Judaism. I guess the IDF has moved beyond its socialist days and the top brass is realizing that secular Israeli kids need serious strengthening of their Jewish identity and their connection to Eretz Israel. Most people admit, if grudgingly, that it is the disproportionate presence of national-religious soldiers in the IDF that has transformed the army from a bearer of socialist/atheist/progressive ideas into more of a Jewish army with an emphasis on allowing the full range of Jewish observance and on holidays. Hannukah, which commemorates Jewish military prowess in the times of 2nd Temple, was emphasized heavily, which I am very happy about. Coming back from a hard march late at night, gathering around to light the Hannukiah, reciting the blessings and then singing Hannukah songs, in full equipment and war paint - that's a pretty rousing experience.

A note on food - they are feeding us a tremendous amount of calories, I counted that I consume about 4,000 per day, and I am a small guy. I don't burn more than that, so my weight is constant. I have been told though, that they are trying to fatten us up in the beginning. We will be having weeks of living and doing various training in the field and there will be a lack of food relative to the amount of daily activity. Clearly, this leads to weight loss. So, the IDF wants to make sure no one loses too much weight once the field training really starts. Otherwise, the chance of injuries drastically rises. Quick weight loss stresses the body, and if you're carrying weight over long distances and working out hard at the same time, you can easy get injured. Hence, we should still have some fat before things get more intense. That's the logic anyways.

I have a visitor from the States this weekend, who's here on one of those ridiculously subsidized 10 day trips. I got the weekend off from the army and it's really great to be with people from my pre-Israel days. The world is quite small though, so there's no reason why the connections that I made in the past should wither. Quite the opposite, they can grow in a new way. My current visitor is one of my best friends and there are other best friends who should make their way over here to the Eretz Israel, the ever-growing and ever-improving Land of the Jewish People. Israel is the center, and the off-shoots are contracting, coming back to the source. You can't argue it or fight it, you can only deny it.