Summer training

Hey everyone. Summer training is here. Nothing too much to report. We are practicing the basics to remove the rust accumulated over our time on deployment. Lots of drills, exercises, working on gear. Its quite hot and the gear is heavy, but that is nothing new.

I am getting ready for some big changes in my personal life. I have decided to move off of kibbutz to an apartment in Tel Aviv (givat shmuel). I decided on this move because it is much better for me socially. In another very exciting development, my sister is making aliyah so now I will be able to see my sister all the time. I am very excited!

Leaving deployment and starting summer training

Hey guys!

Since I last left off, I had been in America enjoying seeing my family and taking a breather from the army. Well, I returned for about another two to three weeks in the army. Same old, same old: guard duty, patrols, and occasionally missions. Like I've mentioned before, I really enjoyed kav because in your free time, you decide what to do with it. Work out, phone friends and family, read lots of books that are on your reading list, drink coffee with the guys (minus the disgusting cigarettes that Israelis feel are required when drinking coffee), or sleep. Well all good things must come to an end, and this past week we finished our deployment in the northern West Bank separation barrier. I will miss the beautiful views we had there:



Anyways, we are now starting our summer training. It will be really, really hot because all our field maneuvers are in the Jordan river valley. This region, while stunning, is quite literally the lowest plain, altitude wise, in the world and is baked by the fierce sun. Luckily for me, I will not only do my training there, but I will do my training with my old friend the heavy and bulky machine gun.

One great benefit of the summer training, however, is that I get out for the vast majority of my weekends including getting out on Thursdays. Can you say beach and friends??

Furthermore, our base is back on our old training base, however, since I have finished training, I now live in the special section of the base that is set aside for us. The atmosphere there is magical. Everyone is walking around on t-shirts, shorts, and sandals. The paths are well tended and every three steps is another place for plushy furniture and places to make coffee. There is a huge lounge and decks for grilling. I guess after absolutely crushing us for an year and three months, there are some benefits to getting into a special unit. I have to say that my unit is really awesome, the feeling of brotherhood is very intense and everyone looks out for one another.

I don't have too much to add. As many of you know, the Israeli elections finished recently and a very unstable right wing government was formed. We'll see where Netanyahu will lead the country. My two cents is that the government will collapse again. If not, it will be very disappointing if the ultra-Orthodox parties succeed in overturning the legislature that would have forced them to draft into the army or national service. Its past time for a sea change in their society and to realize that Israel is their state as well and that protecting the Jewish people is a national burden that they as a segment of the Jewish nation are required to shoulder.

Until next time. עד מתי?

America!

Hey everyone,

I am in America for two weeks for the holiday of Passover and as you can imagine it is wonderful! Seeing the family is great, the dog, my old room and bed. It feels like I never left. Mom's cooking is delicious and the clothes and technology here cost reasonable amounts!!

But of course, I have left, and to be completely honest while I very much missed my family and friends, I did not miss America culturally. There are many aspects of American life that are ingrained in me but I can see how I have changed since moving to Israel.

I have definitely moved to the right in many of my assumptions because of the realities of living in a very tough neighborhood. I am less optimistic when it comes to politics, but much more optimistic in my personal life. I have slowly started to adopt the Israeli attitude of "it will be ok" and to stop worrying so much about the future. Taking it one day at a time.

Aside from that, I don't have too much to report. Here I am enjoying drinks with some college friends.

Quick Update

I don't have too much to add on to the previous post. On kav, you quickly become accustomed to the new reality of patrols, guard shifts and the fluid nature of responding to real world developments.

I will write a few lines about our new commander. You all read of the difficulties my guys and I had with our old commander. Well our new officer, (an Ethiopian by the way, how cool is that!?) is great. He is soft-spoken but has no problems voicing his displeasure if something is not up to par. As opposed to the old commander, his leadership style is to let us do our thing and only correct or prod us when he feels that something is amiss. He also challenges us (to be fair, so did the old commander) to always aspire to be the best team we can be. I am very appreciative of having him!

Anyways, that is about it from me. Happy Passover!

N

Welcome to Kav

Hey everyone,

I have written for the past year and three months from the perspective of a soldier in maslul (training). But with the formal end of my training, I am now subject to a completely different worldview, that of a soldier on kav.

Kav, (meaning literally line, but in this case referring to borders) is the generic term for what combat soldiers actually do in the army when they are a on regular routine. Combat soldiers patrol and do guard duty along Israel's various borders, make sure there are no riots or friction between Israeli and Palestinian citizens, do arrests if needed, etc.

My group has been placed in the northern West Bank and for obvious reasons I can't write more.

What I can say is that my time is spent much more well on kav. Aside from finally (finally!) actually guarding the country instead of doing more training, I have way more free time between shifts. Thats wonderful for me because I am a creature of habit and routine. I have now started reading many books and working out like crazy. I also have more time to reflect and de-stress and all in all I am really enjoying what I am doing.

In three weeks, G-d willing, I will be travelling to the US to see my family and I am ecstatic to finally be able to be in the states after a year of not being in my hometown.

Will write soon,
N

סוף מסלול End of Training!!

I know, I know.

I haven't posted since New Years practically and in those two months, I have just finished training. I haven't filled you guys in on practically the most interesting and jam packed part of my army service. I don't have a good excuse, but what I can do to make it up is write this post. I am now enjoying a week long vacation so I finally have time to fill in the gaps.

The last time I really wrote a detailed post was before our מסכם צוות, so I will start from there. The training for my unit takes a year and three months. The last two to three months are filled with "finals". These are summary weeks where you are supposed to show off your knowledge of something that you learned over the course of the training.

There are about four or five of these finals weeks. Two of them have to do with navigation; you are dropped off in the field and must navigate your way from point to point without any help from maps or the like and do this under time limits. I am above average when it comes to navigation and so I enjoyed those final summing up weeks because I took them as a challenge and I love rising to the challenge. Furthermore, as a new immigrant, navigating the country allowed me to see new landscapes and places, far away from the classic tourist spots that I had been familiar with up until that point. The last summary week for navigation saw me navigate from the western shore of the Kinneret practically all the way to the coast.


The other two weeks were summary weeks of combat as a whole unit (remember we also did a summary week of fighting as a four man unit- I wrote about that earlier). Ostensibly, the week was meant to summarize all of the things we had learned over the year: combat engineering, open terrain, undergrowth terrain and urban combat, navigation,camouflage, etc. In practice, however, these weeks meant walking for tens of kilometers every day while on full gear and up to 50% body weight. The first week like this, the מסכם צוות, was terribly difficult. I was the machine gunner and its difficult to describe how painful the week is to machine gunners. Imagine that your vest and backpack that contain very heavy ammunition, clothing, and food are weighing you down and dragging you backwards. Now imagine that simultaneously a twenty pound, bulky, and long weight is hung over your neck and drags you forward. Painful to say the least. To add insult to injury, the first two days of this week were spent up north near the Lebanese border. The terrain there consists of very thick undergrowth, lots of cattle fences (think barbed wire!) and steep mountains. The strap of the machine gun gets caught on every other bush, your hands are constantly being torn up by thorns, and your leg muscles burn from all the ascents and descents.

Well, the second night that we were there, the skies simply opened up with torrential rain and a frightening lighting storm. Most people don't enjoy being drenched with rain,but to soldiers, rain is our kryptonite, There is nothing worse than being wet and cold. You don't have the luxury of going indoors. Many times, you must wait hours before the chance of changing into dry clothing. Of course, this storm happened as we were in the middle of scrambling up a very high mountain. So there I was, carrying at least half my body weight, the machine gun pulling me forward, pack pulling me backward. It was freezing, with lightning and thunder booming and the wind was howling. I was drenched and the trail we had been following quickly turning into a nightmare of slippery mud. In a particularly steep place, I fell at least twenty times in a row. I simply couldn't climb up.

This was probably my biggest crisis moment. At that particular moment, I just didn't care about it all. I could care less about the stupid mountain, the irrelevant mission, forget Zionism, challenging myself. I only wanted a hot shower and dry clothes. I mean, I was a fingernail away from just giving up. The only thing that kept me going were the guys with me. I couldn't let them down so eventually I made it up. I don't think I will ever really forget that night. It was the worst night of my life.

The other summary week we had that summarized combat as a unit was this past week, the very last week of training. It too was meant to summarize everything that we had learned and it too in practice just meant a lot of walking with heavy weights on our backs. But more on our last week later.

Lets see: I could go into extreme detail about all the weeks that we did these past two months. But I think for brevity's sake, I will list all the weeks that we did, with a general overview of what they were about as well as some themes that characterized the final months of training.

We spent a week on learning how to walk to and approach houses/targets quietly without being recognized. We spent another week learning how to camouflage positions using the undergrowth and shrubbery of the terrain itself to make the position look as natural as possible. We spent another week in urban combat: learning how to take over houses and complexes and navigating in the crowded conditions of Arab cities, including a very fun and interesting exercise in an actual Arab city in the West Bank. As I mentioned, we had two weeks of solo navigation which I really enjoyed. We also had a week of learning to fight in tunnels and finally a very cool week of explosives where we quite literally spent all week blowing things up. Isn't it is nice to hear that this 24 year old is still a little boy at heart?

Themes:
The gradual loosening of the rules. As time went on, the rules were loosened. Slowly, we had more access to our phones, music was allowed to be played on base as we were working, we had more say in certain things etc.

The tzevet (unit)- Though our unit was always very close knit, we became even closer. I love my guys. Forget the whole special training b.s.; in my mind the only advantage to the training that I did was for the incredible bond that exists between the guys and that will only grow as we continue to serve with each other, including in the reserves. In addition, I really missed my lone soldier friend, Shaul, the past few months and am eagerly waiting for him to finish his training and rejoin us.

The relationship with the commanding officer- I am not sure if you guys remember, but I had written a while back that I had lost some respect for the guy when he didn't let me stop after I got really bad blisters. Well lets just say that from the moment on, things only got worse. The guy simply played good cop/ bad cop with us non-stop. He was always on the look out for the smallest infractions and simply could not loosen up. It was an unfortunate situation because in most cases, the commander is supposed to form an incredible bond with his soldiers and with us it was just a poisonous one. Well in any situation, in a week from now we will be getting a new commander and I really hope for everyone' sake that he will form a constructive bond with us.


Finally, the big moment. Our last week. Well in terms of what happened it was quite anti-climatic. Just a lot of walking, then doing an exercise, and more walking, then exercise etc. But finally on Thursday morning, after a year and three months of training, we climbed our final mountain to finish the training. Awaiting us on top of the mountain were our former commanders and guys who already finished the training. Gas grenades were going off, fireworks were in the air, music was blasting...it was an incredible scene (check this out)


 And then we climbed to the top and it was pure joy and pandemonium. Everyone was hugging, smoking, cheering, screaming, dancing. It like a year and three months of struggle, pain, desire, stress and all that it took to finish the training came out in one beautiful sunrise.



And now to finish quickly. After that morning, we got our pins finally in an evening tekes, showing that we are now lochamim, fully trained combat soldiers of Gadsar Nachal.

\My friends and family came which was wonderful and now I have a week long vacation!!

Nate.

P.S. Check out our awesome end of training video!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STVVgF8QzhQ&sns=fb

December

Well Happy New Years everyone!
I cant quite believe that it is already 2015 but time flies.
Quite a lot has happened over the past month but its 12:38 A.M. here and I have to wake up in another five hours for the army. So in blatant laziness and self interest, I will only say that I will write soon and promise to fill in all of the blanks.

Here is a cool picture however of my team finishing an really hard week we had this past month on the top of a very steep mountain in the Jordan river valley.

And another one of me, after last week where we dealt with explosives in the field (a very very very cool week).

Have a great week and I promise to write soon.

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Hey guys. The past three weeks have been pretty fun.

Three weeks ago was the summary week of how to function as a four man squad. The entire week was spent in the field with the squad. No commanders except for when they brought us food. We had missions and navigation to do every night. I had blisters on my foot so I was in agony all week long but my commander simply refused to let me stop. Needless to say, that sucked. I can honestly say that since the moment I lost a lot of respect for him because he knows that I am not the kind of soldier that looks to get out of as much training as he can like many other soldiers do. Though I may complain like everyone else, I have never in my army experience tried to get out of something hard just because it was hard. Anyways, though I was in great pain, it was still a very cool week where it was just us soldiers having fun without our commanders. All night long as we walked, we were joking and complaining; when it was cold, we would cuddle together for mutual warmth, and all in all managed to find the silver lining.

Two weeks ago we started doing solo navigation. Whereas before all our navigation we did in pairs, now all aspects of the navigation became solely each person's responsibility. Learning all the points, their descriptions, learning the path and memorizing it, etc. I am average when it comes to navigation, I usually bring the majority of my points and don't get lost too often. I really enjoyed the week because I got to set the pace of the navigation and so I went much faster than usual. There are many things in the army that I am sure I will forget once I am done with the service, but there are other things that I have learned that I will never forget; life lessons and skills that will help me in the future.

Two skills that pop up in my mind as significant are my gun and navigation. Before joining the army, I had never touched a gun and stood very firmly on the side of gun control laws. But after training and learning how to use the weapon, you realize just how important having trained and responsible people with weapons is. I still firmly believe that most citizens should not be carrying weapons but in Israel, we live in a very volatile neighborhood and the fact that the majority of the citizenry here know how to handle a weapon is comforting. The second skill is that of navigation. I can now usually find the directions of the compass at most hours of the day without too much trouble and can dissect terrain to know where rivers and wadis flow, where there are shoulders, ridges and peaks of mountains on topography maps. Simple survival skills that are now ingrained in my head.

This past week we spent up north learning how to fight in the underbrush of northern Israel. This basically consists of running up steep slopes filled with the thorniest bushes you can imagine- all of course while in full gear and with the machine gun. Of course, this past week was very rainy and so we were filled with mud and quite miserable. It was quite a scene to witness. Twenty soldiers covered in mud during an exercise in a torrential downpour! But we got through the week as best we could. The best part of the week was getting out early Thursday however because of Thanksgiving! I went to two dinners in Tel Aviv and then went out with my friend to a bar. It was so great to go out and enjoy myself.

Aside from that, things are going well. Two and a half months left until we finish training (who is counting?), guys are great, kibbutz is great, and feeling pretty healthy. I plan on coming back to the States for Pesach and I can't wait for that moment.

Final observations: There has been a lot of terror attacks recently in Israel and I can only hope that the families of those killed find comfort somehow in the wake of their terrible tragedies.

In regards to the proposed Jewish State bill: I am deeply opposed. As Jews, we know what it is to be forever the minority and forever being the stranger. So why then do we need to inflict that same feeling on the Christian, Druze, and yes, Arab communities of Israel? Are we not confident enough in the state that we have built to have to pass a law like this?

Dealing with army life: Shoulder on

When I last left off, my two American friends had left the tzevet and we were starting the hardest part of our training. The past few weeks have seen me do the second week of that crazy hard shooting week that I wrote about last time. It was brutal, tons of push-up position, sprints, short times and other small little rules that kept us miserable all week long though of course, at the end like always, give you great material for jokes and stories afterwards.

I also participated in a battalion-wide exercise in the Golan Heights the week before that as a machine gunner which was pretty sweet. A little more about that: I was supposed to be sent to snipers course, but they kicked out our previous machine gunner and so I returned to being the machine gunner, which meant that I couldnt go the snipers course. I am super bummed about that because the course is interesting and important.

In fact, the past month has seen a lot of factors come together to make my army experience much harder. Two friends leaving, losing snipers course, being the machine gunner again etc. You just have to shoulder on because though it is easy to fall into depression or self-pity, these emotions will only prey on you and make the army that much harder. A conscious decision to take it a day at a time and to remember that you made this decision and therefore you have to live with the consequences are what kept me from getting too upset about the whole situation.

Finally, this past weekend was our second Shabbat Garin, a year since our first one. Its truly incredible to see how much we have grown together as a Garin and as Israelis since we started the army about an year ago. We have people going into commanders and officers courses.

And socially, our Garin is super tight-knit, and everyone is pretty comfortable around each other. Its a wonderful framework though I need to get off the kibbutz more on my free time.

I know this update was a little bare in terms of details and dates but that fact is that this past month has been so busy with so many stories that it is hard to write all of them down. If anyone wants to hear more about what I have been up to they should feel free to email me at nsjaphet@yahoo.com and I would be happy to respond to their questions.

Post Course

Hey everyone,
Last time I wrote off I was just starting my 7 week long combat engineering course which is the most important part of my training in terms of what my unit is all about. Well now it is over and here is my post about it.

The course itself was awesome. We learnt all kinds of interesting things. An average day consisted of waking up, spending most of the day in the classroom and doing little exercises. When night fell we would do workouts (we got into incredible shape, this is one picture taken after we finished a morning run by running up an incredibly steep incline that led to the summit of a mountain)

and then all have coffee together, the guys together with the commanders.

Sometimes we would have big exercises involving explosives and other really cool components. I loved the course but my fellow soldiers had a terribly hard time focusing during the classes and were constantly interrupting the instructors which was annoying to say the least especially to a university graduate. Perhaps the greatest part of the course was the atmosphere however. 

The course was on a base in a remote part of the Negev towards Eilat. Far away from the unit's base, with little oversight, our commanders really relaxed and opened up with us. There was practically no distance and we simply just enjoyed every minute, learning, joking around and getting into awesome shape. 

Another incredible part of this course, was an surprise that lifted my spirits and morale immensely. As a lone soldier, I am entitled to 30 days of time to fly home to visit family. I took two weeks in March but had two weeks left. I went to my commanders to request the remaining two weeks.Their response was that due to the operation, every week of our training was now super important and couldn't be missed no matter what but perhaps that they could find one week in November to let me fly out for. Halfway through the course, the commander of the pluga decided that he couldn't let me take that week. Needless to say I was really devastated because it meant another five months at the least before I would be able to see my parents. As it turned out however, the FIDF had raised money during the operation and was offering free flights to the parents of lone soldiers to see their children in Israel. At quite literally the last minute, I applied for the program and my parents were flown out to Israel for an incredible weekend.

I can't describe how happy this visit made me because precisely at this moment I had been in a low due to the rejection of my visit to the US and some other army stuff. It really lifted my spirits. To make things better, I also spent an awesome Rosh HaShana in Jerusalem with close family friends and friends around the city.

All good things must come to an end, however, and so we returned to our maslul (training) and jumped straight back into the thick of things. We have five months or so left and our commanders are determined to squeeze everything in. One of our first weeks back was an incredibly hard week basically meant to remind us of the very first days of basic training. We had to do everything with super short times, pushup positions, sprints you name it. On top of it all, we probably spent 9 hours each day of the week in the shooting range. But honestly, at the end of these kind of weeks you feel like you conquered the world. If you can survive this, you can survive anything. I don't regret the army for a second and honestly am happy that I am doing this now when I have the opportunity instead of settling into the all too familiar study and then find a job routine. I have all my life to do that stuff- now is the time to do the crazy and tough and inspiring experience that is the army.

Finally, in the most recent development in the army (two nights ago), my super close friend and fellow garinmate Ezra who has been with me since day one of our getting to Israel, through our draft, until now has decided to call it quits with our unit. He has been dealing with some health problems and morale and decided that combat is not for him. Its going to be really tough without the kid. Compounding all this is the fact that the final American in the unit, Shaul, is also dealing with an health issue and might have to leave us for some time, thus leaving me as the truly lonely lone soldier. I haven't really processed this yet and I will leave that to another post. 

Anyways, hope you enjoyed the long overdue post and pictures.

Nate