The recruiters all promised the sky — adventure, excitement, professional interest — if we met their criteria. Those who did not meet the standards for combat units ended up as desk clerks and drivers, cooks and adjutants of the rear. To be a “jobnik” — noncombat soldier-was worst of the worst for someone from Nahalal.
From the navy to the air force, they all tried to entice me into their basic training. But I knew where I wanted to go: the paratroops brigade, and specifically to the paratroops sayeret, the most elite force in the brigade. Its appeal to me went beyond the fact my brother Udi had served in the unit before going on to become an officer in the brigade. From everything I knew about the sayeret, it looked like it would be the most fun.
The tests for the paratroops sayeret began a few days after my arrival at the induction center. In one day, the recruiting sergeants from the unit put us through long- and short-distance races, obstacle courses, wrestling matches, and some intense games of basketball. We all tried to impress the recruiters. Only a couple of years older than us, they seemed much, much older, and a lot wiser. Seventy tried out that first day. They picked twenty. I came in first, second, or third in every foot race. Though I had never experienced any real violence among my friends in the valley, we often wrestled for fun. At six-foot-three, weighing a hundred and sixty pounds of wiry farm-bred muscle, I could get leverage on even the heaviest of my opponents. Because of my height, basketball was always my favorite team sport.
Over the coming four days, the routine repeated itself daily as they tried out new recruits, cutting away those who did not make the grade. Finally, when there were forty who met their standards, they told us to heave our duffel bags onto the roof of a bus to Tel Nof, the air force base that served as brigade headquarters for the paratroopers.
And the coddling stopped. Move this, move that, scrub this, clean that — it went on endlessly. They took us out for twelve-mile marches, and just as the base came into view, they sent us marching in the other direction for another dozen.
We learned about stretcher drills, an IDF favorite for turning a platoon of recruits into a cohesive unit. Soldiers take turns carrying each other on stretchers. It is unpleasant to be one of the four carrying the stretcher, and even worse to be bounced around on top. We did dozens of those, double time around the base, over and over again, learning to work together, learning who shirked and who could be trusted, who had endurance and who merely had bravado. When the sergeants tired of stretcher drills, they made us carry our cots over our heads on ten-kilometer runs, to punish us all for a single soldier’s dirty rifle. They let us have two or three hours of sleep in twenty-four hours. But nobody counted; we were too busy learning the rudiments of soldierly discipline.
My love of running came in handy. Because I ran fast I could usually grab a few minutes of shut-eye, waiting for my buddies from the platoon. I ran everywhere, able to maintain a natural loping gait that found a rhythm and kept it over long periods of time. So, I stood out both as the tallest member of the platoon and as one of its fastest, always leading the pack or right on the heels of its leader-usually our commanding officer.
About two weeks after we arrived at Tel Nof, they sent us to Bet Lid, in the center of the country, near Netanya. They combined our platoon with two regular platoons of paratroops recruits, creating a company to go through the three-month basic training together. At the end of three months we faced parachute training, and then another three months learning to command a squad. Only when we finished that course did we become full-fledged soldiers, qualified to wear the red beret and red boots of the paratroopers, silver wings above the left shirt pocket of our green uniforms. By the end of the process, nearly 50 percent of us would be gone, winnowed out and sent to easier outfits.
As trainees for a sayeret, we worked harder in our platoon than the two other platoons of trainees. While they did a six-mile march, we hiked a dozen. When they finished twelve miles, we did another fifteen. All our platoon officers and trainers came from the sayeret, not the regular battalion. From the start, they gave us the feeling that those who lasted through the course would belong to a very special family of soldiers and officers.
Soldiers everywhere say their basic training was much harder than whatever is given nowadays. In my day nothing in army regulations limited the powers of anyone above the rank of sergeant. An hour of sleep and then three hours of running with our beds over our heads; a twenty-minute catnap, then two hours to build a three-meter-high stone pyramid from rocks we found in the fields. They prepared us for the reality of our work as soldiers, when we’d have to go with very little sleep for days and sometimes weeks at a time, racing around the clock to prepare an operation or fighting constantly in a full-scale war.
At Bet Lid we began to learn about all the platoon weapons. We carried a pair of 7.62 mm machine guns, as well as a mortar and a bazooka. Our first rifles were heavy, cumbersome FNs, made in Israel under Belgian license. As paratroopers, they expected us to know how to handle it all, and we felt grateful when, after we mastered the FNs, they gave us Uzis for our personal weapons. After the 1967 war, Kalashnikovs captured from Arab troops equipped by the Soviets were issued to combat soldiers, and I learned the Kalashnikov is the best all-around assault weapon available. (I used the same one for the next eighteen years of active service and reserve duty.)
But I never found any great pleasure in the handling of guns, though throughout my years in IDF special forces my job often included trying out new weapons. I found the lessons in field tactics, topography, and navigation much more interesting than weapons-training. My love of the geography of the Land of Israel gave me an advantage over the city kids — and sometimes the instructors — when it came time to learn the intricacies of maps and navigation across the land.
But as in any army, mostly we practiced, over and over, until we did it right. Around the clock, day in and day out, we learned to stretch our abilities to our very best, for only the very best would finish the course. Except for two twenty-four-hour weekend leaves toward the end of the first three months of basic training, when I went home to visit with family, friends, and Nurit, we lived inside our platoon and company, barely aware of the rest of the brigade, let alone the rest of the world.
The central theme of basic training is to turn civilians into disciplined soldiers, and the simple principle says that a soldier has to follow orders automatically, without thinking, unless of course it is highly illegal-shooting an unarmed prisoner, for example. That is why there are punishments for every little thing out of place.
Rust on your weapon? Dig an eight-cubic-meter hole. The tent is untidy? Move it fifty times tonight until you get it right. All the punishments have one single goaclass="underline" whatever you are told to do, do it, because one day in battle, in a moment of sheer confusion and chaos, survival will depend on a clear head-and the ability to perform.
It surprised me at first how easily I took to the army. I never had much respect for authority unless I regarded it as having a fair and moral basis. But the sergeants and officers never found anything to complain about with me. In all the weeks of my basic training, they never singled me out for a punishment. Of course, as a member of the platoon I participated in all the group punishments meted out for whatever fault the officers found in our general performance or in the performance of any individual member of the team.
A sayeret’s soldiers-even new recruits-are encouraged to speak their minds about ways to improve the unit’s performance, even if it means challenging the commanding officer. In a sayeret, there is no place for blind admiration of senior officers. That suited me fine. My parents raised me to believe in myself, to stand up for what I believed. Throughout my career, officers earned my respect because of what they knew and what they taught me. But I learned there are different kinds of leaders.