The Lone Soldier

Disclaimer!!! I wrote the following a couple weeks ago and never finished the blog. I’m not as angry and annoyed as I was then, but things do still tend to irk me from time to time. I’ve begun to try to accept that this is just the way the army is… Plus I have a working iPhone again which makes me happy, and a great girlfriend to massage my nervous wreck of a self. Without further ado, I present to you all an outdated, unfinished blog entry! Enjoy!

Wow, tomorrow will be 5 months since I started this crazy ride called the Israeli Defense Forces. That means only another 34,186,670 seconds left till I’m out. The reason I’m counting the seconds is because 13 months or a year and a month seems like such a short amount of time. When I started this adventure I didn’t realize that I would be checking every second that goes by. Whether I’m in the army timing EVERYTHING I do because the commander says to, or because it’s on the weekends and I don’t want to waste a second – I’m always checking the tick-tock of the clock.

It’s come to that point in my service where I’ve realized that not everything is perfect in the IDF, very far from it in fact. I won’t go into far reaching details with you now, but I’ve started to become a little cynical due to the broken promises that I’ve grown accustomed to.

Some of the promises are from the IDF, some are from companies, and others are just from people in general. The army promises that Lone Soldiers get out at 6am on Friday’s, I can’t remember the last time I got out before 9am. It doesn’t seem like a huge difference, but when you have less than 48 hours to get everything you need to get done for the week, it really makes a difference. It especially makes a difference because most of those 48 hours are “shabbat hours”, meaning NOTHING is open or working. When the phone company charges you a ridiculous $183 in a month, and they’re closed on the weekend… it doesn’t really help that you can’t call them to straighten it out. I’m starting to hate shabbat, it’s more of a time of being annoyed that I can’t get anything done, rather than a restful time.

OK, so now that I got my bitching out of the way, I can also say that I just completed one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my entire life this week. The day before we left base we had an 8km masa (Journey/hike). The last kilometer we ran with a stretcher full of sandbags, and for the entire 8kms I went with the pakal mayim (water bag). This bag has 15 liters of water in it and so all together weighs around 40 pounds. Add this 40 pounds to the 25-30 pounds of equipment I already carry (1.5 liters of water, 6 loaded magazines, combat vest, dummy grenade, M16 and other small assorted items) and I’m carrying around 70 pounds of stuff. I’ve lost around 15 pounds in the army so far bringing me down to a skinny (semi-anorexic, as my girlfriend says) 150 pounds (68 kilo’s for you non-poundage people). I was carrying 46% of my body weight!!! what?!?!?!