I struggle through my final push up and complete my punishment, but I'm still laughing. My commander opened the floor for us to share headlines we had read in the paper that day, Wanting to lighten the mood from articles about iran's nuclear program advancing and rockets hitting the south of Israel from Gaza, I tell the group about Macey Gray regretting her trip here. The commander askes me to explain who she is so i enter into my best rendition of here one hit. ''I try to say goodbye and I choke, try to walk away but I stumble...'' the soldiers and the commander laugh and I get punished. No singing in the army.
So far the army has not been worth the anguish I was feeling before I drafted. It's oddly a lot like summer camps. The commanders are like the camp councilors and I'm once again a participant.
The people in my unit are aged between 23 and 30 and for all of us Hebrew is our second or third language. It's hillarious at times, because when we get an order to run somewhere, most of us either dont listen or dont understand, so we end up running off like a herd of confused wilderbeast.
We get less than 6 hours of sleep every night, but our productivity in the 18 hours we're awake is nowhere near what we could be achieving. In the 14 hours at the shooting range, only a quarter of our group got to shoot 6 bullets.
There is an internal logic in the army that changes every couple of seconds with each of the commanders, making it incredibley hard to be a good soldier even if I wanted to be. I get told to eat from one commander, then get asked by another why I'm eating by another. This gets intensley frustrating.
I'm enjoying the comradery between the group, we jel over our united hatred for the officers.
The food Isn't so bad, even for vegetarians.
We're sleeping in tents on a base left by the British so the piping is a bit old and so there is always a pungent smell of human waste.
There are probably two main goals for this training. The first in to intergate us into Israeli society. And the second is to turn us into obedient soldiers, you cant scratch your ass without permission. They give you too little time to run somewhere to teach you ask for more time. The is probably the most difficult thing to cope with in my unit seeing as we're all used to being o independent.
Personally, I'm not hating it here. Some things are fun. I'm learning Amharit from the ethiopeans and learning to swear with zeal from the russians.
