givingupsundays

I need a name for my M-16.

How do you make it through the army? Let everything fly over your head. Every once in a while you get distracted and something hits you smack in the face but you pick your self up and swear to be more focused next time.

On Dec. 20th 2005 I was drafted into Karakal. It is a combat unit that is stationed on the Egyptian and Jordanian borders. The unit was created about 5 years as a way to put boys and girls together in a combat unit.

I've been in for 5 weeks now and I'm getting along pretty well. I came with the intention of being a medic and so I am working my butt off to try to get sent to the course. The truth is that the army is what you make of it. Someone who calls the army "easy" chooses to make it easy. They carry one bag, not two. They run at 60% not 100%. Our tasks are not yet so difficult but I can look at my commanders and see that they have gone through a lot to get to where they are today.

It is no wonder that Israeli's stay very close friends with their army buddies. In the 5 weeks I have been in the army, I know people well enough to tell you how they will react in a situation. A girl in my tent can look in my eyes and see that I'm not up to guard duty tonight. For me, it's gotten to the point that I am more excited to go back to my base than I am to leave it. It's hard, it's tiring, sometimes I just want a couple of minutes to sit down and veg but it's when I come back to the base, not when I leave that I feel like I'm going home. For most of the people in the army, leaving means Mom's cooking and my nice warm bed. For me, it's returning on a 7 and a half hour 3 bus 2 train trip to the North to walk into an empty cold room with an empty refrigerator. I have an open invitation at the house of every girl in my tent and I have gladly accepted but at their houses I am a visitor. I keep up manners and I feel like I should be careful not to sleep to late.

Slowly I'm getting used to all the different things in the army...even the thought that for the next (at least) 2 years I will be walking around with y M-16. It's practically already another limb.

I need like a party or something

I have seven days left until the army starts. I'm not sure just yet how I feel about that.

go ahead, make one up.

I spent 18 years living in the United States where my name looked like that of a dyslexic Ivy League. For a while I hated my name. Every new place I came to, I got a new nickname. Diego, Yoshi, Elle...My mom calls me Yaeli, my oldest sister calls me Bell and to make it all more confusing, my Dad calls me pint-size, doll and by each of my siblings names (don't ask me why). On the first day of class my teachers would ask me my name and I would say "Ya'el". They would try to pronounce it and after several failed attempts would end the awkwardness with "well, that's unique". Indeed.
Now I'm in Israel and my name is anything but weird. EVERYONE is named Yael. I want to shake it up a little and add letters or something but Hebrew just doesn't work like that. I have gone from being a freak to being common and I'll say I don't like it.
Some people are never happy.

Lone, not lonely.

If one day you get the chance to talk to a lone soldier and you ask them "why" and they answer you effortlessly with maybe one or two um's sprinkled throughout their speech, that answer is not the truth. In the past 3 months I have met 90 lone soldiers and not one of them had, has or will ever have an answer as to why they are here that can be explained in less than the length of War and Peace. Still though, when a curious passenger sitting next to me on the bus asks me the question, I give them an answer. A simple answer. Usually something like "I love it in this country. I want to fight in this army and marry and Israeli man and have babies with better Hebrew accents than me." But the truth is that that is a rash over-simplification of why I am here. In truth, I don't know why I'm here. I can give a thousand answers that will all be true but there is no thesis. No single answer that will cover it all and still satisfy the soldier sitting next to me. Every day I come up with something new. At first it was my deep admiration for those who have done the army and my burning desire to get that kind of maturity with 3 easy payments of $29.95. Having been here already a quarter of a year, my new reason is that I want to fight to make sure that my children won't have to. I'm sure that in another 3 months, I will have had 20 new reasons. All true. All genuine. All different. They will be reasons why I came and reasons why I stayed. They will be political and emotional. They will be honest.

let's call it informational, not interesting.

Now to attack this blog thing in a more organized fashion...I choose chronologically.

July 25, 2005-the day I decided that I was going to join the Israeli army.
I think that there are only two ways to remember something. One is to write it down and the other is to make sure it leaves a scar.
I quit school today. That's a new record considering I haven't even started. I'm joining the Israeli army. It's a funny thing, though. I can't yet put my finger on why I did it or what I expect. I think I'm just trying to stir shit up a little. I need a little less normalcy than most people.

************************************************
Between this little entry and the next, I went from thinking about a year in Israel in a program called Machal to deciding to do a full army service and live on a kibbutz in the north with 28 other kids from outside of Israel deciding to joing the army.
************************************************

September 11, 2005- the plane ride from New York to Tel Aviv.
We are 1315 miles from Israel and my emotions are blank. Not because I'm not excited--just because this doesn't feel like a big deal. So far the most difficult part was saying goodbye to my parents because this isn't leaving for summer camp, it's leaving for at least 2 years, knowing that if and when I come back, I will have changed so much that this place will no longer look like home. It will no longer be home. This is not something you are supposed to do one week after your 18th birthday. I still don't know what will be the hard part. I bet it will be the culture shock. Israeli culture rests on the importance of family structure whereas American culure depends on education, success and normalcy. Americans live vicariously through their children. They invest everything in their children to make sure they meet these impossible standards of "normal"--even if that investment is in medication. I am dying to fit into Israeli culture. By no means do I want to abandon my American roots. I love being American. I was born with more opportunities than most people in this world will ever have. All I want is to be asked questions in Hebrew and give Israelis the respect they deserve by speaking to them in their own language.

September 12, 2005 at kibbutz Yiftach, my new home.
I met a girl today who told me that this Garin is the only place where I don't have to explain myself.

Septeber 19, 2005
We are sitting at Lishcat HaGius waiting to become soldiers. The mood is more relaxed than pre SAT's even though this means so much more. We are with another Garin--all East Coasters, Canadians and Brits. Still, no one needs to defend themselves. Soon we will go to Tel-Aviv and go to Bakkum (part of the Tel HaShomer base where Israelis go to become soldiers) where we will get our uniforms.
I think that Israelis are curious. An Israeli boy just came up to a table full of Garin kids and asked us if we are Americans. We answered "yes" and he asked us what we are doing here at Lishcat HaGius. A kid smiled and answered "I don't know." It's funny because for all of us, it's sort of true. If we all rewound our lives 10 years, we would never imagine ending up here. Not in Israel, not at Lishcat HaGius, not about to enter the army.
This place is already a place of memories for me. I have only been in Israel for 1 week but this is the place where I have my Tzav Rishon. I came here at 8 am on Wednesday and stayed here until 2:30. I had a personal interview with a very sweet chayelet who was super patient with my terrible language skills. I also had a mental test with a bunch of shapes and then I had a helth check up. In the end I got a score of 97 (the highest you can get).

September 24, 2005
We finished Gadna on Thursday and I was Chayelet Mitzdayenet (best soldier in my group). I worked hard (even though it wasn't actually tough) and I kept my mouth shut. I think that once my Hebrew improves, the latter won't be quite so easy. Sometimes when you get sothing like this silly little award you feel like you have finally found justice in the world.
Our gius went well, I think. We got our uniforms and we were proud to put them on. The whole process was a little bit silly and a lot of being treated as a number. This wasn't actually our gius. We became soldiers but weren't drafted so eventually I will go back there to join my unit.
We went straight from Bakkum to Juara for Gadna. We were wearing our uniforms when we arrived. Gadna was a little silly. It seems to be designed to get kids excited for the army and give them a little taste but I know it will be nothing like this. Gadna was telling, though. I can see now just how much trouble some members of Garin Koach will have in the army. We are not a noral group of kids joining the army. Not only did we not grow up knowing that we would join the army, not everyone is 18. It was important for me to come now. It will be hard enough for me to get though---impossible if I were any more different. During Gadna, a bunch of the older kids had some trouble getting into the role of "chayal" It is hard to take orders fro a 19 year old girl, 6 months in the army when you are 22 and have already finished college.

my company

My father taught me to look at everything with the eye of a historian. I had been trying for a while to figure out why there was such an odd bunch of people with me in my Garin [group of kids joining the army together--in my case all people from חו''ל--outside of Israel]. All you have to do is look at what it is we are doing. We all left the land of opportunity to move to a country plagued by terrorism and the constant feeling among its citizens that all their neighbors want them dead. We not only moved to this place, we came to join the army. We signed ourselves up for (some of us) a 3 year prison sentence. The army is something many Israelis run from but we volunteered for it. So what kind of American kids leave home to do something like this? Clearly not the normal ones. Some people here were running from something. Some wanted to live bigger. Some felt at home here their whole lives. Some did it for Zionistic reasons. Some are extreme right wing, some extreme left. Some people here have no political opinions at all. Deciphering their reasons for coming here would be an endless task seeing as I am still working on my own defense. Defense. That's exactly what it is. When I am on a bus in Israel and people figure out after a little prodding that I volunteered to come to this army, they can't help but ask why. But not "why" in the curious sense. More of "why the hell would you do that?". People are supportive but they don't see the army as an experience or as something good. For the most part, the Israeli army is just one more thing they have to get out of the way. Oh yeah. The people here are pretty cool. You just have to ignore the bizarre context in which you meet them and understand that, even though we are here from different backgrounds, we are all here to do the same thing. It makes me think...they took a different road than I did but we ended up in the same place.

Feeling like a...plastic spoon.

I heard a story once in Latin class of a Caesar of Rome who feared assasination so much that he took small doses of a dozen poisons every day to build up immunity. In the end, his enemies stabbed him to death.

I will not live my whole life in a bubble just to walk down the street and be hit by a bus. There are a lot better ways to die. I will look both ways before crossing the street and I'll avoid eating rare steak but I won't refrain from enjoying myself just because what I am doing is potentially dangerous. That's just not a way to live.

Lights in Lebanon

My sister spent last night trying to figure out if school was cancelled today. The way a smell can sometimes remind you of something so powerfully, her behavior combined with the cold weather and the time we spent yesterday looking out the windows sent me rushing back to being in elementary school when I used to sit in front of the television in slippers waiting to hear that school was snowed out. But I'm 6000 miles from Montgomery County, Maryland and 800 meters from the border of Lebanon. When we look out the windows here, we are not looking to see the beautiful landscape blanketed in white but rather the source of the katusha rockets we can hear flying over head.

About two months ago, one week after my 18th birthday, I moved to Israel. One week after my Aliyah I became a soldier. Now I am living on Kibbutz Yiftach, a small community on the Northern border of Israel. I am here with 28 other kids from outside of Israel--Americans, Canadians, one British, one South African and one Venezualan. The age range is from 18 to 24 and we are joining the army together.

Occurances like this one (the fighting on the border yesterday) are clearly rare here. Still, though, the people of Yiftach behave as if nothing happened. The fleeting thought that their children are in danger is merely a parental instinct and it disappears quickly enough. They know that they are in one of the safest places in Israel.