Tironut

Well, tironut (basic training) is over. What we, that is my plugah (company) got was a taster. What I mean to say is that, sure there are a lot of boys who are drafted at age 18 do the same tironut as we did and then go on to do not much for three quite boring and mind-numbing years. However, there are also a lot of boys who get put through hell and back. My tironut was four weeks of really not doing very much within a framework of strict discipline. Get up somewhere between four and five o’clock. Stand outside in the cold, forced to scream out ‘ken mefakedet’ (yes commander) at the top of your voice when you still haven’t really woken up; thirty or forty push-ups for being two seconds late at a quarter to five in the morning; holding your cold and heavy M-16 at sixty degrees with the cocking mechanism drawn back in the rain or sleet, your fingers aching and your arm sagging from the weight of the gun while the mefakedet slowly makes her way along the line checking each individual rifle of close on forty soldiers; run there in fifteen seconds, run here in twenty seconds; clean your barracks in four and a half minutes; pack up all your belongings, not a single possession to be outside your bag for morning inspection; ten minutes to eat with a three kilo assault rifle dangling round your neck; stop eating on command whether you’ve finished or not; standing still for twenty minutes in the cold until instructed otherwise; having orders barked at you day and night, a twenty-six year old having to ask permission to go to the bathroom from a nineteen and a half year old; being screamed at if just one of your tzevet, was late, spoke when he wasn’t supposed to, left his water bottle behind or a host of other minor misdemeanours.

This is not a fun lifestyle, it is tiring and unpleasant and I only did a month. What’s more, we never faced any real physical challenges whatsoever. We had a day of field training, and two days of shooting at the shooting range. We had to hike to the shooting range, which was maximum two kilometres away, with a fair amount of gear and we slept in a shed on the concrete and marched back. That was the extent of our physical challenge. Regular combat units’ tironut lasts six months and more and includes long distance hikes with very heavy gear, camping out under the sky, orienteering at night and a lot more besides. Elite units have to deal with hikes of seventy kilometres and more. The level of discipline is also extremely severe, much more so than we experienced with the smallest infraction of the rules eliciting very harsh punishments. Compared to that, our tiranut was as Paddington Bear is to a half ton Grizzly Bear – rather more soft, fluffy and cuddly than the real thing.

Yet, as I mentioned, even our tiranut was by no means fun. Basic training is largely focused on creating a new reality for the raw recruit in which he is brought to understand the fact that he is not in control of his own life, that he is under the total control and authority of the military and, as such, must fulfil, pretty much unquestioningly, all orders and instructions that he is given. As I said, we didn’t get a full dose but we came away with a good understanding of what it must be like.

The army has a slang term for raw recruits; shockistim. It refers to the state of total, bleary-eyed, vacant-expression numbness which soldiers in basic training experience as part of their induction into the IDF in which they basically don’t know what’s hit them. We were never quite there but spare a thought now and then for the eighteen-year old kids who have to give up three years of their lives for the army and then get hit with the full force of the IDF’s basic-training regime.