Heavier Weapons and Fieldcraft

Last week, six guys from each platoon were sent to heavy weapons courses or to a driving course. The driving course is for APC's (armored personnel carriers), and is, frankly, quite a waste of time. The IDF rarely uses them and after the recent war in Lebanon, an Israeli general would have to be functionally retarded if he thinks he can transport his soldiers around in what are basically armored coffins. The Hizbollah has the new Russian Kornet anti-tank missle that can be fired by a mobile crew of three, and it is making the IDF's tank corps rethink how it operates. The APC's are completely helpless in combat in a mountainous or built up area and no amount of re-strategizing will change that. It may still be worthwhile to go into an Arab village in the Judea or Samaria in an APC, since Hamas doesn't have anti-tank missles yet. But if soldiers need only be protected from small arms fire, an armored Jeep would be better, faster and cheaper.

Most of the guys were sent to heavy weapons courses for such destructive wonders as the automatic grenade launcher - it requires a crew of four and fires 100's of grenades (actually small shells) per minute. This is an amazing piece of equipment, it basically provides short range artillery firepower. Another heavy weapon some of my friends trained on is the mortar, your well-known support weapon whose real worth is in it's ability to shoot accurately over an obstacle to hit the intended target. Finally, we have the .50 caliber Browning machine gun. This thing was designed in 1906, used in World War I and is, still, 100 years later, absolutely the best heavy machine gun in the world. Because you have to be quite strong to carry them around, the guys that were sent to train on these weapons were the bigger, stronger ones. I am a relative weakling, so the heavy weapons aren't for me. Most of us didn't attend these courses and spent last week doing a little bit of everything - running, shooting, guarding, taking care of equipment, cleaning, resting. There was a two day period where the guarding and training occured, in an alternating basis, for 48 hours straight, so the lack of sleep was painful.

This week, however, is the real story. It is dubbed "Fieldcraft Week" and is basically five days of what can only be described as torture. We started it off by not sleeping on Saturday night and preparing all of our equipment instead. At 2:30 am on Sunday morning, we marched out, each carrying an average of 70 lbs, in heavy rain and freezing wind, and spent two painful hours covering hilly, muddy ground to get to a barren, windswept hillside where we "slept" for a few hours before starting the day. The five days that followed are hard to describe. We lived in the field, sleeping in worthless old sleeping bags on the cold ground without even a basic tent. We averaged 3 hours of sleep per night, and it was sleep interrupted by ever-annoying guard duty. We ate 2 meals a day of dry rations, and since there wasn't much food in each rations box and we were given an absurdly small window of time to eat it in, the hunger effect was easily achieved. But, as bad as the lack of sleep, exposure to the FREEZING Negev nights, and undereating were, the actual substance of what we did was even harder.

We spent the days, and most of the nighttime as well, marching around with our equipment, practicing various small unit maneuvers, carrying the "wounded." This last part is the most painful exercise ever. You are already exhausted because you are never allowed to take your fully loaded vest off, even when you sleep. Since you also carry additional packs on and off over the course of the day, and wear yourself out crawling and walking up hills, your body goes into a certain state of shock. Having very little sleep makes the situation even worse. To then be forced to carry each other over that same rough terrain is taking the human body and asking it to go above and beyond.

I can't relate in words the feeling of carrying a stretcher. You have an angry pain in your shoulder from where the handle digs into the bone and muscle. You completely forget that before you lifted the stretcher you thought your personal vest and pack alone were tough to carry. Your eyes are focused on the ground, as there's no trail and you are negotiating holes, bushes and rocks. Your back aches from the weight, your leg muscles alternate between burning and numbness. You have to focus all of your mental and physical energy to cover the ground quickly, and you have to avoid thinking about when the excercise will end. It can go on for 20 minutes, or for two hours. You can be going on flat ground, uphill or downhill. People will take turns under the stretcher, and sometimes you'll break the stretcher down and just carry each other one-on-one, the ultimate punishment.

When you're stopped by your commanders and you look over the ground you've covered, the distance and the type of ground it was, you're genuinely confused. There's no possible way I did that, it doesn't make sense. And you're right, it doesn't. Only in the military framework can your body actually perform such extreme activities. I have to honestly say, I can't imagine how I did what I did for five days on next to no sleep. It's totally bizarre and I wonder how I didn't just injure out at some point. I have to attribute it to adrenaline, and to the fact that the mind is, in fact, stronger than the body.

Since my company is the best company ever, we got to do helicopter training during our fieldcraft week. Technically, we were supposed to do this much later on, but the officers decided that since we were so meturafim, insane (in a good way), that they were going to incorporate helicopters into the week's fun. We were picked up in random fields and dropped off on even more random hilltops. From the hilltops, we continued with our usual fieldcraft activities, the helicopter being some sort of a surreal interlude. Watching the machine land, feeling the force of the wind lashing against your body, charging against the wind to get into the helicopter, strapping in, looking out the open back as you fly over mountainous ground, rushing out, and hearing the helicopter fly away as you move in formation towards your next objective - it's quite an experience. During the day, it's more of a scenic experience. At night, the helicopter ride feels like something out of a video game.

Another aspect of fieldcraft is digging observation posts and fire points. You basically dig into a hillside, put up some rocks and earth around the post for protection, camoflauge it with bushes and leaves, and you have a location to hide, rest, collect intelligence or take on the enemy. Digging and carrying rocks around is actually kind of relaxing relative to our other activities. At the end of the week, my squad was commended by the company commander for being the best overall, although I think he was most impressed by our manuevering. He promised some sort of a chupar, reward, and we all hope it means going home a day early for some Shabbat. Time at home is the single best way the army can reward someone. Conversely, taking that time at home away is the single best way to punish us.

This upcoming week will be similar to fieldcraft week, but a bit more realistic. The training companies of our battalion are taking on the veteran companies in a war game in the Golan Heights. Clearly, we're going to get beat, badly. But it's all in good fun. I am just hoping that our commanders give us a break and we spend more time laying around and waiting and less time running and covering ground with heavy packs. Sadly, I am sure that next week will feature a lack of sleep and combat rations. Those two aspects of field life are hard to avoid.