I reported for induction on the second Sunday of November 1959, three

Chapter Three I reported for induction on the second Sunday of November 1959, three months short of my eighteenth birthday. Military service was a near-universal rite of passage for Israeli teenagers. For children of the kibbutz, it held even greater significance. Now that we had a country, the kibbutzniks’ role as the avant-garde in taming and farming the land had ceased to be relevant. But the sense of mission we’d been raised with — what we were led to believe set us apart from the mere “city-dwellers” — drove us to aspire, maybe even assume, we would leave an imprint in other spheres of the new state’s life. I doubt it’s an accident that nearly every one of the boys with whom I grew up in Mishmar Hasharon went on to become an officer during his time in the military. Judging from my own first few weeks in uniform, however, there was every reason to believe I would end up as an unfortunate, undistinguished exception. This was not due to lack of ambition. In fact, I thought at first of joining the air force. But a question on the application form asked whether I ever suffered from any breathing discomfort. Like almost everyone on the kibbutz, I did get a bit clogged up when the weather turned cold and damp. So I naively answered yes, ending any chance of training as a pilot. My fallback choice was a tank unit. But when I joined the hundreds of other draftees at the processing center near Tel Aviv, about a hundred of us were shunted, by alphabetical lottery, into training for armored personnel carriers instead. Known as battle taxis, the APCs which Israel had at the time were lumbering, World War Two-vintage halftracks. Our training battalion was based, alongside the country’s main armored brigade, in a huge, hillside army camp outside Beersheva in the Negev. I knew that our fironut — basic training — would be tough. That was the whole point. But we endured a seemingly endless array of inspections, under the watchful eye of a corporal who meted out punishments for the tiniest scuff on a boot, a belt, or a rifle. The rest of the time was spent in physical training, which I found especially hard, at least at the beginning. I still weighed barely 130 pounds, and by no means all, or even most, of it was muscle. My military career, such as it was, looked very likely to involve spending my required couple of years baking inside an APC in the Negev before moving on to something more useful, and certainly more fulfilling, with the rest of my life. 50 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_027898