Returning our things and saying good-bye

As in most stages of life, when things come to an end, you often need to return things and say good-bye. In our situation, we had to return all our gear and say good-bye to some of our commanders and friends.

Since most of our gear belongs to the base, and since we are leaving the base and going somewhere else, we had to return some items, such as snow pants (in case it ever really snowed in Israel), our small tents, our rain gear and a variety of other things. In return however, we got a go army sweater, bungee rope, a flash light and a shakpas or knife proof vest.

The other part of the week is saying good-bye to our commanders. In the next stage of our training, we are only left with a samal and a mm (third and second in command.) The reason for this is because we are no longer considered trainees and we are now thought of as a tzevet or group. For this reason we don't need 24 hour supervision and thus not so many commanders.

In the army, the way you say good-bye to people is play fight them and then we have a heart to heart. In the heart to heart, the commander usually jokes around with us, tells us where he lives, what he thought of us and we all share some funny stories.

Some other highlights of the week were:

1) we also broke distance with the MM and our new Samal. however, since they are still considered to be our commanders, we don't play fight them and there is no heart to heart. Their is just the usual history facts about them.

2) we took part in the nation wide missile drill. We pretended that a missile has hit our base and that we had to guard it. It was a lot of fun because it was actually a real life situation and we finally got to put what we learned into action.

The ending of another chapter in the army

Well it’s been a hard three weeks but one of the most fun and interesting ones I’ve had.

When I first got back to the army, we continued where we left off, by having shavua machlika. a machlika is a level up from kita and contains two kitot (around 21 guys.)

During the week, I was the radio man for the samal or sergeant of the group. It was a lot of hard work, but fun at the same time. We basically continued doing what we did during shavua kita, where we learned how to conquer a mountain. The difference this time was that we actually learned how one group provides cover fire, while the other group continues on. This is a lot of hard work because if you’re not firing, you’re running forward.

My job however, was to be towards the back of the group to provide cover and report our position, ammunition and wounded to the commanders higher up. This means that I didn’t shoot as much as the others, and got to talk a lot of Hebrew. Some other highlights of the week:

1) we broke distance with MM (the second in command.)

2) Since we didn’t need to bring tents, to sleep in, we needed to dig holes and got to sleep in them at night

3) One night, we had a long march and reached a new camp site in the morning. It felt like we walked 30K but it was only 8.

The next week was war week.

War week is basically a week of simulated warfare. We basically act as if we were invaded by a country and we had to fight to recapture Israel. Every soldier hates war week because it is the hardest week in all of training.

Highlights:

1) During war week, you need to carry all your essentials with you on your back. This means that we were carrying food for the week, ammo and other goods. This also means that we were carrying around 40 - 60 kilos a person. Since I am trained to use the maclar (a grenade launcher) I had to carry it on my back. I carried around 60 kilos during the week.

2) I shot the grenade launcher and had a jam and fixed it

3) We had an omes home every day. (Omes home is when the temperature outside is so hot, that we need to stop training and get under a shaded area because if we continue training, we could get heart stroke.) The advantage of this was that we got to sleep a little during the week

4) We did another all night march and got to sleep in the morning.

5) War week is really a continuation of shavua machlica. What we were doing with 21 guys, we were now doing with 150 guys.

6) All our training exercises were watched by the magad or head of the base and the head of training.

The whole week was a lot of fun, but hard as hell and is defiantly a good simulation of what war would be like if we were ever in one.

The finally week that I had was shavua cumta.

It is during this week, that we have our masa cumta and our tekes cumta.

The masa cumta is a long walk (we did 54K, from our base to Masada) that is held at the end of training as a sort of final test that must be completed to finish.

Our masa lasted 13 hours in total and covered a lot of different terrain, from dirt roads, to streets.

Even though the masa was hard at times, it was also fun because we got to talk during the masa, listen to music and eat food (things that are usually considered forbidden during our marches.)

At the end of the march we had a ceremony at the top of Masada. It was really funny because a lot of American tourists were on the mountain. Within a few minutes of us reaching the top, cameras were already taken out and photos were being taken of us. Asher (another American soldier, in my machlaca) and I quickly went over to the American groups and introduced ourselves. It was a very meaningful experience for them to see Americans, leaving their homes and coming to serve in the army over here.

Once we were done with our march, we went back to base to sleep and we were given the rest of the week off (except for Thursday, when we had our tekes.)

Thursday was our tekes. The tekes took place at the nahal museum in pardes Hannah. The tekes was very nice and only took an hour. It is during the tekes that we turn in our training cumtot and get our neon green, nahal brigade, cumtot. It is a very important step for us because now we are part of a bigger group and no longer considered just trainees.