Saturday, August 28, 2010

First steps of becoming a real soldier

Here i'm back after 2 more weeks of being there. I must say, those 2 weeks were easier, than i expected. I found some new friends, i didn't change my division as i wanted, because i got what i need here also. The post i hold now is called "mem-tet" - "mishne techni", or a technical unit. I will sit in the vehicle called "sampick", you can see it on the back side behind the artillery on the pic in previous post. My job is to coordinate the fire of the whole division - surely not alone, we will do the job together with other "mem-tets", but that's how it works.

What has passed during those 2 weeks? We've learned some new stuff, one of the most significant in the first week were lectures about biological/chemical weapon usage threats and using first medical help - this one was also with practical and theoretical tests. I've passed both, and although we weren't told about our marks, i think they are pretty decent, i can recognize only 2 little mistakes i did. But hmm, may be the man would die because of those mistakes, omg...  actually, a man's life is the highest value in Israeli Army. If there are some wounded or killed on the enemy territory, they will never be left alone. In the last Lebanon war the average time since a soldier being hit or wounded on the battlefield till he was evacuated into one of hospitals is 1.5 hours! But we strive for 1 hour. That's not always possible...

After closing Shabbat in the base, we had the whole shabbat free - we could sit in our rooms, we could even go to play some football, although for some reason there were very few who wanted to play in 40 degrees heat :D  All i did was reading a book and eating snacks, we were allowed to go to soldiers shop to buy some eatable stuff before the shabbat came. In the beginning of the next week we packed our stuff, a lot of stuff and left to shooting grounds, where we learned basics of shooting with M-16. In the beginning i couldn't hit a shit, i was almost crying about me being such a dumbass sniper, but i've improved with time and in the end shot a head 5 times out of 5 from 50 meters :O  We spent 4 days in the desert, without having any showers or other signs of civilization. We were eating so called "Manot krav" - "Battle portions". Except of important for surviving canned food, such as Tuna or preserved meat, they also contained canned nuts, canned onions, canned chocolate, tea, sugar, raspberries powder (!), canned olives and... canned halva! I've even got one for myself, so i could take a pic of it to show it to you (pic1) :D  It's pretty tasty, btw. Well, desert is still pretty nice in the evening and in the night, and especially in the period when we were there the full moon shined in the sky, was fantastic. All those 4 days we were training shooting different targets, getting into position after running and so on, learned many new things, new skills... xD We've even learned close fighting with our gun. After we've packed our stuff to go back we've made a tour of 4 kilometers with all equipment and equipment of our group. Full-equipped vest weighs around 5 kilos, additionally i carried a large flask of 10 liters of water on my shoulder the whole way, wasn't that easy. In the end I was granted a stripe with symbol of our division, i've sewed it on my "alef" uniform (pic2) :)  by the way, there are letters on the forehead. Actually, the whole forehead are letters in hebrew, it's the name of our battalion - Granit.  It was a big surprise for me, but i'm the only one who was granted the stripe, am i so outstanding? O_o

Next week we are going there again to widen our knowledge, although i'm tired of all this thing,my left leg hurts after every action i do with it, and whole thing with timing is just freaking me out. All we do is with timing. And if you are late for 1 second, you can even get so called "Tsvei Pgiya",  which hold you for another hour or two in the base before you can go home. If you get too much of them you don't go home at all :D

Feel free to comment and ask question, this means a lot for me. I wasn't sure about writing this post, i thought that anyway no one needs it....

2 comments:

  1. Чертовски познавательный блог! :) Жаль, что больше не пишешь.

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    1. Действительно жаль...армию уже закончил, а вот так почитать сейчас...были времена )

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