The warm up

After a nice relaxing shabbat on base, Sunday ended up being an extention of Shabbat - guarding and sleeping. They took us to a place near Be'er Sheva, which is a place where tons of soldiers go Sunday mronings on their way back to base to do guard duty. It was going to be a perfect day - 2.5 hour drive to get there, a few hours of guard duty with breaks in between and then a 2.5 hour drive back to base. What made the day even better was that the bus broke down on the way there for 2.5 hours so it was an extra 2.5 hours of sleep instead of guarding.



This week we finally started practicing in the tanks. Our company commander described this week as the warm up before the run. We mainly practiced fires and evacuating the injured. The loader has the most work to do in all the exercizes. In fact, aside from button pushing and joystick moving I did ALL the work. For the injury exercizes I have to drag the injured to the back door of the tank, which is no simple task at all. All the space in the tank is taken up by either weapons, weapon related systems or ammo. It is not made for spaceous lviing or accessibility. So aside from the fact that I have no idea how Asaf, the 6'2" 200 pound gunner gets into his chair in under 15 seconds (starting with his feet on the ground outside the tank) I have no clue how I'm going to drag his limp body through the tank hwere all the help I get from the commader is that he moves his legs to the side s oAsaf can squeeze by as I drag him by the straps on his vest. There is absolutely no easy way to grab a hold of the injured. hopefully I will only need to do this in practice be cause those exercieses were hard and obviously no fun at all.



On wednesday night during our hour of free time, my commander came and told me just after I had gotten out of the shower that our tzevet had 7 minutes to be dressed and at the tank - obviously that meant that we didn't check the tank properly and that we forgot to do something. After spending about a minute and a half trying to find everyone else in my tzevet, needless to say I didn't have much time remaining. I did however have enough time assuming I didn't screw up getting dressed. I think you can figure out where this is going. After I finished lacing up my boots I realized I had my pants on backwards. Decision time: be late and dressed properly or on time and hope that my commander doesn't notice. It would only be maximum 5 minutes at the tank and it was relatively dark outside. We finished with the tank and he didn't notice the backwards pants. I rushed back to my room to change before any of the commanders bug me for anyting else. Before I could start getting undressed another commander tells me that the social worker is waiting to see me... now. Ugggggghhh.... okay... I find her and she says follow me. Where do we go? Right into the office of the company commander. SHIT! He tells me to sit down. I strategically placed my gun over my crotch to hide where the buttons should be. After a minute of small talk he wished me a happy passover and gave me a give (Lone soldiers get lots of gifts at the holidays). Now for the exit: I stand up and take steps backwards and sideways as not to turn around so he doesn't see the buttons on my ass. I maange to make a clean exit and get changed be fore anyone noticed (I hope). At this point I can only hope that the company commander hasn't lost all his faith in me.



Along with a bunch of gift certificates Ialso received the most ironic gift ever from the Friends of the IDF. For passover they gave me a sandwhich maker. No explanation needed, but for those who don't get it passover is a holiday where amongst many other things we dont eat bread.



Thursday I go tthe day off which was fantastic. Aside from the obvious plusses to a longer weekend I missed a day full of cleaning the tanks and barracks. On top of that they were doing passover cleaning which means that if cleaning were made a sport, passover cleaning would be the extreme version of it.