Light Years

by Tammar Stein

  “I can’t believe you won’t be here tomorrow night,” my mother said. “My little pashoshi, my baby chick is all grown up.”

  “You’re going to have a great time,” my father said. “Some things will be really awful, like the food. But you’ll make great friends and you’ll grow up.”

  I had heard this speech before.

  “The military is a great experience,” he continued. “It teaches you about discipline and order. Focus. Teamwork.”

  “Abba, I know. You’ve told me.”

  “Have I?” he asked. “Well that’s good advice I gave you.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Of course you will,” my mother said briskly. “Look at us here, acting like something awful’s about to happen. Maya, you’ll do great, you’ll have fun. I had a great time during my basic training. I’ll have you know I was a crack shot.”

  I burst out laughing.

  “What? What’s funny about that?”

  “Oh, Ima,” I said, snorting. “A crack shot?”

  My mother was round, like an apple, and would shriek like a car alarm at the sight of a cockroach.

  “That’s right,” she said with dignity. “I always hit my mark.”

  “Leila tov,” my father said. “Good night.”

  “Good night,” I called out. I could hear my mother protesting as they walked away. “What’s so funny about being a crack shot? You know I was.”

  I lay in bed that night, memorizing my room, wondering how much I might miss it. I couldn’t stop thinking about how I’d look wearing a uniform. Some girls looked so awful in them, and there was nothing you could do about it.

  I went over my packing list again, trying to think if I forgot anything. My mom and I had gone out and bought several packages of white T-shirts and white socks, and I could only wear brown or black hair bands and barrettes. I packed workout clothes, running shoes, shampoo and conditioner, a hairbrush, nail clippers, tampons, but there was that nagging feeling that maybe I’d forgotten something and I’d be stuck without it. I didn’t sleep well that night. I kept waking up, thinking it was morning already.

  In the morning my mom drove me to the central pickup point for Haifa, where all the girls leaving for boot camp assembled. With so many families seeing their girls off, it was hard to get to where I needed to go. At first I wasn’t even sure where I was supposed to be; it almost felt like a party. Parents took pictures, kissed and hugged, and tucked in extra sandwiches for their girls to eat or to share. I looked at my mom and she smiled and hugged me.

  The buses drove us to Tel Hashomer, where everyone started out on the first day of their military service. Buses with girls from all the other pick-up centers kept arriving, one after another. It was amazing the number of girls, like me, milling around, chatting, trying to look like they knew what was happening, but failing. After we got off the bus, there were soldiers with clipboards, reading names off a list. Within an hour, we were separated into squads and formed the “soldier necklace.” We followed one another, like beads strung on a necklace, each picking up an empty kit bag and then walking from station to station, collecting equipment. You entered the necklace a civilian and you left it a soldier.

  I signed for two types of uniforms: training and formal; two belts: one for each type of uniform; sandals, skirt, hat, a first-aid kit, and dog tags with my name and personal number. When I finished with my service, I’d have to return most of the stuff.

  I rolled up my sleeve and a nurse with a gunlike injector shot a triple cocktail of vaccines into the meat of my left shoulder.

  After everyone was done with the necklace, we assembled in squads and stood at attention.

  “Heads up!” a drill sergeant shouted the first time we stood in formation. “Shoulders back!” My chin practically pointed at the sky. I was arched back so far I felt like I might fall over. It seemed a bit silly, standing there in my new uniform, my shoulder blades nearly touching.

  The drill sergeant inspected each girl, tugging at uniforms, nudging chins. When she had us arranged to her liking, she stood in front of us, her legs shoulder-width apart, elbows bent, hands behind her back.

  “Welcome to boot camp,” she said coldly. “Don’t expect a vacation. You will work hard and study hard. I expect you to pass your classes and your physical training. Failure to follow orders will result in unpleasant consequences.” She stressed the word unpleasant. “If you follow orders, if you are disciplined, if you are not lazy, fat, or slovenly, then I think we will get along fine. If you are spoiled, if you are lazy, if you are disobedient, then I think”—she paused for a second, then smiled—“then I think we will have a very interesting three weeks.”

  We were herded onto buses again. These drove us to where the actual boot-camp training took place. I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t slept the night before. As soon as the bus pulled away and that humming purr of the engine settled into its highway lullaby, I saw heads nod forward or tilt at odd angles as nearly everyone fell asleep.

  I woke up when the bus lurched to a stop and the girl sitting next to me grabbed my hand.

  “We’re here,” she said.

  Once we got off the bus, the twelve of us in my squad huddled together until the instructor we were assigned to found us. The boot-camp instructors, Makits, were aloof and took themselves very seriously. Like the rest of the Makits, ours wore the brim of her hat pulled low over her eyes. She stood in front of us when she had us line up and I hated that I couldn’t tell where she was looking. She showed us our barracks. We dropped off our gear on the narrow beds and then fell in again outside.

  “My name is Drill Sergeant Orit,” she said. She sounded much calmer than the drill sergeant at Tel Hashomer. “There are three basic sections to your training: weapons training, chemical and biological weapons protection, and first aid. Every day, wake-up is at five. You have thirty minutes before morning formation. After formation, you’ll participate in morning physical training, then morning inspection. After that, you go to the dining hall for breakfast.” She outlined the standard schedule of each day.

  I liked knowing when and where I was supposed to be. The program sounded tedious but not terribly hard. I can do this, I thought. This isn’t such a big deal. Our Makit seemed very sensible, and she explained things clearly and simply. Just when I was ready to write off Drill Sergeant Orit as a good egg, one of the girls in the squad blew a bubble-gum bubble and it popped loudly. Orit stalked over to the girl.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  The girl looked a bit surprised. “I’m chewing gum. What, aren’t we allowed to chew gum?”

  “Soldier!” Orit barked, startling us all. “You do not have permission to look me in the eye!”

  All of us sucked in our breath and, while looking straight ahead, tried to see what was going on.

  “You are not allowed to chew gum! You are not allowed to blow bubbles! And you are not allowed to be disrespectful!”

  I think what shocked me the most was how quickly Orit went from being a reasonable-sounding person to this snarling beast. I made a note to step lightly around her.

  That night, the girl from the bunk above mine stood by the bed, trying to look over her shoulder at her butt. She kept twisting and craning her neck. A lot of the girls were pretty miserable about their uniforms. Even the smallest amount of belly fat looked like a jelly roll in the ill-fitting khaki-green shirt. People’s butts never looked right in the uniform either.

  “It’s not as bad as you think,” I told her.

  She snorted. “Do you think they designed them to make us look fat on purpose?”

  “Probably,” I said. I remembered her from the bus ride. Irit was hard to miss, being half a head taller than everyone else. Leah, in the bunk next to mine, was her cousin.

  “I hope to God we have a better Makit than my sister did two years ago,” Irit said, sitting down on my bed. “You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff she put that squad through.”

&nb
sp; I sat cross-legged at the foot of my bed, and Leah sat on hers, leaning against the wall.

  “I don’t think ours will be like that,” Leah said. “She seemed pretty nice, actually.”

  “Were you standing in formation with the rest of us?” I asked.

  Leah shrugged. “That’s just to set the mood. You can’t take these things too seriously.”

  “Don’t take it seriously, huh?” Irit snorted. “Let’s see you not take it seriously when she has us run the base perimeter for the fifteenth time.”

  “That’ll just get us fit and skinny,” Leah said.

  Irit stared at her for a moment, not sure if she was serious. Leah started laughing. Pretty soon all three of us were laughing, the kind of laugh where you don’t even know why you’re laughing, but everything keeps cracking you up.

  A few minutes later, the lights went out. I lay in my narrow cot on the rough cotton sheets, surrounded by the soft sounds of a dozen girls settling down for bed. I quickly fell asleep, utterly drained by the long day.

  * * *

  I soon discovered that boot camp was like summer camp without a swimming pool, field trips, or arts and crafts. We were on our feet a lot, learning to march from here to there. We learned all about the Uzi and the M-16: how to assemble them, how to clean them, how to fire them. I was surprised how much I enjoyed the satisfying clicks that cool black metal made as it slid and locked into place. Each night, we dropped our disassembled firearms in a vat of oil. The next morning, we had to clean all the parts until not a drop of oil or a speck of dirt remained.

  At inspection, we stood at attention next to our beds, our weapons in pieces on them. Orit stood by the door and called us to attention when Lieutenant Meirav entered our barracks. I worked hard that morning to clean my weapon, and it certainly looked clean lying on my bed. There were certain parts, though, that no matter how much you cleaned them, you couldn’t get all the oil out. Meirav, in charge of weapons inspection, knew that, of course. She picked up each piece and examined it from every side.

  “I’m looking for elephants,” she said the first time she did it.

  I smiled, not sure if sarcasm meant she wanted me to answer or not.

  Just when I thought she was done and I’d passed inspection, she picked up the one piece I hadn’t managed to get perfectly clean. She stuck her pinkie in it and then held it in front of my face so I could see the oily smear on her finger.

  “What’s this?” Meirav asked. It was obvious what it was, so I didn’t answer. There was nothing I could say. My stomach growled. We’d been up for two hours and hadn’t had breakfast yet.

  “Your weapon,” she said, inches from my face, “will keep you alive. It will keep your fellow soldiers alive. Show it some respect, Private Maya, or it will fail you when you need it most.”

  That was a big joke, of course, because the weapons they gave us to practice with were ancient. Irit joked that she recognized hers from a textbook photo of weapons used in the 1940s during the War of Independence. No one really thought we would ever use them to stay alive. I knew what Meirav was saying was just a pose, and she knew I knew. But I also knew what she meant. In the end, a weapon was a thing that was designed to hurt, to kill, and it demanded respect.

  Few inspections went by when she didn’t pick my weapon to inspect. Sometimes I wondered if Orit told her to pick on me, because she only inspected three or four weapons each time, so it was sheer perversity that made her constantly choose mine.

  Lieutenant Meirav nearly always found a trace of oil in a tiny crevice that I had somehow missed. For a brief second, her face would light up in a cold smile. She hid it in a frown of disgust and disappointment, but I knew she was glad that she’d found something wrong.

  Each time I failed inspection, my stomach dropped and my afternoon would be shot, wasted on re-cleaning and extra duty for failing to clean the weapon well enough in the first place. Twice, though, I did it perfectly. Meirav wanted to find something wrong, but she looked and looked and finally walked away without saying a word. I couldn’t stop grinning for half an hour.

  When we weren’t on the field, we were in the classroom learning about enemy positions, equipment, strengths and weaknesses. In military strategy we memorized battle plans of past wars. Not particularly grueling; not particularly interesting either.

  I had a harder time with the firing range. I both loved it and dreaded it, and unlike my mother, I was not a crack shot. On the one hand, it was oh so cool to be lying in the dirt, eyes squinting at the man-shaped target. It fit with the image I had of myself as a tough soldier … a deadly, dangerous woman to be reckoned with. On the other hand, it was scary because there were no dividers between each shooter and I always worried that the girl lying next to me would lose control of her weapon, have it skid sideways, and accidentally shoot me. Perhaps my habit of keeping an eye on the shooter on either side of me kept me from hitting my target as often as I would have liked. One eye to the left and one to the right didn’t really leave you with much to look straight ahead.

  Each time, the range Makit would shout the command to drop down to shooting position. We’d all drop down to the dirt lying on our stomachs, one arm extended along the length of the barrel, gripping the handle, the other curled around the trigger. I’d wait until I heard “Cock your weapon. Aim.” I’d close my left eye, sighting down the length of the barrel, the target fuzzy in the distance. My heart would start beating faster. Then the range instructor would call out, “The targets are before you, fire at will.” I shot quickly and sloppily, my target speckled with the occasional hit, my ears ringing from the noise. We were given earplugs, but they only muffled the sound.

  It was always dusty, and I was usually sweaty and grimy. But I never looked forward to the showers because they had no curtains. At first I tried to figure out some way to shower without anyone seeing anything, but that was impossible. It took me a while before I could strip and shower without feeling my skin crawling with invisible eyes. But after a while, the sight of a bunch of naked, soapy butts stopped bothering me and I just didn’t care who saw my boobs. I probably stopped caring because I was so tired. By law, we were required to get six hours of sleep a night. Our Makit made sure that’s about all we got.

  In boot camp they wanted me to overcome the overwhelming urge to hide, duck, take cover, and disappear. Instead, I was taught to stand up, take action, grab a rifle, and shoot. Our basic training took place in a mini-base inside the perimeter of a “real” base. We had our own perimeter to patrol and our own “safety hole” where bombs could be detonated.

  On my first few patrol duties, I was fully alert, my eyes and ears twitchy to every movement around me. I felt personally responsible for keeping the rest of my bunkmates safe. Irit waited three days before pointing out that the guys get to patrol the outer perimeter of the real base and that everything we were doing was just pretend. That took away a lot of the excitement of guard duty. After that I really didn’t take it seriously.

  Once the thrill was gone, I tried to laugh at our Makit’s seriousness, her melodramatic insistence on aggressive perfection. I felt foolish for ever believing this was serious business. I tried to maintain the mocking pose I was so famous for in high school.

  “These people need to remove the sticks from their asses. It’s not as if we’ll ever see combat,” I grumbled to Leah. Quiet and easygoing, her pale skin full of ginger-colored freckles, she never got boiling mad the way Irit and I did.

  She shrugged, her moon-face unusually serious.

  “You never know,” she said.

  That’s the thing about Leah. She was quiet, but she had a way with words. I shut up and stopped complaining … at least about that.

  When the three weeks of boot camp were finally over, we had a “breaking of the distance” and all the instructors who had been distant and aloof came over and gave us big hugs and said we were a great group, one of the best they’d ever taught. Irit rolled her eyes at Leah and me, but I just smile
d. It turned out that our Makit, who’d been training us, punishing us, and occasionally praising us for the past three weeks, who was so commanding and stern, was only three months older than me. I’d been sure she was at least two years older.

  The same day, most people received their assignments. I’d already been told the week before that I’d be sent to a one-week administrator course. What mattered was the assignment after that. On impulse, I requested a posting “away from home.” My parents lived in Haifa, but I was hoping to get posted near Tel Aviv. My aunt lived in the heart of the city and it would be fun to live there with her. There was always a lot going on in Tel Aviv, and between concerts and comedy shows and funky shops, you could count on finding something fun to do on the weekend.

  Both Leah and Irit had requested to be stationed near their homes. With her high scores, Leah was assigned to a military-intelligence course. Irit, like me, got the administrator’s course.

  One of the girls from our squad had a camera and she took our picture, right at the end.

  I loved the picture, the three of us slim like Leah predicted, and tanned, arms draped over one another, looking very comfortable in our khaki uniforms.

  Six of us from our barracks received a week’s leave, and Irit invited us to her parents’ house on the banks of the Kineret.

  Irit put on MTV’s greatest hits, and the whole room throbbed with the bass from the speakers mounted on the walls. In the kitchen Leah made mystery punch. I was well into my third drink when someone bumped into me and the bright-red punch sloshed out of my cup. I watched, fascinated, as it arched out, hung suspended for a moment, and then came splashing down on the white marble floor.

  I started laughing, which got Leah’s attention. She looked so funny like this, loose-limbed and graceless. She tripped over a kitchen chair trying to get a closer look. Irit tried to help as Leah fought to right herself, but she was laughing so hard that Leah fell twice more, completely tangled in the chair legs.

  “I’m gonna pee in my pants,” Irit shrieked while poor Leah, struggling to right herself like a bug on its back, tried to stand.