Remember when you were a little child and your parents would make you do chores and you would get rewarded at the end of the week with some money? Life doesn't change when you grow up I found out.
My group, along with another group, was put back onto guard duty. We would switch off days. (Monday and Wednesday we guarded the base and on Tuesday and Thursday the other group guarded the base.)
On guard days, nothing really changed. Guarding has becoming a sort of self-reflecting time because for three hours we watch and get to be alone. Most of my reflecting turned into what I am going to do when I get home. What will I eat, who I will see and so on.
On days that we weren't guarding, we spent the time working either in the kitchen (cleaning, cooking) the other jobs we did were working for the Ra'sar (the person who is in charge of the entire base.) We spent the time putting up tents, taking the old tents down, cleaning the base, washing different parts of the base and basic "house-cleaning."
Then on the weekend, my group got to go down to En-Gedi for some guard duty. Unfortunately for me I couldn't go because I was still on the injured list. So, while the guys got to go off and have some fun at the beach, I had to stay back on base. The good part was that all of a sudden, it got really gray outside and it started hailing. Big hail. The commanders had us repair all the tents and then gave us 10 min to let us have a snow ball fight. It was funny to see the Israelis play with hail because to them, hail is a rare occurrence here in Israel. It was also fun to see a group of 50+ soldiers playing in the snow.
The weekend was also Purim. Holidays on Base are a great experience. For example, on the first night of Purim, a rabbi came to base and he read the Migila for us. After that we spent the time singing and dancing. The next night, a group of Haradiem came by, dressed up and again sang and danced with us and read the Migila. The down side to being on base for the holidays was that both parties wanted us to drink. (During Purim, one of the commandments is to drink until we can’t tell the difference between good and evil. The problem was that since we are soldiers, we aren't allowed to drink and therefore we weren't able to complete all the commandments. However it was still a lot of fun to sing and dance with 30 other soldiers.
Then it was back to reality and a new week.
Last week we worked on taking over a mountain in groups of four people. One of the people was the leader, the second guy was either the grenadier or a sniper, the third guy was either the MAGist (me), Negavist or sniper and the last one was either a grenadier or regular soldier. The way it works is the leader calls out what to do and we work our way up the mountain until we reach the enemy and fight in close quarters. The training only lasted from Monday to Wednesday. On Thursday we had our Bochan 05. A Bochan is a test, which can either be physical or written test. This test was both practical and written. This Bochan was a test on everything we learned since the start of basic training. It included weapons, chemical warfare, first aid and also radio. The written test consisted of questions relating to the weapons, radio, and chemical warfare and also about Israeli history. Since the test was all in Hebrew, all the Americans got a Mashakit Alyiah. The Mashakit helped us write and understand the questions. After the written part, we went to the practical test. There we demonstrated how to load, take apart and shot the weapons and also how to apply first aid and talk on the radio. The test went well and no one failed.
This is also the final step in our basic training. From here we go to advance training for two months and then to special training.
The commanders then let Asher and I leave to go home and start our packing!!
Hope everyone had a great Purim :)
