“Red alert! Red alert!” The call came through the loudspeaker of our tiny post on the Lebanese border, piercing the relative quiet of the evening. But despite its suddenness, we were used to this. We all ran inside from wherever we had been – some were playing FIFA on the playstation, others were talking on the phone outside, some were sleeping, others were eating. Within two minutes we had pulled on our bullet-resistant vests, combat vests, and helmets, and were waiting in the bunker for orders. Something had touched the fence in our defensive area.

A group of guys ran outside to the armored personnel carrier, ready to high-tail it down the hill to the border fence if need be. A few more were told to go man the machine guns along the fortifications of the post. I was with the group of guys waiting inside, ready to move out on foot.

Suddenly, Eitan remembered something.

“Shit, didn’t we just order pizza?”

“Yeah, it’s supposed to get here soon,” said Ron. He pulled off his helmet and laid down on the bench he had been sitting on.

“It’s gonna get cold,” said Eitan.

Five minutes later, the guy at the gate yelled into the bunker. “Pizza’s here!”

“Ask him if he saw any Hezbollahs on the way here!” I yelled.

“Fuck it, I’m hungry,” Eitan said. Ron jumped up to join him as they left the bunker in full combat gear, walked over to the main gate, pulled it open, and went over to talk to the pizza guy.

“What the…” said the pizza guy.

“Red alert. Don’t worry about it,” said Eitan.

Just as he walked in with the pizzas, a voice came over the loudspeaker: “end of alert!”

“Perfect timing,” I said as we all grabbed a slice and started removing our equipment.

We’re always tired. The kind of tired where you can fall asleep at the drop of a hat, but you don’t really feel like it until you find yourself doing something that will take a few hours and then regret not sleeping. It’s a vicious cycle, but one we’re learning to live with. The days just roll one into the next – we sleep three hours here, half an hour there, and in between we guard, patrol, hop on the hummer for a few hours, eat, clean. The three weeks I’ve been here have been my fastest three weeks in the army, so I guess it’s good that we’re going to be doing this for six months.

We’re on the border with Lebanon. From the posts in our bunker we can see the UNIFIL soldiers doing their patrols, the Lebanese army goofing off, and the occasional Hezbollah guy taking pictures of us. It’s funny – after the second Lebanon war, Hezbollah is not allowed to have any presence south of the Litani river; that is, at least not official presence. The UN patrols the area and is supposed to enforce this rule. But almost daily we spot a guy dressed in civilian clothes driving up to within a few hundred meters of the border fence, stop, get out, and start taking pictures. Sometimes when the UN goes up to investigate, they run and hide behind a bush until the pass, and then get out and start doing more recon. Other times they try to tell the UN soldiers that they were just there to take pictures of the landscape or the wildlife or something like that (I can tell what they’re saying by their majestic hand movements), and then they’re just told to beat it and they hop on their motor scooters and drive away, only to come back a few hours later and do the same thing.

I’m about to close my third Shabbat in a row without being home; this is already the longest I’ve ever been on base without a break, and I’m set to be here another week. It got to the point where if I took my four-day leave now, then I wouldn’t get to see Frannie until somewhere around the end of October, so I decided to suck it up and stay for another week and then take it when she gets here. That means I’m going to have to wash some socks and underwear in the sink with shampoo, but it’s not so bad. Honestly, despite the lack of sleep and the three-hour guarding shifts, I’m having a pretty good time. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to go home – I actually feel myself getting more restless and generally more crazy as the days go on. The guys who went home for Rosh haShana came back to see the eight or nine of us that still hadn’t gone home being way more goofy than normal, yelling, wrestling, singing, dancing around. Here’s hoping that I don’t go insane before next Sunday.

There’s a fucking horse outside my window. Normally this would be unexpected on an army base, but alas, this is Israel, and I’ve come to learn that nothing should be unexpected.

Our base is in the Golan, right next to a kibbutz. Due to what seems to be a combination of laziness and lack of funding, the fence between the base and the kibbutz’s pasture is incomplete, and thus, we frequently find barnyard animals wandering around, popping out from behind buildings and vehicles and being generally annoying.

The cows aren’t so bad; they just hang around the dumpster, moo, and crap out huge, yet avoidable, cow-pies. This horse, on the other hand, is the bane of our existence. It wanders into our area and pees in our rooms and drops deuces everywhere. Sometimes it just stands there, like an idiot, and we have to throw rocks at its feet and make loud noises to get it to leave. Three weeks ago, we came back on a Sunday to a huge puddle of horse pee in our sheltered common area, and as we were cleaning it up, the horse cruised over to mock us. We picked the bigger rocks to throw that time. Then it made that face that horses make when they want to piss you off – you know, when they flip their upper lip up to bare their teeth – and casually walked away. Man, I hate that horse.

When we first got to this base a few months ago we had heard nothing of this infestation. Our first night here, at three in the morning, I was fast asleep, when suddenly I heard a “mooooooooooo” from literally right outside my window. When I recovered from nearly peeing my pants, I looked out the window, gun in hand, and saw one of those god damn cows just hanging out between our trailer and the bathrooms. The next morning we started noticing the massive piles of farm animal feces all over the base. The good news is that there are usually only three or four of the menaces in the area at one time, so it could be a lot worse, but man, are they gross.

But back to the horse. We went home this past weekend, but my friend Yona from Alabama volunteered to stay and pull guard duty. When I got back to base today, he told me about the disaster in the dining hall.

Apparently, someone had forgot to close the door to the dining hall after Shabbat dinner on Friday night. So, when everyone went back on Saturday morning for breakfast, they were greated by huge, steaming piles of horse crap and puddles of pee all over the floor, and that fucking brown horse just standing there like a moron, munching on some leftovers that someone forgot to throw away. After chasing it out, they had to clean up all the presents it left them on the floor, thus ruining their appetites for the remainder of the day. And I’m assuming it came back later to mock them, because that horse sucks.

My room at the base is the “new immigrant” room. There’s me, Yona from Alabama, Sergei from Ukraine, Andre from Ukraine, and Andre from Russia. The Ukrainians and the Russian, along with Denis from the other platoon, make up what we call the “mafia rusit”, or “Russian mafia” in English. For short, it’s the “mafras.”

We made it a rule that Hebrew is not allowed in the room, except, obviously, when the Russians and Americans have to communicate. Andre from Ukraine went to a yeshiva in Brooklyn, so he usually acts as the interpreter, but for all intents and purposes, Hebrew is our common language, even if Sergei has a 50-word vocabulary and Yona takes ten seconds to think of each word he wants to say. But commanders, Israelis, don’t come in our room with that Hebrew, man, we need a break.

Last week Yona and I got fed up with the Mafras playing their monotonous euro-techno, so we asked if they mind if we put on some country music. “What’s country?” asked Sergei.

“Well, it’s the music of the south and south-eastern United States, you know, like cowboys,” I explained. Andre from Ukraine translated a few words from Hebrew to Russian.

“Oh, they’re like the kibbutzniks of America,” said Sergei.

—

For the past few weeks I’ve been cruising around on a pair of wooden crutches I picked up at the Israeli equivalent of Goodwill. It’s not that I can’t walk – although, from not moving or putting weight on my knee, it’s been stiffening up and hurting so much that I actually can’t walk – but rather the orthopedist at home told me he’d prescribe crutches for two months if I were staying in Santa Barbara. I don’t want to play around with my health, so I obliged.

In the meantime, Shmeel and Moti were working almost full time to get me in to see the orthopedist in Israel. I ended up faxing my diagnosis in America to the medical division of the army, and before my lazy company medic even called in to get me an appointment, I got a call from an officer in the medical division saying I had an appointment the next day at 8 am. I had just gotten to base after having taken two days off to look for an apartment in Tel Aviv, and had been there all of three hours before I had to put on my formal uniform and go back to Shmeel’s so I could make my appointment the next morning. All in all, I was on base for five hours that week. Not bad.

The orthopedist told me that I can’t have surgery, and also that I don’t need crutches. Unless I go and start running and jumping again, I can’t do any more damage. We just have to wait until the blood drains, and then I can go back to my normal combat service. But, it could take up to six months. After two months of rest and physical therapy, I’m supposed to see him again to check on my progress. In the meantime I’ve been doing everything I can to get better and back into combat shape.

On my way back to the kibbutz right now after being in a radio course for a week – we started learning the secret stuff today and my security clearance hasn’t gone through yet, so instead of having me stick around and wait, they sent me back to the battalion in the Golan. It’s for the best, anyway – we were sent there to be the radio operators in the battalion commander’s platoon, which means that of a war broke out I’d have to carry a bunch of heavy machinery and just walk around with the guy. Not what I had in mind as a combat soldier.

I timed my leave pretty well, I’d say. I came back to three days of hanging out in base – still waiting for the doctor, by the way – to a week of “recreation” with the rest of my battalion. Granted, sometimes I feel like a babysitter with all these kids running wild, but it’s still pretty fun. Better than being on base, that’s for sure.

We met Sunday at a place in Rishon leTzion called “Cinema City”, which, when I heard the name, sounded like it might be the Israeli equivalent of Hollywood. When I saw it, I can’t say I was disappointed, since I’ve been rendered immune to disappointment during my service, but I definitely laughed a bit. Israel’s famous “Cinema City” is a small-ish mall with a five-screen movie theater upstairs.

I noticed the same theme yesterday when we were at Rosh haNikra, the northern-most coastal point in Israel. It’s basically a few cliffs with some caves with some tiny rock islands fifty meters out from the beach. But we watched a movie at the place that made it sound like one of the wonders of the world. The enthusiastic narrator boasted about the supposed natural wonder over video of crashing waves and majestic birds; almost making me forget that we have hundreds of places like this in California. But hey, Israelis are proud of their country and achievements, so might as well let them make a national park out of Grover Beach and call the Victorville five-plex “Cinema City”.

In between enjoying the wonders of Israel, I’ve been trying to deal with my knee. I managed to get hold of some crutches on the kibbutz, but they’re the kind that have those little arm holders and come up to just above your elbow, so walking around with both of them made me look like I have Polio. I chose the more stylish one-crutch look, and have been cruising around like an old guy with arthritis for the past few days. But if I don’t do this now then in a few years I’ll be a young guy with arthritis, so I’ll take this, thanks. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to see a doctor this week, but several people, including the army folks that Shmeel yelled at on Saturday night, have said that I would see one first thing on Sunday. Not counting on it, but this is the most certain answer I’ve ever got from the army about anything, so that has to count for something.

On my way to a museum right now. Should be fantastic. Maybe there will be some birthright kids there; I’ll tell them I got injured in a combat mission in Lebanon. Those Hizballah guys always go for the knees, right?

Looking back at my time at home, I can honestly say I did everything I wanted to do: I ate at all my favorite restaurants, I went to the beach or hung out by the pool almost every day, I saw a bunch of my friends, and, best of all, I was with Frannie 24/7. But shit, when my plane started its descent toward Ben Gurion Airport on Sunday, all I could think about was how much I wanted to turn around and go back.

I started thinking about how I was when I first started basic training – namely, miserable. I would have to wait two months before I would get to see Frannie, and those two months were arguably the hardest, at least psychologically. Getting yelled at by 19-year-olds, trying to teach 18-year-olds how to live by themselves, eating crappy food and getting an interrupted six hours of sleep per night was not what I wanted to be doing while I was bummed out waiting for my fiancé to come.

Now I’m in the same position, and that’s what scared me. Frannie is set to come in early or mid October, and I’m worried that just like in tironut, I’ll end up being bummed all the time and even depressed on Sundays when I have to come back to the army. But, luckily, I quickly realized that that wouldn’t be the case.

I came back to a new world – gone are the yelling, the mundane tasks just to fill the time, the intentional lack of sleep. Even the food is better here. When we work, we work hard; when there’s nothing to do, well, let’s just say they don’t make us do pushups and clean our guns for the 14th time when we have a spare hour, like they used to. I’m actually not having such a bad time; I’m reading a bunch of books, listening to music, taking two-hour naps during the day. Life isn’t so bad.

And I’d like to say that I’m fully back in the swing of things, but, as I’m pretty sure I wrote in June or July, I ended up taking care of my knee while I was at home. I started with physical therapy while I waited for the MRI results, but quickly stopped when the doctor told me what I had.

Mind you, this is the one thing that I’ve been absolutely dying to know for the past 6+ months, and man was I bummed when I found out.

I have what’s called bone marrow edema – which is, if I remember correctly, a condition in which the bone experienced massive trauma, and in response the bone marrow is excreting some sort of blood-like fluid in order to protect the wounded area. In my case, almost a third of my kneecap is filled with fluid.

The kicker is this: the only way to heal it is time. The doctor wrote me a prescription for crutches and told me to use those for a month or so, then not to run or do anything stressful for another couple months. I asked him what if I kept up what I’ve been doing in the army and tried to heal it after I got released. He said that I could ruin my knee for life. So much for that.

So then I was faced with a dilemma. I had managed to fight through the pain for six months, doing stuff that most people with two healthy knees won’t even come close to doing in their lifetimes. But now I find out that I’m lucky my knee is still functioning. Theoretically, I could continue and maybe not ruin my knee, since that’s what I did for half a year after my injury. But now that I have heard it concretely that I will potentially develop arthritis or worse if I keep this up, I had no choice. I brought in copies of the images and the results, have shown a few people, including a doctor (wow, already?? I know, right?) and am now waiting for my company medic to come back from the shetach to sit down with me and the doctor and figure out what to do. My friend said that he knows a guy who got 6 months medical leave for the same problem. I don’t really know what to think of that right now, and frankly, I’d rather not get too ahead of myself before I talk to the doctor. I’m hoping for today, but tomorrow wouldn’t be so bad either. What’s good is I’m so accustomed to the way the IDF works that I’ll be pleasantly surprised if I end up seeing him at all.

That’s my situation. Not exactly what I had in mind for my return, but in my time in the army I’ve become a firm believer that everything happens for a reason. So far out of everything bad that’s happened to me, something better has come out of it. We’ll see what this leads to.

I’m done with training. Man, it feels great to be able to say that.

I ended up sitting next to a guy from New Jersey today on the train who is in his third month of basic training with the paratroopers. He pretty much has the same story as me – loved Israel, finished college, then came to the army – and he was just as depressed as I was at that stage. I though to myself, “was I really that bummed out?” And yeah, I guess I was. I would come back to base on Sundays bummed as all-hell, just grinding through the days to get to the weekend.

But now I’ve done a complete 180. It’s funny how much control that you have over your own emotions. I remember just deciding one day that hey, fuck it, you can be bummed and miserable all day, or you can try to enjoy yourself. I stopped worrying about my knee, started getting stoked for the tough exercises as if they were a test of my motivation, and I instantly became happier. So that’s what I told this guy. I’m sure it’ll take a while, but he’ll get to where I’m at now. Most of us do.

Anyway, I am now incredibly happy to say that I finished what has up to this point been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Discipline alone, it wouldn’t have been so bad; lack of sleep alone, and it wouldn’t have been so bad; grueling training exercises alone, and it wouldn’t have been so bad; but shit, man, when you put all that crap together you get one hell of a tough ride. And that feeling on the last day of war week – after we went days without sleeping, walking dozens of kilometers with the equivalent weight of a VW bug on our backs, and then went and did two-hour combat exercises in the afternoon heat – after all that, when we walked back into our base, I got what I think is the feeling that guys get when they win the NBA finals. When you work so hard and suffer so much and see your family so little for something, and you get it, well, you have to have experienced it to know what I’m talking about. No point in getting high with drugs, just do seven months of training in the IDF.

So now we just turned in our old guns and equipment. We’re taking buses up to our new base in the Golan tomorrow, where we’re supposed to get all-new equipment, and where we’ll even be sleeping in rooms. And then, next week I come back here for an Ulpan program for the new immigrants in my unit, and then on that Thursday I fly home. In short, it’s going to be a good next 11 days.

In approximately eight hours, I’m going to put on my bullet-resistant vest, my combat vest, my manpack, another pack with 18 liters of water, my helmet, and my gun, and head out for five days of simulated warfare.

This is War Week, the final week of advanced training. After this week, we are infantrymen in every sense, and will likely be called to fight in the next war. Our enemies, a division of Syrian commandos that look surprisingly similar to the cardboard targets we use in shooting practice, are awaiting us on the tops of hills, behind bushes, and hidden in narrow ravines. Our goal is to conquer the territory as quickly and efficiently as possible. Sounds simple, when they don’t shoot back, but walking 100 kilometers in one week with no sleep and 80 pounds on your back is never easy.

It’s pretty funny to look back just seven months and see all of us in shock as new recruits. The first masa we did was two and a half kilometers, and I had the stretcher on my back. At the time, it was hard as hell, but now it seems like a joke. I can’t exactly say that we’re all battle-hardened warriors, but we’re getting there. Most of us, at least.

There are still those same few whiney kids that make up medical excuses to get out of stuff. Meanwhile, I play down my injuries so they let me do stuff. Last week we did an overnight platoon combat exercise, during which my stomach decided it had had enough with whatever was inside it – 20 kilometers, 15 throw-ups and one pass-out later, I made it back to the base. And there’s one guy who’s not coming with us this week because “his leg hurts.” Not to toot my own horn, but 90% of these guys wouldn’t have been able to deal with the knee pain I had or what I went through last week. I guess it’s the fact that I left everything at home to come here and kick ass that is giving me the necessary adrenaline to get through all this crap.

At the end of every live-fire exercise, our officer says “sof targil ratuv,” or “end of wet exercise.” Now, at the end of the last exercise on Thursday morning, we’re all getting stoked for him to say “sof targil ratuv, sof shavua milchama, sof imun mitkadem.” End of wet exercise, end of war week, end of advanced training. I can’t even imagine how happy we’ll be when he says those words.

And then, 14 days from that Thursday, I’ll be on a plane on my way to New York.

This is going to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but as Lance Armstrong once said, pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever. Let’s git’er done.

We’re still here…decided to have an inter-platoon cook-off using our typically bland food.

Turned out pretty damn tasty if I say so myself.

Three weeks left now – two, I guess, with next week being only a few days long with Shavuot and all. I was supposed to be home by now, but shit happens, and here I am on the Gaza border, waiting to see if they need me to hang out in a tower and shoot people in the knees if they get too close.

But it works out. Instead of leaving for the weekend, they’re letting me out for Shavuot, which will give me more time with Frannie before she goes back to the states. Odds are that I’ll get to stay home until the following Sunday, unless there’s another need for sharpshooters in Gaza. The past three weekends have all been like this – the Arabs all write on Facebook that they’re going to rise up after morning prayers on Friday, and the army keeps us around just in case they do. After what happened in Syria a few weeks ago, the generals can’t afford another slip-up and subsequent barrage from the papers.

The guys who volunteered to come here are the ones that I would have no problem going to war with. These are the guys that grab the stretcher and don’t let go for the 5k left on a masa, the guys that grit their teeth and suffer in silence while the other guys whine and give up.

We all jumped at this opportunity. Everyone else is going home? So what? We signed up to be fighters, so why be a pussy and go home to mommy when you can spend Shabbat on high alert on the Gaza border? It was an easy decision for me.

But it’s likely that we won’t end up doing anything. Right now I’m sitting in the shade with about a dozen other guys. A few grabbed some mattresses off the truck and already passed out. One guy is listening to reggae, two are spinning their hats around on their fingers, and the rest are dinking around on their iPhones.

In fact, we spent most of the past two weeks like this. Because of the heat, we weren’t allowed to train between 11 and 6 every day, so we would sit in the shade, read, tell jokes, throw rocks, and fall asleep on each other. And when it came time to do stuff, we were rested and ready to go. Last week was supposed to be one of the hardest in training, but because of these breaks it wasn’t so bad.

So two more weeks of that? I’ll suffer during the 20k hikes at night, but hey, no problem. And aside from the end of training, I have something else to look forward to. Yesterday I finally got permission to fly home – I got 24 days, from July 7th until August 1st. And shit, I can’t wait. Three whole weeks with my fiancé, eating Mexican food and hamburgers and trafe, lounging at the pool and the beach.

However, my parents already scheduled an orthopedist appointment, MRI, and physical therapy, so it won’t be all fun and games. I’ve pretty much given up on getting my knee fixed by the army, so even when I got approved for an MRI and was then informed that my appointment (in two months) was canceled because the hospital doesn’t have money, I didn’t even blink. But it is kind of ridiculous that within 2 hours my parents were able to accomplish more than the IDF has in 6 months. Gives you a pretty good look into the world of socialized medicine.

Shabbat shalom, y’all.