Scary News Out of Israel: In the same email, Janet wrote a quite a few stories from my cousin Arik, about his first few months in the Israeli Army. Here are excepts from just a few:
- It's so interesting when Arik comes back, we have dinner together every Friday and the last time he was telling us all these stories. Half the time I was laughing and half the time crying, not kidding...They have tests all the time on all the stuff they've learned. You know "the usual everyday stuff that a normal person has to know" (ha ha ), like how to kill someone with an M-l6, without firing a shot (I'm serious); like how to survive an ambush; how to enter a helicopter at night when you can't make a sound, etc.
- One of the most difficult things to cope with, of course, is lack of sleep. Even though they are required to get 6 hours, they have to get up in the middle of the night EVERY NIGHT put on all their gear, uniform, boots, etc. and go outside and guard.for about a half hour. Then when you're done you wake up the next kid...Then, during their week in the field, where you barely sleep at all, they make you do all these long treks in the middle of the night, pitch black. There's a certain technique about following the guy in front of you so you don't get lost, etc. Arik is walking behind a kid, who suddenly veers off to the right or left. Arik swears the kid was asleep while walking and Amnon and others swear to me that they've seen the same thing during their army days.
- One of the most difficult things they had to practice was surviving a gas attack. Arik was scared to death when he spoke to his friends who went through this before him, and who said it was horrible. You have to put on a gas mask and protective clothing and you go into this small room where there is an officer who releases some kind of tear gas. He suddenly tells you to take off your mask, announce your personal number (each kid has a personal army number) and then run out. It's literally a minute or two that you breathe the gas, but Arik said it was the most horrible thing he's ever experienced so much so, that he said, he now knows what it must have felt like to be in a gas chamber during the holocaust, and here we're only dealing with tear gas. Many of the kids fainted and many vomited. Arik, with his weak stomach, felt like doing both but he managed to survive it. He said it was an indescribable feeling you feel like you're literally choking to death. Great, huh?