Last Sunday, our Ulpan arrived at the Tzalmon army base in the North, around 15 kilometers northwest of the Kinneret (Lake Tiberias). We spent a week in a program called Gadna, which is put on by Zahal (IDF), and functions as a preview to basic training. A lot of Israelis do it when they are 16 or 17. They woke us up early every morning, between 5 and 6:30, to begin our daily tasks of cleaning bathrooms, picking up garbage, classroom lessons, running from place to place while counting down from 20 in Hebrew, and standing around in the blazing sun at attention for indefinite periods of time. Standing still is a very highly valued skill in the army. It's a fun challenge to see how long you can have beads of sweat rolling down your face until one finally tickles you enough to force you to move. Then it's a test to see if you can wipe it away undetected by the commanders so as to avoid doing push-ups. If that fails, the trick is to see if you can manage to do push-ups on a bed of gravel and avoid re-opening any scrapes on your hands that you acquired during any one of the number of activities that included scooting across rocky terrain on your stomach. Fortunately, I only had to do punishment push-ups once, due to an unbuttoned button.
Overall, I thought the experience was great. It was such an interesting perspective of the army that I would never have had the chance to see otherwise. We had some interesting classroom lessons on a variety of topics. The ones I found most interesting were the purity of the weapon, missing soldiers (primarily Gilad Shalit), and learning about M16s. On the last day we got to fire them. I hit the piece of paper with all 11 of the bullets. It was intense to be behind such a powerful weapon. My heart was beating really hard. I have gotten so used to seeing people my age and younger carry them around everywhere and I liked experiencing for myself what it is like to use one.
I also enjoyed the physical competitions. The different teams would have to complete various challenges such as jogging, running lines, push-ups, sit-ups, and army crawls across a field of gravel (that one left our knees scratched and bruised). One day they thought it would make the competition a little more interesting if we did it after dinner, resulting in several people throwing up. The strangest one involved teams racing to open and eat cans of tuna, sardines, and the equivalent of kosher Spam, and drinking a huge gasoline can full of water. It was a sample of the food given to soldiers who go out on missions in the field. Directly after, they gave each team a box of these field rations to eat for lunch, because what you want after eating it all under time pressure, is to have the chance to sit down and really enjoy it. It was all really fun though. I would definitely do the army if I was making Aliyah. For those who are interested, the Israeli army, which most of us know as IDF, Israeli Defense Forces, is called Zahal here, which stands for tzavah hagana l'yisrael, army defense Israel.
Pictures:
1st: One of the buildings on the base (uniform storage) and the hills in the background. The base was in a beautiful area.
2nd: The field of gravel where we spent hours standing around in the sun at Hakshev (attention). The flag raising ceremony took place here every morning.
3rd: Our bad ass 19-year-old mefakedet (commander) leading the way down the hill to the shooting range.
4th: Who likes cleaning bathrooms at night in pajamas? I do!
5th: Kitchen duty day. We washed a lot of dishes that day. We had brief training including the importance of staying out of the dairy sections of the kitchen when you're working a meat meal and being careful not to mix any of the dishes or utensils.
