Chutzpah & High Heels

by Jessica Fishman

  I can’t believe that I’m actually going to be an IDF soldier. Today I’ll finally receive my puke-green, polyester uniform with pride.

  I look up and see my name lit up by red bulbs on a board. All of the sudden those previous hours seem too short. As I begin walking to the bus, the memories of playing on the beach on our first family trip to Israel ten years ago, to my IDF Gadna training experience during my subsequent high school trip, to making pita on the beach with Orli and Liel, to the prayers I said at synagogue every weekend asking for the safety and security of Israel and her soldiers come rushing back to me.

  Despite my previous excitement to give my life to the country, I want to be the last one on the bus. Unfortunately, it seems as if all the other girls feel the same way. This must be the only bus in Israel that people push others in front of them instead of cutting them off. When I finally board the bus, I turn on the stairs to see Orli snapping a picture, which will soon be hanging on my parents’ fridge, of me with wide eyes, a hesitant smile, and a larger-than-life backpack.

  I turn back around to see the crowded bus. My eyes dart back and forth searching for a seat. I feel like the loser in junior high that no one wants to sit next to on the school bus. The bus seems so big and the girls, even though they are five years my younger, are intimidating. I find a small empty section of a seat. Without saying a word, I squeeze into it and place my backpack on my lap.

  As my bag becomes heavier and heavier on my lap, I think about my sorority pledgeship. Having to wear baseball hats for a week, put on green nail polish, mash creamy peanut butter into our hair, and fill our mouths up with marshmallows doesn’t seem so worthy of our complaints. I wonder how all of the JAPs from my sorority would deal with boot camp. How would they fare with an M-16 on their shoulder instead of a Kate Spade? Would they bring their Louis Vuitton trunks and expect someone to carry them? Or would they try to wear their Manolo Blahnik high heels with their uniforms?

  After only five minutes of driving, the bus stops. A young female soldier gets on to the bus, yells something that is too fast for me to understand and then everyone starts getting off the bus. I follow everyone else. I’ve learned that the best thing to do when I don’t understand something is to smile and follow what everybody else is doing. I’m unsure why we had to board a bus for such a short trip, but since no one else is asking, I decide not to either.

  As we single file into a lecture hall, we’re handed purple toiletry bags. I sit down and start looking through the bag. There are tampons and pads in it.

  An older male officer walks to the front of the room and welcomes us to the IDF. Since I just finished my “high-level” ulpan class, I’m feeling particularly confident about my Hebrew comprehension. Then the speaker begins his second sentence and I have no idea what he is saying.

  Based on the purple toiletry bag with the Always logo on it, the lecture might be about makeup tips and how to deal with our first periods. It becomes apparent to me that the meanings of high-level in ulpan and high-level in the real world are very different. This obvious language difficulty makes me start wondering about my ability to serve effectively . . . and safely. Will I be running into the shooting field when we are supposed to start firing?

  I don’t have much time to continue contemplating my fears, since the lecture quickly ends and we begin our trip down the endless, dreary hallways of the drafting office. It looks nothing like the yellow brick road that Dorothy skipped down. Instead of feeling like I’m realizing some Zionistic dream of mine, I feel like I’m entering a prison. Like a bunch of cattle, we’re herded through the long concrete hallways, from one door to the next, with each stop being a different, unfriendly station that processes us into the army.

  Exactly like in a prison, the first station is finger printing, which is manned by apathetic teenage soldiers who obviously prefer to be anywhere else. One of the soldiers dips all ten of my fingers into ink and individually rolls each of them on a piece of paper.

  At the next station, I receive my dog tags. Females only receive one dog tag, but the male soldiers receive two—the second one goes in their boot. This is not in case they misplace their boot.

  The next step is getting my picture taken for my army ID. Unlike a passport photo, this photo op does not offer any do-overs.

  “Pull your hair back into a pony tail,” the faceless soldier tells me.

  I do. Without any warning, the flash blinds me. Less than a minute later, the soldier hands me my new choger, IDF ID card.

  In the picture, my eyes are not shining with joy in anticipation for a trip to some exotic island or someone about to fulfill a dream. Instead this picture resembles a mug shot, with the look of panic showing in my eyes.

  Everything moves along quickly and efficiently. Like from a scene in Brave New World, we walk through the hallways, which seem to have an invisible current pushing us in one direction. Things come to a screeching halt when I enter a large hall with a few chairs and a lot of bored teenage girls sitting on the floor waiting around. Everyone is waiting to be called into one of the rooms for some type of interview . . . or interrogation. I find a spot on the cold concrete floor and call the IDF deputy spokesperson to let her know I’ve been drafted today. She thanks me and again reminds me no promises.

  I look around the room and realize that I’m no longer an individual. I am being processed.

  Two hours of girls coming in and out pass until my name is called. I enter a small, plain room with a table and two chairs. One of the chairs is occupied by an officer sitting across the table. I look around to see where the two-sided mirror is, but don’t find it. The officer asks me questions about myself, my family, my education, and my history. The only thing he does not ask me is where I was at a certain date and time. He also does not ask me where I want to serve in the army, so I decide to tell him.

  Like a person orders pizza and expects to get exactly what he orders, I say, “I want to be in the IDF Spokesperson Unit.”

  He does not respond. Instead, he smiles to himself, writes something down, and tells me that we are done. I walk out of the room to see that there are even more girls waiting outside than when I entered.

  I’m beginning to realize that my decision to join the IDF Spokesperson Unit has no real significance. It is sort of like the Florida voters voting for Gore.

  The windowless building makes it impossible to see how late it is. It feels like time stands still here. I look at a clock on the wall and it seems like it is melting off the wall. This day may never end.

  Then I reach the last station: IDF uniforms, which I secretly think are sexy in a tough kind of way. I remember when I had spent those four days in the army at sixteen, how excited we were to wear the IDF uniform. Instead of handing them to us high-schoolers, they had dumped them in a big pile. Frantically diving through the pile of green army uniforms, we had looked like we were at an after-Christmas sale at Macy’s. Hoping to find a size that would make us look like sexy Israeli soldiers, we had tried on uniforms over our clothes. I felt like I was playing dress up. None of us looked like we had hoped. We had wanted tight fitting pants that would make us look bootylicious, but instead our pants were baggy and saggy. We walked with accidental swaggers, hiking up our pants every few feet so that we wouldn’t trip.

  “Quiet! Attention!” a young Israeli soldier, with her hair tightly pulled into a ponytail that reached her lower back, had yelled at us high-schoolers. Despite her petite figure, she demanded respect. “Get in line.”

  Not knowing what to do, we had looked at one another. We had made a single file line, one behind the other, as if waiting in line for school lunch.

  Pretending to be mad, the female soldier tried not to laugh at us. “No, not like that. Like this,” she said, as she gently moved us so that we were standing shoulder to shoulder in three lines.

  After we had been rearranged like a chess set, she said, “I know your pants are too big, but if you put on your belts, then they will stay up.” The IDF had re
fused to provide us tourists belts since previous high school groups had stolen them as souvenirs. After putting on our shiny and sparkly belts that we fished out of our suitcases, we looked like an army of JAPs.

  This time around I don’t have a sparkly belt with me.

  “What is your size?” a female soldier, who looks at least five years younger than me, yells at me. She hands me three pairs of pants, two shirts, and a sweater in the size that I tell her.

  I try to find a quiet place to try on my uniform. With everyone changing and rushing to get different sized pants, the room feels like an overcrowded H&M, but with no selection or dressing rooms. After putting on my uniform, I look in the mirror to see high-waisted green pants from the 80s, a bulky button-down shirt, and a sweater that looks like it came from Big and Tall, even though I’m small and short. My black Reebok tennis shoes do not help improve the reflection in the mirror.

  When I look around and see some more experienced soldiers with uniforms that look cute on them, I gullibly wonder if my uniform just needs a wash and a dry. I go back up to the soldier who is handing out the uniforms and, as if she is a dressing room attendant at Bloomingdales, I say, “Mine don’t look right. Maybe I need another size.”

  “You should take at least one that is a size or two too big for you. All girls gain weight in the army.”

  I look over when I hear a new recruit saying to a friend that she is going to take her uniforms to a tailor to fix the shirt and bring down the waist in the pants. I do not know whether to be more surprised that I actually understood this or that the army gives us such unflattering uniforms.

  I look at myself in the mirror again. I’m going to have to spend more money tailoring my army uniforms than I did my prom dress.

  Now that we received our uniforms, I assume that we will now finally be told which unit we’ll end up in. It’s not that I would mind being on the front lines, but I of course, expect to hear that I am going to the IDF Spokesperson Unit since that is where I can make the most difference. After all, I am a young Zionistic American who moved to Israel and volunteered to join the army so that I can help them improve its international image. They do realize that I am here to help them, right?

  They should be begging me. But I’m slowly realizing, like Hezbollah and Hamas, that the IDF does not beg anybody for anything.

  The day ends and I am not told where I will be serving. Instead I’m bunched in with a lot of young girls who are starting to look like real soldiers. We board another army bus, but this time we are in uniforms and not in our civilian clothes. Hours or possibly even days have passed since I first entered the drafting building and it is now dark and cold outside. We are not told where we are going or how long it will take to get there.

  I look around the bus and see a bunch of girls who look exactly the same. We do not look like the modern day Biblical heroes that I had envisioned. We look kind of dorky. When I look into the window on the bus and see my reflection, the realization finally sinks in that I too am another faceless soldier. I am no longer Jessica Fishman, American immigrant. I am 7063618. The words of my educational director from Otzma echo in my head: “Even IDF soldiers who are killed while protecting the country cannot be buried in a Jewish or a military cemetery if the Orthodox rabbinate does not consider them Jewish.”

  The bus comes to a screeching stop. The lights go on and my reflection disappears. A twenty-year-old boy with an acne problem stands up at the front of the bus and begins yelling, “You are being sent home for the weekend. We will start boot camp at 8:00 A.M. Sunday morning. Being late is not an option.”

  We jump out of the bus looking like a bad scene from an 80’s movie with our pants’ waistlines coming to a rest right below our boobs. Wandering around the bus station, our shiny Styrofoam uniforms and fuzzy berets that look like dead cats propped on our shoulders make us stick out as the army freshmen. We look like such losers that I’m not worried about being a terrorist target. I’m more concerned about being picked on.

  After my long day of becoming an Israeli soldier, I jump on a bus back home to Jerusalem. It is thrilling flashing my army ID card instead of having to pay for the bus ride. Thankfully the government figures that since it is going to send its kids off to the army, it should at least pay for the carpooling.

  On the bus, I run into one of the religious girls from ulpan. I thought I would be proud to show off my new uniform, but I’m not. Embarrassed to be seen in my wannabe G.I. Jane outfit, I try, unsuccessfully, to hide behind my backpack. She chats with me about the final ulpan test. The test seems insignificant now.

  The bus reaches my stop and I head up the hill to Merkaz Hamagshamim, backpack and all.

  The doors swing open. I’m greeted by smiling faces and the wonderful ring of the English language. Today was the first day that I have not heard one single English word, and my head is hurting from all the Hebrew. After telling everyone about my day, I quickly get into bed so that I can get up early the next morning and take my cardboard uniform to the Russian tailor on the corner and have it taken apart and put back together like a patchwork quilt. I will have to get the waist lowered, the seat and thighs taken in on the pants, and the shirt will require pleats in both the back and the front to make it a bit more flattering. I’m hoping that by the time they are done it will look more like a Britney Spears’ outfit than a Cindy Lauper costume, so that I will be able to defend Israel’s reputation with pride.

  IDF Pledgeship

  I try to keep my eyes from closing, but the lull of the train makes it hard. My eyelids are heavy. The sun has just risen, but the train is already packed with soldiers on their way to their bases to report for duty. I’m afraid if I fall asleep I’ll miss my stop and be late for my first day of boot camp. I can hear two girls behind me speculating about what boot camp will be like. They sound like news analysts trying to predict the elections on a twenty-four-hour news station—everybody has something to say, but nobody knows anything.

  When we get to the base, we are greeted by the same scrawny acne-covered boy who yelled at us Thursday night and two new commanders: a chubby tomboy and a girl who looks like she has stepped out of an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog.

  By 8:00 A.M. a group of us are huddled together on something that resembles an old basketball court. One of the commanders yells at us to stand in the formation of a chet—ח, a Hebrew letter that looks like a square with a side missing. If we were in the US, these twenty-year-olds would be hazed, but here in Israel they are commanding me.

  Running around and bumping into each other, trying to get into formation, we look like a bunch of really bad cheerleaders, minus the pompoms. One side of the chet is twice as long as the other two and another side is slanted inwards. After nearly five minutes, the forty of us finally prove that we have passed fifth-grade geometry class. Our commander, the pimply-faced kid does not look amused, but the chubby, tomboy commander is trying not to laugh.

  Our commander begins taking roll call, “Miriam Avraham”

  “Yes,” a girl mutters, obviously intimidated.

  “Yes, what?” the officer yells back at her.

  “Ehhh . . . Yes, I’m here?”

  “Yes, mifaked!” he screams back at her.

  It’s ironic how much that sounds like McFuckhead, I think to myself.

  “Yes, officer,” she says, near tears.

  He continues along the roll call. Everyone answers with the mandatory mifaked.

  I look around at the girls. They all look alike at first glance. They look so much younger than me. I wonder if I’ll be friends with any of them. Their uniforms make them blend into one another. Only when I take a closer look do I notice the differences in their hair, make up, nails, and even their postures.

  “Did I say you could move?” the oily-faced commander yells at someone.

  “Ehhh, no, but I only wanted to take my coat off,” says an innocent-looking eighteen-year-old.

  “You mean, you only wanted to take your coat off, officer,�
�� he snarls at her. Then he turns to the rest of us and says, “You are in the IDF now. You are soldiers. You do not do anything without asking permission. You don’t scratch, you don’t breathe, you don’t take a shit without first asking permission. Do you all understand?”

  We are too afraid to say, “Yes, mifaked.”

  After roll call, the commander takes us on an all-day expedition to get our new army equipment. We receive our kit bags, our medai bet—work uniforms, sleeping bags that have probably not been washed since the Israelites wandered across the Sinai for forty years, and blankets that are as rough as a cactus.

  Our cotton work uniforms are unlike our formal uniforms that we received at the drafting office. The baggy pants look like Justin Bieber’s drop-crotch pants. We receive a canteen water bottle that looks like it carries herpes. Our commander tells us to put rocks and toothpaste in our canteens to get rid of the smell, but all this does is give us chalky water with dirt taste.

  Throughout the day, our commander commands us to run everywhere, but then once we get there, we have to wait for over an hour until something happens. I guess that is why everybody told me that the IDF’s motto is “hurry up and wait.”

  The entire day I am anticipating getting our semi-automatic weapons, but we never get them. As the sun starts setting, we are taken to a Hanukkah ceremony on a large concrete field. We are set up in line formations and the head of the base is leading the lighting ceremony. I’m so far away, I could be in the nosebleed section of a really boring concert.

  With the sun going down, it starts to get cold and the wind picks up. Without our coats, we are all trying to fold ourselves into our thin, cardboard uniforms to stay warm. Unlike combat soldiers, who refuse to wear their coats and walk around with their sleeves rolled up when it is freezing outside to prove how tough they are, I’m fine showing that I’m a wimp. I miss The North Face coat I got back in college so that I could fit in with all the sorority girls. Since it is the fourth night of Hanukkah, the ceremony luckily doesn’t take too long. I can see the high-ranking officer joking up front, filling his pot belly with jelly-filled donuts to stay warm. It is so cold that if I could have any miracle for Hanukkah this year, it wouldn’t be for the spokesperson unit. It would be for a coat. Instead the only miracle I get is another cup of nes coffee, since all that is served at dinner is a soggy salad and a burnt slab of tivol—breaded, tasteless tofu.