Educational Course

I meant to write a long post about last weekend, but as usual laziness and being away from home defeated me. In short, the parents of Michael Levin (the only American killed in the war in Lebannon, three years ago this Thursday) took all of the lone soldiers in the Paratroopers to a sort of vacation-base for a couple days. There were some speeches (including Michael's parents and the commander of the Paratroopers) and a documentary on Michael, as well as various organizations and programs to give advice on after we get out (mostly a few colleges, some foundations, and a lot of police looking for new recruits).

The big hilight for me was that I got to talk to Avigdor Kahalani again. For those of you with very good memories, I explained about half a year ago how he is the head of the Friends of the IDF and came to visit us before we went into Gaza, and a few minutes talking to him made me feel better than anything else the army did. This time I was able to thank him and tell him what his visit meant to me. Of course he didn't remember me, but it still made me feel better.


In other news, I'm no longer a combat soldier. Just before going to the vacation-base I turned in my gun and all my equipment other than my dress uniforms. On Sunday I started the educational course I'd been dreaming of for months. I didn't expect to like it - I figured I'd be surrounded by lazy jobnikim [non-combat soldiers. More on them in a moment] complaining about the smallest things and just speaking Russian. I don't like it but the army tends to make people at least somewhat racist, especially against Russians.

Sunday was just signing into the course and I spent most of the time searching for other real soldiers. Like most combat soldiers, I consider jobnikim useless and not real soldiers. They are home all the time (especially the type that end up in my course, most of whom probably get out every day), spend their time in the army sitting in air-conditioned offices, and that's not enough for them. After the war in Gaza, they took our whole battalion to one of the vacation-bases for a week. The jobnikim got to relax the whole time doing nothing, while the combat soldiers (i.e. the people who were actually in the war and deserved the rest) still had to do guard duty!

As I expected, there were almost no combat soldiers signing in, and it seemed even fewer signing in for the course in Haifa. But as I said before I left, even if they make me wash dishes for 8 hours a day, it's worth it if I can go home every night (note: that's an example of a combat soldier mentality).

Monday the actual course started. And my first thoughts were pretty accurate. Aside from me and a girl from Argentina, everyone in my class was a native Russian speaker. And the closest to combat soldiers were one former infantry medic who was injured and put in with his battalion medical unit (sort of a half-jobnik position) and a guy from the "Homeland Front" (technically a combat unit, but almost as low as they get - their job is mostly to help out people in emergencies - setting up bomb shelters, evacuating collapsing buildings...). A little while later, one proper soldier did show up - he's from one of the best infantry reconnaisance units.

And as I predicted, the day started with the mishakit [I'm not sure how to translate that well, but she's the one in charge of us] apologizing that the air conditioner was having problems and suggesting that we take a break until it started working. It was a little warm, but not bad.

Once with did commence, we opened with some getting-to-know-each-other-games. We were each given a question to ask everyone else. Mine was "What was the last army punishment you got?" Most of the answers I got were 2-3 days having to stay on base. My first reaction was to remind them that I asked about a punishment, not a reward.


But things began looking up. We all opened up some and started joking around, and I realized that they were all pretty good and fun people. I wouldn't necessarily want to go to war with them, but that's not why we were there. Once I started paying attention to who they were instead of what tags or pins they were wearing, I had a great time.

I slept on the bus ride to Haifa this morning, and dreamt that I was back with my old platoon. As usual, no one was doing what they were supposed to and they were all screwing each other over. Every time I came back to the room, they had thrown my stuff outside, tried kicking me out... As I woke up I realized how glad I was to be anywhere but there.

We're mainly studying basic Judaism and Israeli history, much of which I know already (they tried convincing me several time that I don't need the course, but there's no way I'm turning down 11 weeks of going home every day). Today I decided to make things a little more interesting and perhaps to get something more out of my time, and asked the people sitting near me to teach me some Russian. This instantly made me everyone's friend, and for the rest of the day people were coming up to me with words to learn.

I don't expect much since it's very unstructured and only a couple months for an extremely complicated language, but it can't hurt and it would be good to know some Russian (about 1/7 of the country's population are immigrants from the former Soviet Union). And it helps me get to know the others there. A couple of them decided that if I'm going to learn how to talk like a Russian, I should also learn to drink like a Russian; so hopefully I'll be able to teach them a thing or two in there (my Ukranian commander tried that during advanced training - it quickly turned into him asking me for pointers).