Gadna

Two posts in three days! Woo!

I'm going to write about Shavua Gadna in this post, our week in army simulation. We spent the week in an army base called Tzalmon, in the north of Israel, close to the Kineret. The view there was BEAUTIFUL!!! Other than that, there weren't very many beautiful things about the week. Stam! (Just kidding!) No but actually, it was a very fun week, and I learned a lot, too.

I connected less to the week than a lot of people did, because it was a lot of talking about different jobs in the army and other things that apply more to people who are going to the army, which I am not. Nonetheless, I learned a lot about different "dargot" (levels) in the army, what different signs on the uniforms mean, "tohar haneshek" (literally meaning "purity of the weapon," but is the concept in the IDF of using weapons in a moral way), women in the army, and much more.

Highlights of the week:
1. They told us every morning we would have 20 minutes to get ready, which is relatively a lot. They ended up waking us up early for two of the mornings and telling us we had 7 minutes to get our uniforms on, go to the bathroom, and do whatever else we needed to do.
2. Yom Shetach, our Day in the Field. We spent a day outside of the base in the middle of some vines, simulating what fighters do when they train in the field. We learned and practiced how to do army crawls (we all have black-and-blue knees now), we did a "masa," hike/run/journey, with stretchers and crawling, and we did a group competition where we had to eat a can of tuna, a can of loof  (the most DISGUSTING thing in the world...basically meat leftovers), and chug a 5 liter jerrycan of water as quickly as possible. It was very fun. We were supposed to sleep outside that night, but there were 4 drops of rain in the middle of the night, so we weren't allowed.
3. We stood in "Hakshev" for hours at a time. This means with your legs in a v position and your hands in a special position behind your back. It hurts, but I can now do more push-ups because the hand position makes your arms stronger I guess.
4. I shot an M-16!!!! I didn't hit the target at all, but it was mostly because I was so nervous.

We were all split up into groups of about 15 that we spent allllll our time with during the week. My group was great! We made lots of cheers, and we came out of the week much closer than when we began. Tzevet Sheva 4eva!!!!!!

One more thing-I had already done this week 3 years ago with my EIE program when I was here as a sophomore in high school. It was a very similar thing, except that this time, they tried to make it harder for us because we are older and in a mechina, and I didn't have to translate the whole time :) Anyway, this week brought back many Gadna memories and just EIE memories in general, and I realized how meaningful that semester was to me. Later in the week, I visited my brother YONI at Tzuba, where EIE is based! He just got here for the program. I miss EIE, but I know that it helped me in the best way that it could, and now I am moving on to even bigger and better things.