“So . . . are you in the IDF Spokesperson Unit?” Ester asks excitedly.
“I’ll know tomorrow,” I say.
Trying to hide my fear, I look down and start fiddling with my gun.
The next morning it is pouring rain. We’re supposed to be cleaning, but we are all hiding in our tents to stay dry. Everyone knows that we’re done with boot camp, so there is no chance that we will have to stay on the base for the weekend as punishment.
For the past few days it has been avirat sof ha’kors, end-of-the-course atmosphere—the army version of senior slide. We have been slacking off, getting into the chet formation more slowly, and forgetting to salute. Last night, I saw the pimply-faced commander sneak off the base on sick leave without saying goodbye to us. Watching him with his bag on his back, trying to get an extra day at home with his parents, his girlfriend, or his friends, made me realize that despite all of his yelling at us that he, like all our other commanders, was a young kid trying to get through his mandatory army service. They became less scary after that.
By nine in the morning, we have already returned our work uniforms, sleeping bags, and cots. Last night I packed up my bag. When packing, I saw my diary for the first time since I had been drafted. Only the first two pages were filled. If I were to begin writing again, I don’t think I would be using the same enthusiastic tone that I used the night before being drafted. I’m slowly becoming a hardened Israeli.
Now standing outside the tent, there are soldiers telling us which unit we are going to be joining. I keep shifting my weight from one foot to the other and squeezing my hands. This is it. I will finally know my fate. I will finally know if it has all been worth it.
My name is called.
I walk up to the soldiers.
“You will go to The Campus,” says one of the soldiers. The Campus is a base in Tel Aviv. There are no sororities or fraternities there.
“Am I in the IDF Spokesperson Unit?” I ask expectantly.
“You will find out what unit you are serving in once you get there. Next!” she screams, not caring about my dreams.
I go home both disappointed and optimistic. I still don’t know if all of this is going to be worth it, but I try to believe that the Israeli phrase will also apply to the army: Yihyeh b’seder! Everything will be okay!
5
The Emerald City
A dozen other identical soldiers and I are sitting on benches waiting to hear our names called. It feels like we are waiting outside the principal’s office, about to get detention. Everyone is silent. My puffy winter army jacket is zipped up all the way. We aren’t really sitting outside, but we are definitely not inside either. The building, if it can be called that, looks more like a shipping container with a sukkah connected to it than a structure at the Israeli Pentagon where the defense minister and the chief of staff are stationed.
“When is my name going to be called?” I scream in my head. My stomach is cramping from nerves.
This morning, I woke up extra early. It took three buses and two hours to get to The Campus on time. When the gates to the base opened and I saw everyone walking around in green uniforms, I felt like I was walking into a dreary version of the Emerald City. Now I have been sitting in this same spot on this bench for nearly an hour. Hurry up and wait.
I’m still worried that I’ll end up answering phones for the next two years. Since everyone at Merkaz Hamagshamim works at a call center in Jerusalem fielding calls from the US, they think that it would be funny if I end up doing the same thing in the army for ninety percent less pay. I don’t see the humor in that.
“Jessica Fishman and Chen Shapirah,” a guy calls authoritatively from behind his desk and through the open door. He doesn’t even look like he can legally drink in the US.
The two of us solemnly walk in together. Sentencing is about to begin. I want to make a plea for mercy as he is shuffling through the papers on his desk. Without looking up, he hands us both a form and unenthusiastically states, “You will be serving the next two years in Dover Tzahal. Go get these forms filled out and signed.” He said it like Ben Stein would announce the winner of Best Movie at the Oscars.
I did it! I want to smile, to scream, to jump up and down. But I can’t. I’m in the army. Instead I stare at him, blank faced.
He sends us out of his office without even a nod. As I look to Chen and want to share my excitement with her, I can’t find the words to express myself in Hebrew. It suddenly dawns on me that I’ll be serving in the IDF Spokesperson Unit and I can still barely even speak Hebrew.
Chen starts chattering to me. “Where are you supposed to be in the IDF Spokesperson Unit? I’m supposed to be a photographer. If I’m in the wrong department, I’m going to have a fit. I’ll have to call my dad to get him to fix this for me. How did you get into the unit? Are you in the logistical part of the unit or are you going to be doing a real job? Here, we have to go here. Just follow me.”
Despite the fact that she kind of sounds like the girls at AEɸ, I’m happy to have an Israeli help me through this maze of bureaucracy and logistics.
We are greeted by the smiling faces of two female soldiers and the evil stare of a male officer with a unibrow. If dirty looks could be part of Israel’s weapons arsenal, then this officer definitely would have been a combat soldier and not a jobnik, a desk jockey.
“Welcome to the IDF Spokesperson Unit. You have officially arrived. You are part of us now. We like to call ourselves the commandos of the jobnikim. This is the logistics officer, Nimrod,” the two female soldiers chirp like munchkins and point to the male officer next to them.
“Wait outside while I figure out where you are supposed to be serving,” demands Officer Nimrod.
Another hour passes. Just as my fingers are beginning to turn numb from the cold, Officer Nimrod calls us in.
“Chen you are going to the photography department. Jessica, I should know tomorrow where you will be serving in the unit. In the meantime, go do your tofes tiyulim.”
The phrase tofes tiyulim is deceiving. It sounds fun, since tiyulim means trips and is usually used when going on a fun vacation with friends—like after the army, Israelis go on a tiyul to India, Thailand, or South America. However, the word tofes, means a form, so it turns the phrase into an oxymoron. Chen and I spend the next five hours getting our forms signed and filled out by soldiers all over The Campus. The whole day feels like a really bad scavenger hunt, where we receive badges, pins, tags, and our security clearance.
But at the end of the day, I get my shoulder tags. Proof that I’m a part of the unit. I feel so proud putting on my new IDF Spokesperson tags that all I can do is stare at myself in the darkened windows of the bus on the ride home.
The next morning Officer Nimrod tells me to hurry up to meet Dan at the “S” House.
When I arrive, I’m greeted by a soldier who is supposed to be guarding the building but is more interested in reading the newspaper than keeping the building free of terrorists. But between the building looking like a low-income-housing project and unit’s ineffectiveness, I doubt any terrorist would waste his time or life blowing up the office of the army’s public relations.
I wander around the building looking for Dan, whose name is uttered around the unit as if he holds magical powers. When I finally find his pikedah, secretary, sitting at her desk in a small nook that isn’t even big enough to be a cupboard, she is too busy trying to avoid work to help me. She gets up and goes downstairs to smoke a cigarette.
Even though I want to yell at her like I think a native Israeli would, I’ve been warned to never get on the bad side of army secretaries. They hold the keys to everything and know more than anybody. If you want to know when and how Israel is going to bomb Iran, all you have to do is ask a secretary. So I force myself to wait patiently on a broken chair in the hallway.
More than an hour later, I’m still waiting to meet with Dan. But fortunately boot camp prepared me to wait.
Bored, I wander around th
e small, messy, stuffy halls. Looking into different rooms, I see that they are cramped, cluttered, and noisy. I notice papers marked “top secret” thrown about, televisions blaring CNN, and phones ringing off the hook. As I walk past one room, a soldier picks up a phone and slams it down before even saying hello.
“I don’t have time to field calls from Christiane Amanpour; besides you know what her agenda is,” she says to an officer in fluent, unaccented English.
The officer just shrugs his shoulders.
When I’m about to peek into the next room, Dan’s secretary calls me into his office.
I walk into Dan’s room. He has two falaflim on his shoulders signifying that he is a lieutenant colonel. I freeze. As a soldier, I have never been so close to such a high-ranking officer. Having just finished boot camp, where we salute everyone more senior than us—even the dog that has been on base longer than us—I pause to salute, but something tells me not to. I remember Orli telling me that our real army service is nothing like boot camp. She told me that there is not as much distance between soldiers and officers.
In army slang1, distance is the degree of remoteness between a soldier and his superior. Pronounced dees-tance with an Israeli accent, it comes from the English word, since Hebrew does not lend itself to such formalities. In boot camp, the distance between a soldier and a commander made my family—more than six thousand miles away—seem close. In the US Army, soldiers continue to salute their superiors through their entire service—stopping to salute whenever there is a superior within eyesight—but in Israel, after boot camp is over, soldiers either ignore their officers, give them a nod of the head like they are in the same gang, or run up to them and give them a pat on the back and say, “What’s going on, my brother?”
I don’t think Dan would know what to do if I saluted. And he probably wouldn’t want me running up to him to give him a hug. So I just freeze in the doorway.
He motions for me to come in and sit down.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
I tell him my name and he starts humming the chorus of Jessie, Jessie, Jessie, Jessicaaaaah! I’m not sure if I should start humming with him, but then he stops and asks me in very slow Hebrew how I am.
“I’m good. Thank you. Happy to be here,” I respond nervously, but with a smile.
“Good. Tell me about yourself,” he says in the simplest Hebrew possible.
I’m thankful that he is speaking slowly for me. I give him the short summary of my life that I have memorized in perfect Hebrew.
During my explanation, he answers a number of phone calls. I don’t mind, because I’m excited to possibly overhear some behind-the-scenes information about the spokesperson unit, but instead, he is talking to his wife about who will be picking up their daughter from kindergarten today.
I look around his room. I see pictures of his family. There is a large map of Israel hanging on the wall. There are a number of different plaques. There are pictures of him shaking hands with famous Israeli politicians. I squint my eyes to get a better look at one picture. Is that the king of Jordan?
He hangs up and asks me a few more questions.
After my short interview, Dan welcomes me into a department called tzevet t’guvot. Not knowing the translation, I hope that this is the department that liaisons with the international press so that I can prove to the BBC that Palestinians are not throwing flowers, but rocks, and that they are using schools as weapon arsenals, and ambulances to transport missiles.
As I try to say the department’s name out loud to test it out, Dan chuckles at my pronunciation.
Dan stands up and hitches his pants up around his waist. It looks like he has a few falafels in his stomach too.
Tzevet t’guvot, tzevet t’guvot, tzevet t’guvot, tzevet t’guvot . . . I keep trying to say the name of the department in my head as I follow Dan out into the hallway. No matter how hard I try, I can’t say the short “tz” and form the guttural “g” and “oo” in my throat. I can’t say either of the words. They are like a specially-designed-for-American-immigrants tongue twister. How am I going to tell people what I do in the army?
Dan opens the door to a small room.
There is a chubby female soldier stenciling purple flowers and red hearts onto the wall. There is a tall and skinny fake-red-headed girl reading a book. There is an officer with the rank of a major haphazardly shoveling through piles of classified documents. Looking around, I can’t believe that this is the Israeli army—the pride of the Jewish people!
“Shmuel, Shmuel! I have a new soldier for you,” Dan says, visibly annoyed. “This is Jessica.”
Shmuel, bewildered, looks up from the documents scattered on his desk and says, “Ehh . . . Aalo. How’s you do?” in an Israeli-British accent.
English! Does everyone here speak English? Am I not going to be as special as I thought?
He smiles at me and I see that one of his front teeth is missing.
“Welcome to the Rapid Response Team,” he says, but when he says the letter “s,” he whistles. He then fishes for something in his pocket and shoves a tooth into the gap in his mouth.
“That is what it means,” I think to myself. Based on my boot camp experience of hurry-up-and-wait, I’m surprised to hear that there is anything called rapid in this army.
“So,” he says without whistling, “you are the new soldier. Well, we don’t really have any extra room and we only have three computers for the four of us. And you will have to find a chair.”
I had an IDF t-shirt showing my pride for this army.
“Shmuel will be your direct officer,” Dan explains. “If you need anything, ask him. He used to be the head of something called the explanation department, but that got dismantled because it wasn’t working.” Only a Jewish army could come up with a department that sounds like a religious philosophy class.
I walk into the office as Dan shuts the door behind me. With the noise from the rest of the unit sealed off, the room feels like a vacuum. I look around and begin to feel trapped. I wonder how I’ll be able to make any impact while stuck in this small room.
“I’m being released in four months and then I’m going to the Galapagos Islands.” Shmuel perks up, smiles, and then his front tooth falls back out of his mouth onto the desk.
Like Clockwork
My days become routine.
6:30 Hit the nudnik button.
6:35 Force myself out from under my comforter and feel the cold Jerusalem air. Put on my uniform.
6:40 Go to bathroom, wash my face, and brush my teeth.
6:45 Pull my hair back into a ponytail.
6:47 Cut up vegetables for my lunch.
6:55 Cut up fruit to eat with yogurt on the bus.
7:00 Walk downstairs.
7:01 Walk back upstairs to get my umbrella.
7:02 Run back downstairs.
7:05 Run down the hill and to the bus stop to catch the bus to the Jerusalem bus station. I’m not too worried about being late. I don’t have anything to do in the office. If I miss this bus and Shmuel is mad, I can always claim that there was a bomb scare at the bus station. Always having a bomb scare as an excuse for being late is just one of the perks of living in Jerusalem.
7:07 Get soaked by the cars that are driving through puddles on the road and splashing me, even though I have brought my umbrella specifically to hold it out to the side to block the spray. By looking at my soaking uniform, no one would ever know there is a drought in this country.
7:10 Get on the bus.
7:17 Curse the Jerusalem traffic.
7:25 Run through the Jerusalem bus station like a madwoman trying to catch the next bus. Luckily, I can bypass security by flashing my army ID.
7:30 Board the bus just as it is pulling away. Find the last seat.
7:32 Eat my breakfast and fall asleep.
8:40 Wake up to see that we are, as usual, stuck in traffic at the entrance to Tel Aviv. My clothes are nearly dry. I go back to sleep.
8:55 Wake
up again to the bus stopping at the Tel Aviv bus station. Get off the bus and get soaked in the Tel Aviv rain. Step into a puddle with my right foot. Now it is soaked.
8:57 Board the bus that will take me to the “S” house.
9:12 Walk into my office. Both Shmuel and the two other soldiers are already there. I have nowhere to sit, nowhere to work, and really nothing to do.
10:14 Ask hopefully, “Shmuel, is there any work that I can do?”
“No.”
11:28 Wander over to the international news desk, where everyone is so busy that no one has any time to talk. Go back to my office and stare at what the other girls are doing on the computer: one is deleting emails and the other is playing solitaire.
12:17 “Shmuel, I’m going for lunch.”
“Okay”
14:12 Return from lunch.
15: 32 My sock is still wet.
15:46 “Shmuel, is there any work that I can do?” I ask doubtfully.
“No.”
16:57 “Shmuel, can I go home now?”
He looks at the clock, “Wait another half an hour.”
17:27 “Shmuel, can I go home now?”
“Okay.”
17:45 Catch the bus back to the Tel Aviv bus station.
18:00 Board the bus back to Jerusalem and fall asleep.
19:25 Get to the Jerusalem bus station.
19:40 Catch the bus back to Merkaz Hamagshamim.
20:27 Walk into the doors of Merkaz Hamagshamim.
20:40 Wash my Tupperware, but am too tired to eat dinner.
20:43 Shower.
21:17 In bed with the lights out.
I would feel more useful if I actually was making coffee for someone.
No Glass Slippers
The entire unit is gathered on the first floor of the building. All the high-ranking officers of the unit are gathered in front of us. The three head officers are staring at us, waiting for the last stragglers to file in. I wonder what is happening. Is a war about to start?
Chutzpah & High Heels Page 12
