Easing into Pain

After my regila, week off from the army, I started advanced training. The first week back was based around the concept of "lets make sure these kids are Zionist in that good old-fashioned military way." Excellent idea, and it was executed quite well. Five days of touring battlefields, history museums, meeting with veterans of different wars, and learning Jewish and Israeli history since the inception of modern Zionism in the late 1800's. The only thing we did that seemed to remotely resemble army life, aside from wearing the uniforms, was a couple of running sessions. The best part was that instead of being on base, we lived in a series of nice guesthouses. I was happy to find out, over the course of the seminars and discussions we had, that about 90% of the guys in my unit are center-right or right-wing in their politics. The kibbutzniks aside, nationalism is strong with my brothers-in-arms. On the other hand, the kibbutzniks perform so well in the army environment, that I have to say I wouldn't mind if they were 30% of my unit, instead of 10%. Their basic human values and work ethic are very strong, even if their Jewish identity is, for all intents and purposes, zero.

The following week, my training company had guard/kitchen duty on base. Luckily for me, my squad was chosen to guard the ammunitions bunker in Beit Lead, the Central Command HQ base in the center of the country. The base itself has many different units, but most people there are jobnikim, or non-combat soldiers performing an assortment of administrative and sundry duties. Since we were not on our home base, our commander decided it was a good time to let us lehit'khapshen, or slack off. We did some runs, practiced a cool way to turn a corner in urban combat, slept a lot and ate unreal amounts of food.

Mostly though, we took turns guarding the entrance to the plot of land on which several dozen ammunition bunkers are located, many half-buried and covered in thick vegetation, giving the place a non-military feel. One person would guard the gate, checking all those coming in and out, while two others would go on "patrol." Technically, we were supposed to look for suspicious objects and activity, and check the locks to all the bunkers. In practice, the "patrol team" would find a nice spot out of the way from prying eyes and nowhere near the entrance itself, take off our vests and guns, and lay around, talking or sleeping. During night shifts, sleeping on patrol was crucial. If the commander would approach the gate, the guard there would phone his slacker buddies, who would get up, suit up and walk back to the gate, as if coming back from the required 30-minute patrol. No harm, no foul. Of course, you may say what we did was wrong and that we shirked our duty and endangered the ammunitions stores of the base. To you I say - try guarding 2 hours on, four hours off, non-stop for 8 days and nights, then talk to me. Napping or fooling around, or in my case, reading, is the only way to deal with guard duty. Yes, it is technically sketchy what we did, but anyone who has been in the army knows what a pain in the ass guarding is. It's pointless, boring and the chances of something happening are so slim, you might was well not guard at all. Finding ways to make guarding bearable is one of the chief preoccupations of soldiers since the nascence of organized force.

After two easy weeks, we come to this past week - shavua kita, or squad week. The week was spent in the field, marching and training with an intensity way above anything up to this point. The ultimate misery were the dual abuses of lack, or total absence, of sleep, and the brutality of stretcher marches. The only upside was that the backpack with the eight 2-liter water bottles that every squad carries was replaced with a special pack that sits quite comfortably on ones lower back. I volunteered to spend an entire day and night carrying the water, and I have to say, a better bag makes the difference between horrendous pain and barely bearable pain. But the award for being the most hardcore goes to my buddy, the quiet Russian from the Transdniestrian Republic, who carried the Mag, the heavy machine gun, during the entire week. The gun is bad enough, but the ammunition is the real killer (pun intended). His total combat load was 60 lbs.

Speaking of combat loads, I think some of my readers may be interested in what exactly is the weight that I keep complaining about in my posts. There's the basic combat weight that one has to carry, based on one's specialty, and there's the additional weight which includes squad level equipment and extra clothing, sleeping bags, etc. The combat weight (fairly evenly distributed thanks to the new vests, except for the gun of course) for each specialty is:

Regular soldier - 27 lbs
Sharpshooter - 33 lbs
Grenadier - 36 lbs
Light MG - 50 lbs
Heavy MG - 60 lbs

MG means machine gun, by the way. These weights may not sound like much, but imagine that you have to run up and down hills in rough terrain, crawl for hundreds of yards at a time, or march long distances on rocky, dirt roads. Not pleasant. Each squad also carries a stretcher, about 15 lbs, a communications device, 22 lbs, and the water pack weighing 35 lbs. Three people have to carry these (on a voluntary or rotational basis), and the rest of the squad needs to carry the personal bags that contain sleeping bags, ground blankets, clothing and random other items. There's a personal bag for every two people. Frankly, I think the only thing that military inventors should focus their energy on is how to make the soldier's equipment lighter. Forget the missiles and planes, those things are useless anyhow. Make lighter steel that's cheap to produce and the soldiers' performance will skyrocket.

Month of Pain and General Thoughts

I know you have all been bored for a full month due to my blog-absence. We haven't been getting weekends off from the army and in general it's not been an easy four weeks. After the resounding fun of the Golan Heights exercises, my training company got back to our base and resumed the regular schedule of training. We first had shavuah hulia, team week. A "team," or hulia, is four soldiers, one of whom is the team leader. This team of four is the basic building block of a combat force. We spent a week in the field, with the usual rough conditions and exessive running around with weight. During this week, we trained to attack a mountainside in the hulia structure. The only type of attack with live fire that is done in IDF training (in the open field) is uphill. The reason for that is simple. If you get used to running, crawling and shooting your way up a rough, rocky hillside, any other type of movement in a real situation will seem easy by comparison. We practiced the attack both during the day and at night.

I think everyone there rather enjoyed it. Firing your gun at random targets while running up a hill, or finding a rock and shooting up targets from the stationary position, all for a good 10 minutes of constant action - it's a pretty nice release. As expected, one of the nights in the field we had a masa, a march. It was 12+1, meaning 12 km march, followed by 1 km of carrying a stretcher. As described in earlier posts, stretchers are the commanders' way of bringing extreme pain to our bodies. While the distances may sound tame, for reasons that can only be fully understood by someone who experienced it, marches are grueling. The walking speed combined with the weight on your back makes your body work surprisingly hard. Towards the end of every masa we do, my shirt is completely drenched in sweat and my body is in a state of total exhaustion. We generally do one masa per week.

The second week in February didn't have a particular theme, it was just hard. There was some shooting, a lot of obstacle course training, a lot of random physical labor around the base, too much guard duty, and too little sleep. The obstacle course, as described in previous posts is a tough experience. You run a kilometer, do the set of obstacles and run another 500 meters, all in full gear. Almost every military movie or show features the obstacle course and it always looks retarded. Well, in real life, it's even more retarded. But as retarded and simple as it is, for some reason I do not understand, it is extremely hard to actually pull it off in a reasonable amount of time. There are guys who simply can't do certain stations. It's not that they are the weakest guys, or in the worst shape. It's one of those things where you either can or you can't. With regard to times - the hardcore types do it in 7:30-8:00, and your average IDF soldier pulls off anywhere from 8:30 to 10:00, with the mean time being 9:20. Yours truly did it in 9:07. Sounds weak, but that's because I am, in fact, weak. Without weight, I run like a gazelle. Put weight on me and I tend to perform in the 60th percentile. The obstacle course is standard in the IDF and has been for 60 years. Guess who the record holder is? Ehud Barak. Yes, that fat old man, who today is a bad left-wing politician, used to be a total beast of a man. He did the bochen maslul, obstacle course, in 5:50 back in the 1950's. This is a completely insane time, and it was done on the course at the Wingate Institute of Health, which is on the beach, so the running part is in the sand and hence much more difficult. For comparison, the fittest guy in my company, this Ethopian (obviously), does the course in 6:45, and he's a uniquely fast individual. He's a full minute off Ehud Barak's time!

What's really telling is that today the mean IDF time is 9:20, whereas it used to be 8:00 from 1948 (when they first started measuring) until the late 1960's. In the 1970's and 80's it went up to 8:30, and the time has been 9:15-20 since the early 1990's. The country is getting richer, lazier, fatter and wimpier. If you read or talk to older Israelis about what they used to do in training and compare that to today, it becomes clear that we have gone down several levels both physically and mentally. Granted to go down from a level that was mindnumbingly high still puts us in a good spot. But, the IDF really needs to get its act together and pick it up a notch. Recent investigations following the Second Lebanon War showed that the army needs more time training in the field, more marching, more stretchers, more crawling, more crappy conditions, it needs to get back to its roots. As of now, the IDF has practically transformed its infantry arm into thousands of excellent SWAT teams. As useful as that is in the West Bank and Gaza, we still need to be capable of fighting an old-fashioned war. Starting this past fall, the IDF is in the new (actually old) mode of thinking.

The last two weeks have featured different courses. Like all soldiers nearing the end of basic training, I needed to do a course to specialize in some particular aspect of the organized violence that is the military. Due to my excellence on the shooting range, patient personality and stunning good looks, I was sent to the sharpshooters course. Sharpshooter is kala in Hebrew, which, incidentally, also means "bride." The course was enjoyable, lots of various types of shooting at stationary and moving targets at different distances, both during the day and at night. Don't worry, it wasn't all fun. We ran to and from the targets to check our hits and when you do that all day every day it wears you down. On the upside, we slept plenty and got a lot of time to eat. Two very simple needs that one learns to appreciate. There was also a masa thrown in here and there - the 14+2 and the 16+2 - and a few nights where we got woken up for random physical abuse. The 14+2 was the masa samal, meaning the march of the platoon sargeant. That means it was his march, he led it and he abused us before, during and after the march. Between the 14km march and the 2km with the stretchers, we had krav maga, which, as I've described in previous posts, is basically a brutal workout. From whence we found the strength to carry stretchers after that is beyond me. It was supposed to be one of the hardest nights in basic training as at the end of the masa samal we received the logo to put onto the beret. I can't admit I would not have rather bought the logo in a store. You people have no idea what a sadist our samal is.

I now have a week off from the army. It's known as a regila, which is a week long vacation all soldiers receive once every four months during their service. My mom is in Israel right now and I'll be spending my time off travelling around with her, visiting some relatives and friends and soaking up the mud and salt of the Dead Sea. Some of you may think that a week better spent is one full of bars and clubs, but clearly you're not religiously observant and you follow your baser instincts. Which is cool, I was there from age 16 to 25 so I can't judge. For me, lots of sleep, a good book or two, and quality family time is more valuable than the tomfoolery of my college years.

I also have an impressive announcement - a friend of mine, well past his 28th birthday and a fellow graduate of the same snooty Ivy League school, just volunteered for IDF service. He was at first stymied by their idiotic bureacracy, but after an intense week of going to the recruitment bureau daily and pounding on random people's tables, he did his physical and IQ test, pushed through all the volunteer papers, and got a draft date. If he can defeat the bureacratic beast, so can anyone else. It just takes persistence. So for all you old farts (22 and up), who still want to serve 18 months in a combat unit even though you're technically not supposed to, you can still do it, it's never too late. Unless you're really fat, in which case I suggest you lose weight first. If you don't, you'll most likely end up with stress fractures from hauling your own weight around. It's not funny.

On the political situation - who cares? The politicians in this country are clinically retarded and what little brainpower they do possess, they expend on corruption. Israel is holding strong in spite of its government, and purely on the merit of the fact that the majority of the people here really do love Israel and do their best to make it a decent place to live. The shitty minority of pricks, including the human waste that is the political elite - they are an embarrassment that slows this nation's growth. But try as they might, Israel is advancing nonetheless. The economy is strong, the standard of living is rising, the medical and scientific progress goes on unabated, and the army is strong, if somewhat misdirected. Most importantly, the level of Jewish identity and religious observance is slowly rising, and the secular socialists are losing ground. They don't realize it, because they run the media and live in isolated population islands in the Tel-Aviv area, but the spiritual strengthening will continue with or without them. In conclusion, the entire Moslem world is still bent on our destruction and unlimited resources are being directed to that end, but we're showing them all a huge middle finger.

AM ISRAEL CHAI!!!