Chronicle of a Military Service • Part 5
Mar-Apr 2008 • BAS // Herodion
I was to arrive back at the battalion on Sunday, then stationed in the West Bank. Because I was coming alone there would be no shuttle available, I was told, only public transportation that passed nearby the base. On the phone the adjutant clerk gave me an alarming description of the situation. My impression was that I would have to alight in the middle of a village of dangerous Arabs and transverse a considerable stretch of hostile territory were they not to send the armoured patrol to pick me up.
As it happened, on the day I bumped in the Jerusalem Central Station into other returning battalion soldiers so that, with the safety of numbers, no patrol was needed. Nonetheless, reality revealed to me that I'd have felt embarrassed if a patrol came for me.
A decade or so before the birth of Jesus, King Herod of Judea had a palace constructed at the edge of the Judaean dessert, south east of Jerusalem, bearing his name: Herodion. Two millennia later, across the road from its artificial hill lay stretched Base Herodion, occupied by the HQ company of the 405th artillery battalion Nahmer. The spot where the bus dropped us was a desolate roundabout in whose center stood a block of concrete with pashkevil pasted on it. Not only was it not the middle of a village, it was scarcely the middle of anywhere. There were a few Arab houses in the surroundings, some unoccupied looking, mostly a distance away though one stood right in front of the base's gate which was directly in sight, a distance too meager to potentially offer an adventure of any kind.
We arrived before the bus of the HQ soldiers who had been at home for the weekend did. My companions quickly disappeared and other than a cute Alon (who had been with me in Shivta?) who was destined to become part of the adjutancy and who at that moment was waiting, together with me, outside its trailer offices, only a person or two passed by that morning. It was the smallest army base I had been to, the grey and heavy weather contributed to a feeling of a ghost town. I felt odd. I had a feeling of the uncompromising presence, bare, of reality.
The BAS, the Battalion Aid Station, to which I was sent, was like all other structures in the post, a single trailer. It was locked — a part of it was out on a patrol and the rest hadn't returned from their leave yet. The idea that the medics were sleeping in the Aid Station was strange to me. Until they arrived I had been impressed by an altered bilingual mines warning placard that rested on one of the windows; the Hebrew now read “Danger medics!” and the English “DANGER MINDS!” When they returned I was impressed by the rooms from within. These were the first rooms that I saw in the army that looked like living spaces of humans. The youngster room, which had one single and two bunk beds, was decorated with various items and posters, including a regimental flag on which was printed a play on common mottoes, “Why hurry? Snail from Nahmer,” a TV with a DVD and a PlayStation 2 plugged in. The senior room had an air-conditioner in it, and a little wooden counter that served as a pantry for stocked cookies, wafer bars, snacks, Nestea. The fridge in the clinic room contained, other than medicine: milk, the vegetables of the vegetarian paramedic; the microwave, there to heat up fluid ampoules, was mostly heating popcorn bags, pitas, schnitzels and sausages.
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It took me some time to comprehend the idea of youngster and senior rooms, perhaps because an obstinate point was not made about it. Since the task of replacing the single with a bunk bed to accommodate my addition hadn't been accomplished or even attempted at, I was first put in the empty bed of an absentee; when he returned I was moved to sleep right under the harsh AC on top of a bunk bed in the senior room, on the bed of the Battalion-Medic-to-be who was away in a course. When one of the young medics was sent to serve as the Company Medic in the basic training company in Shivta I was sent back to the youngster room. Harmony was reestablished.
Within a few days I joined my first AE, takbats in Hebrew, not yet knowing what the word meant. This acronymic term, standing for “axis reinforcement,” loaded much significance onto the simple operation that we conducted. A section of the BAS, consisting of either the doctor or the paramedic, a battalion medic and two other medics, were driven around by an HQ driver in the Abirbulance1 to display military presence in the surrounding occupied territories. We simply drove around, in other words. On some fixed points we would disembark: exit the vehicle, stand and —those who smoked, ate or drank— smoke, eat croissants, drink coke or Nestea. The spot by the pillbox2 was known as the one with the better internet reception. It was there that we heard a story from one medic Podkidysh about a friend he knew who had drafted as an Atudai and studied computer science on the army's expense. When the time to start his service came he pulled a dirty one, got out of the army and was gone to Australia. The AEs were also utilized to pass through Tekoa, a nearby settlement, to pay a visit to the supermarket or pick-up and drop-off commuting personnel.
Like the rest, I spent the AE drives sleeping and reading content from the internet. Around the time I left for medics course my parents, through a deal with the telecom company, got me a new phone, a Sony Ericsson K800i. Unlike the phone it was relieving, it could connect to the internet. Out of the box it had not done the task of web-browsing well; Sergei, a good fellow BAS mate who took a liking of me,3 introduced me to the Opera Mini mobile web browser and thereby unlocked my phone's potential. I started reading during AEs and before bed, in addition to Wikipedia articles, a copious amount of Steve Pavlina's blog. After having finished reading his polyphasic sleep posts I moved on to gobble the rest of it, his posts about time management, goal setting, positive thinking, taking control over one's life, diet and the transition from being employed to being self-employed.
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Other than DVD movie watching in the evening, when one wasn't on an AE or on sentry duty, the most popular activity in the Aid Station was sleeping. I myself tried to avoid that. I wasn't aware of the evanescent nature of my belonging to the BAS and was certain that I'd be there until my discharge. It was clear to me that I didn't want to sleep away those years. I wanted to pass them with literature. Around then I was reading David Grossman's “The Yellow Wind”. This book first emerged when Yaniv found it somewhere in the IB4 and brought it to our medics course room. It had lain there on a locker until the end of the course when we cleaned and cleared our quarters, at which point it occurred to me that if I didn't pocket it it would be thrown away, so I did. I first opened it when I was in the BAS, in the West Bank, the setting, as it happened, of the book itself, which narrated Grossman's personal encounters with the people of the region two decades earlier, in the spring of 1987. As with El Señor Presidente, the reading went slowly. My mind must have been distracted by my environment, or the content led me to reflect on my own situation. While I was sitting one day on the metal bench outside the BAS, a medic asked rhetorically whether I was still reading the book. Indeed, it had been several days that I sat there and read it. The remark jolted my reading, I felt embarrassed to dally on one rather thin book for so long. I finished it and moved to an anthology of Augusto Monterroso's stories, then to one of Hemingway's. I entertained the idea of writing a cycle of short stories revolving around a single military base. I remember spinning a story in my mind around the puppy dog that was brought to Base Herodion by one of the adjutant clerks; the Regimental Sergeant Major, responsible for maintaining standards and discipline on camp, notified the clerk that the dog must be gone.
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The BAS served as the first medical response in the base. Each day one of us would be on call, open the clinic in the morning, check the equipment on the Abirbulance, see complaining HQ soldiers. I do not recall seeing so called patients, though it is reasonable to suppose that I did do that, perhaps even made prescriptions. What I do remember is being at a complete loss during an emergency. One of the cooks was operating a vegetable slicing machine. It slid off the counter, he tried to catch it, and the blades, exposed due to a partially broken casing, slashed into his thumb. He appeared at the BAS with a thumb on the cusp of truncation. It was my duty as the medic on call to take care of him but I didn't know what to do. Thumb injuries had not been on my curriculum. I hadn't been there confused long before Tsarfati and another medic took care of him. The only task left for me was to wash the blood off the clinic's floor. I didn't expect to get unused to blood so quickly, but there I was, gripping the mop for support, watching the floor beyond a graining vision.
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The AEs were not all inane. Occasionally we were asked to form checkpoints: to disembark on a crossing or main road and arbitrarily stop passing vehicles –– Palestinian vehicles, of course, recognizable by their green rather than yellow license plates. One time there was a suspect being trawled, but mostly we were not looking for anyone in particular. We checked documents, asked whence and whither and good bye. Again, to “display presence,” the end result being merely a distress to the Arab population.
One time the AE patrol was summoned to the Arab village Tuqu', “The Arab Tekoa” as we called it. We parked the Abirbulance next to a number of Storms. Off the road was an open expanse which sloped suddenly up to the visible village. From the vehicles was seen a Bruegelian landscape with a fireteam of three to five soldiers shooting, I think rubber bullets, in the direction of the villagers who slang stones at them. In the meanwhile a bigger detachment was being assembled under the command of the Vice Battalion Commander, which included the BAS doctor Leandro and a few medics. They entered the village and sowed chaos. Tsarfati talked later about the smoke grenade that he had shot too high. A few of the soldiers, amongst them myself, stayed behind to secure the vehicles. I remember myself there standing in the corner, holding my rifle, feeling loneliness, deeply agonizing, terrible self-consciousness, and the worry that I'd need to use my weapon. I felt terrible and only hoped that it would end quickly.
I can't remember when it happened; here at Tuqu' I stood, it seems, too far from the events, but I cannot think of another occasion when it would have been more plausible. The uncertainty about the dating makes me even doubt that it happened at all and wasn't merely the recollection of a prospective fear of mine, but it provoked a little insight that suggests it was evoked by the external- rather than the inner world. I was hit on the foot by a stone, just above the ankle. It by on means injured me, but it was unpleasant enough to suggest what an impact it could have had had it been launched at me from a shorter distance, or hit me at a more valuable spot. Nothing compared to a rubber bullet, to say nothing of a copper one, but nonetheless.
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One time, it must have been a Friday, the Aid Station was summoned to serve as medical support. A demonstration in the village Umm Salamuna against the separation wall headed towards the “Jewish road.” It was blocked from descending on to it by a coil of razor wire and soldiers from our battalion and Border Police. Behind the razor coil was another road that joined the contested road in a T junction: the BAS parked there, at some distance. Not quite a street, this asphalted road was flanked on one side by a short multistory residential building,5 some sort of kiosk or shop on its ground floor. The doctor and my commander, Don Lejandro as I thought of him (I think the nickname was coined by Tsarfati), placed us, or at least me, around our Abirbulance.
Palestinian residents were passing by us. Hijab-covered school children smiled at me or laughed in my direction, I think. I anyhow wanted to smile back at anyone who looked at me. I can't remember if I did or not. I wanted to broadcast that I did not hate them, that I did not want to hurt them. Our Druze driver dispelled in Arabic a congregation that observed the demo from our side. When the doctor saw me he told me to hold my gun and “appear aggressive” — my rifle hung around my shoulders, my hands were in my pockets.
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Towards one mots'ei Shabbat,6 probably the day following the above demonstration, the Vice Battalion Commander was making plans to enter with a military force into Arab Tekoa, “to raise mayhem” — as Leandro told me; to flex muscles in front of the Palestinians, to be the neighborhood bully. It disgusted me. And as the BAS soldiers were to participate, I found myself facing myself. I thought whether to do something, no to do something, to say something to somebody, to somehow avoid the terrible affair. But I neither said nor done anything other than suffer distress. At the very end, I had been already made to try on a ceramic vest, it so happened that the one vehicle of the nocturnal expedition didn't have room for me. I knew that otherwise I would have probably gotten on and ventured with the rest.
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When during medics course I imagined being a medic, I envisioned a room too large, yellow within and yellow outside the windows, empty other than a file cabinet and a desk to which I was seated. I sat there, little disturbed, and read all day. This conception was never scrutinized and so had never been perceived as unlikely or impossible. Through habit it became a representation of my prospects, of a desired ideal. In the end, being in the Aid Station was mostly like that, only less yellow and less devoid of people.
The pleasant life —interspersed by unpleasant events— of the Aid Station was over for me within six weeks of arriving. I had managed to read a little, to watch many movies, when one day I was summoned by the doctor to a conversation. The recently returned Battalion Medic and the Clinic Supervisor were also present. They notified me that I would be transferred to be a medic in Aleph (Alon) Battery. They said they wanted to send a responsible reliable medic and that I fit the description.
I took these to be mere pretty words, soothing lies. It was all social connections and politics, or so I thought. I speculated that my appointment had to do with the fact that I had never contributed to the snacks stocks, per my resolution to not spend money in the army. Or because I had openly displayed too much leisure, sitting and reading outside the BAS. One time I had a distressful not as discreet as I thought phone conversation with a friend outside the BAS, after which Tsarfati asked me if I was a left-winger. Maybe it had to do with that, too. In the end somebody had to be sent to the battery, it wasn't that the sending of a medic per se was arbitrary. At the same time, there were other junior medics that could have been sent, and so there must have been a reason I was picked and not another. But then again, I was the youngest of them all. In any case, I could tell that nobody wanted to leave to the battery, and so I didn't want to either, though I couldn't say why.
I was asked what I thought about the matter. I said nothing material but raised an incidental point — I was worried about my home leave. I was supposed to have one that weekend and I had reasons to believe that if I moved to the battery I would not get it. Don Lejandro told me not to worry, that I'd get my leave. Of course, I would not get it. Something I gradually learned in the army from my own and others' experience was that one should not believe the promises of commanders which concern themselves with other units. Or with the future, really, which as far as promises go is very inclusive. Never. Incidentally, I have learned since that it was also the case with promises in the commercial civilian world. It seems like positions of power are held by those who dare make irresponsible promises. That it is the case with politicians is even banal.
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Then or on the next noon, a Ze'ev7 that was going to the battery was parked at the Herodion. Feeling nervous, I acted like a good disciplined soldier. I was told to get on so I got on. I had been sitting alone with my equipment in this spacious vehicle for a long while, perhaps 20 minutes, thinking about the lunch I was missing because it had been delayed, when I got up, found the officer and verified I had time to eat. At the mess hall I ate hastily as if I was risking missing the last train from, say, the Soviet Union to the free world.
All embarked, the Ze'ev started. Again the strange anticipatory feeling towards a new unit. On the way to Aleph Battery's post at Metzad the Ze'ev stopped by one of their driven patrols. We were parked sufficiently long for curiosity to deplete the vehicle from its passengers, myself included. The patrol was detaining an old Arab. They found among his possessions a pouch with leaves in it. They were certain that they caught an Arab with contraband, namely with marijuana. He looked drugged, they said, and waited for the police to arrive. We didn't dally long enough to observe the conclusion of this drama. Later I heard that what he had in his pouch was tobacco. The narcotics police they thought themselves to be, the patrol.
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The M462 Abir was an off-road vehicle manufactured by the Israeli Automotive Industries Ltd. The Abirbulance, as it was called at least among us, was a closed model thereof, fitted with medical supplies and a stretcher.
The pillbox generally refers to a low fortified loop-holed guard-post. The Hebrew pillbox , a term surely borrowed from the British during Mandatory Palestine, refers to a towering blockhouse, perhaps even more deserving of the analogy by having the same geometrical proportions as the somewhat symbolic American yellow-orange pill containers.
Sergei used to call me “Garik”. I no longer remember what prompted the name, but it had an affectionate touch to it which was not obvious in its affection.
Instruction Base, namely, the medical IB where I did my medics course.
Consulting Google maps for details, I found a single spot that could conceivably be the one. Though a decade and a half separates my account from the Streetview photo, it's unlikely that that much has changed. Its deviations from my memory must be faults of the latter rather than real changes occurring in the intervening time. I remember a row of buildings rather than just one, and some other differences.
Mots'ei shabbat literally means “shabbat's exit” and referts to Sunday eve. According to Jewish law one date ends and the next begins at the end of the day. Twilight has an uncertain status, neither day nor night, and for that reason Shabbat is strictly observed from sunset on Friday and until the night prevails on Saturday — historically until three stars were visible at the sky, nowadays a certain amount of minutes after sunset.
The Wolf Armoured Vehicle is a 4X4 armoured personnel carrier, developed by the Israeli Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd.