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by Naomi Anne Goldner
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A cold November morning marked my last day as a civilian. As I climbed onto the bus, my tightly-laced, black Doc Martens heavy with each step, I turned around to see my mother and my boyfriend standing side-by-side – two familiar faces among the sea of strangers who had also woken early on this gray morning to send us girls off to boot camp.
I imagined that, like me, the other girls had carefully chosen their outfits that morning, knowing this may very well be the last chance in a long time to express their uniqueness. There was nothing noteworthy about my light blue jeans and baggy sweater, at least not to those who’d never laid eyes on me. Yet those who knew me well could tell you the story of the blue-grey sweater my grandmother knitted for my grandfather and how I made it my own one wintery day, the color of the yarn perfectly matching my eyes. And the jeans, my signature pants, I bought on Haight Street in San Francisco when visiting my father the previous summer. Looking around, I tried to pin each girl to an Israeli city or town based on what she wore; it was hard to set my teen judgments aside. I categorized them by their outfits knowing that they, too, would have purposefully selected a civilian outfit that solidified their identity.
The bus engine hummed below my feet as I quickly scanned the area and found an empty seat by the window. I sat down, shoved my heavy bag under the seat in front of me, wiped the foggy window with my sleeve and smiled nervously at those I was leaving behind.
My stomach flipped at the thought of the next twelve days. There was nothing about me and the military that made any sense. I struggled for months to wrap my head around the fact that I would soon become army property, along with most eighteen-year-old girls in Israel. Generations of women before me proudly served, going as far back as my grandmother, who joined the Jewish Palmach before the state of Israel was established. But me––I had not an ounce of pride. My entire existence was counter-culture in every way – far beyond the typical teenage rebellion. I was a poet. I had grown up on the fringe of mainstream Israeli society with a lesbian mother and artistic family in the center of Tel Aviv where my boyfriend was in a rock band. This experience made no sense to me or my life. Yet I was forced to be here, on this bus, my pacifist self who marched against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians and voted for the transcendental meditation party when I got my first right to vote. This was more than a departure from my hometown and family—I was leaving everything I knew to be me and I could not imagine who I would be upon my return. Then there were all the horrors and impossibilities of bootcamp I had heard about: brutality for the sake of brutality, inhumane living conditions, brainwashing, UTI-infested bathrooms, shit on the walls, guns. There was no way out now and I started to panic, my palms sweating and heart racing.
The wheels of the bus began to move slowly. I could hear rain pattering on the roof, a usually comforting sound that now made my insides ache with a longing to be back home under the covers, sleeping just a little longer on a school day or curled up with a book. The soft ground under the wheels would be turning damp, and as I stared out the window I could see the rain growing heavier as the bus picked up speed. I tried to take a deep breath without success, the anxiety sitting heavy on my chest; instead I closed my eyes and tried to calm the storm within me.
“Everyone says that our camp is the worst out of the three,” someone said. The chatter on the bus began to fill my ears with this and other comments made by the uncertain, excited, and sometimes fearful voices of soon-to-be-soldiers. As we drove through towns I had never set foot in, I watched people on their way to work and school; for them, this was just another day, one of many in their routine lives. Certainly, the adults had already been in my place, and the children making their way to school were destined to find themselves on a bus like this when they reached eighteen years of age, heading toward the unknown, just like me. Military service is mandatory in the state of Israel: two years for women and three for men. Depending on your background, you could be anything from a truck driver to a teacher, cafeteria worker, photographer or even a fighter in the most prestigious unit, that is, if you are male. Depending on your views, you either try hard to get into the air force or go as far as breaking your own legs to lower your physical profile to avoid a combat unit. Women are allowed to be commanders who train men, but they aren’t allowed to fight. I couldn’t care less about applying my feminist views when it came to the military. I didn’t understand why anyone would want to not only risk their lives, but also their sanity, by killing innocent civilians and those we deemed as terrorists. If you had great connections or came from a good family and had good grades, you could land a role in the army radio station. You’d spend your service as a radio jockey: alternative music on weekends, Israeli rock and pop mixed in, and a long playlist of sad songs ready to play whenever there were wars or terrorist attacks with fatalities. I was not so lucky to land this coveted role, but due to my command of the English language, I got to join the Intelligence unit.
By the time we reached camp, it had stopped raining. We got off the bus and were led into a big gray building. Busloads of girls from all over the country flooded the long hallway creating a quiet chaos. No one wanted to be singled out by the soldiers herding us along, but confusion led to whispering and mumbling as we tried to anticipate what was happening next. Bladders full from the ride, some girls asked for the bathroom while others itched for a cigarette—all were denied with a harsh coldness we would soon recognize as the normal mode of communication.
During the next hour, we were stripped of our identity and turned into soldiers – at least on the outside. It would take a little longer to rid us of our internal selves. The first station was vaccinations: one-by-one, like cattle being branded, we each stepped up to the military nurse who moved like a robot, her face a blank stare. We all stood quietly in line, no questions asked. When it was my turn, I rolled up the sleeve of my shirt and tried hard not to flex my arm muscle in fear, knowing that there is more pain with resistance.
Next, our pictures were taken and our soldier IDs made. I didn’t smile and wasn’t expected to, which was a relief – I was a master of the teenage angst look and was in no mood to change that today. With remarkable speed, I was handed my new ID a few feet down the line. It was me in the picture, but something was off. This was no passport photo, here the greens of the military colors in the background contrasted with my long, gentle and sad face. I stared at the photo in disbelief as I trudged behind the girls in front of me. My thoughts were interrupted by a soldier handing me a silver ID tag to wear on a cheap chain around my neck; this was when I was introduced to my number.
“Start memorizing it,” the soldier barked at me before moving on to the next girl in line. I put it around my neck and swallowed hard thinking: From now on this is who I am. A number.
The final station felt like the most significant on the path to losing our identity. Until that moment we could still cling to the girls we had been that morning. We were a colorful mosaic of young women, each with her own style, background, and history reflected in the way we stood out from one another – or even how some of us tried to blend in. Yet we were about to be stripped of the last signifier of our individuality. After the soldiers scanned our bodies with their eyes for proper sizing, we were each handed an olive green uniform and told to change quickly. We all undressed in a big damp and dim room, commanders rushing us like the building was on fire. I stood frozen, trying not to look at the naked bodies around me. I didn’t want to undress in front of these strangers, but knew this was no time for apprehensions; after all, we were all females and there was nothing to be ashamed of. I claimed a corner of the room and stripped off my jeans and sweater, feeling the damp coolness clinging to my skin before sucking in my stomach and zipping up the pants, which by the end of the week would become loose around my hips.
My personal belongings were transferred to a big army bag with one long strap that cut into my shoulder as I hauled it down the hill following the herd towards camp. I tried hard not to stumble and fall, barely keeping up with the ridiculously fast pace that was made even harder thanks to the oversized boots I’d been issued. It took all I had not to stop midway to camp and throw down my equipment in defeat; this bootcamp journey had just started and I was already ready to quit. But this was not a game, or a class I could skip, or a relationship I could end. This was the military, and I was at the mercy of everyone around me.
Upon arrival at the camp, we were quickly introduced to our new best friend: an Uzi submachine gun. We each got our very own and were asked to sit on the ground and listen carefully. A curly red-headed female officer paced back and forth as she growled at us.
“You take this Uzi with you wherever you go, got it?” she said. “Never let go of it, no matter what. Don’t ever, ever leave it behind, even when you go to the bathroom.”
At night we slept with it under our makeshift sleeping bag pillows, guarding it with our lives. This Uzi soon became an extension of myself, the consequences of leaving the machine gun unattended too scary to imagine. Just a couple days into bootcamp and here I was, a gun-carrying soldier like the youngsters I’d seen on the buses and streets on their way home or to the base. Soldiers were peppered throughout our Tel Avivian civilian life, some coming into schools to visit former teachers who’d get teary at the sight of their students all grown up and donning the Israeli Defense Force uniform proudly. As children, we’d have a soldier accompany us on field trips anywhere we travelled across the tiny state of Israel. Some girls dreamed of a soldier boyfriend, preferably from a combat unit, while all I wanted to date were musicians who rejected the military. Yet here I was, a number on a silver tag around my neck with a gun to keep me company day and night.
Our days were filled to the brim with activities, likely by design. There was not a moment to stop and reflect on what was happening, not a split second to look up at the sky and remember that I was still here on this planet, that the sun was still up there, and that underneath this worn out uniform my soul still resided. This was how the days went by, constantly trying to keep up with a schedule that seemed to always start in negative time. During our five-minute breaks, we had to fit in a cigarette (at least a drag or two), a trip to the bathroom and an attempt to make it to the pay phone before the line became too long. The graffiti in the bathroom stalls told stories of girls who had passed through here before us, promising that this, too, would pass.
Our days began with morning drills and were filled with lessons on gun mechanics and cleaning, physical education, group work, and practice on the shooting range. Our days ended with ice-cold showers. I slept in a large tent with seven other girls for those twelve nights at bootcamp. The tent was made of thick waterproof material where raindrops gently bounced at night, filling my ears with a familiar and comforting sound after each new day of terrifying events that turned my world upside down. We received random collective punishments for smiling at the wrong time or missing a piece of trash when cleaning, endured conditioning that even the athletes among us couldn’t keep up with, were denied food at the cafeteria if we forgot our meal ticket, and spent countless hours at the shooting range practicing with live ammunition trying to hit a cardboard cutout of a human that made it seem all too real for me. Night and day, day and night. Propaganda packaged as history lessons with no room to question the facts, humiliation at every turn from young women who seemed to want to destroy what was left of our moral judgment and discernment between right and wrong. I slept for most of the six hours they gave us and obediently woke up to the routine morning drills. Bit by bit, I was losing myself.
Bootcamp was a large-scale game of pretend, only it felt very real, and we were all completely engaged. The commanders were all females, young women, two years older than us at most. I had friends their age back in Tel Aviv, some even older, who had already finished serving. I could not wrap my head around this, and how we learned to fear those nineteen-year-olds only because they were the ones who could take away the meager privileges we had left. They were the authority and we were game pieces on a board game where they seemed to have the freedom to bend the rules as they wished to amplify their control over us. We stood in straight lines upon their arrival and saluted them whenever we saw them around camp. These formalities were the hardest for me; I could easily see through them, yet I had no control and was left with no choice but to play by these twisted rules.
Along with my fellow soldiers, I counted the days until this living hell would be over. Within a short time, we had become some definition of friends, survival buddies perhaps, getting each other through the bland meals, cold showers, and graveyard guard shifts, nodding asleep while sitting up with Uzis around our shoulders. We relied on each other to help make it through the long, mundane days as much as we could, but only when we could set aside our immediate personal struggle for survival. It didn’t take long to realize that we all came from backgrounds so different that I had to wonder how it was that we even spoke the same language. It was true that we were all eighteen-year-old Jewish Israeli women, yet I felt alone and different, knowing that the murmurs of my heart and the sparks in my mind were better kept to myself. These girls had been fed a type of patriotism of which I had been spared growing up; thus they would make it through the two years of military service, while I would do all I could to escape this insane form of reality.
The horror and shock of bootcamp slowly began transforming into utter despair within me. In order to make it from early morning drills to collapsing onto the cot each night snuggling my Uzi, I had to push any feelings deep down. I imagined that everyone around me was drifting away from themselves over the course of those twelve days as well, but it didn’t make my suffering any less intense. I had no memory of what it felt like to be me, the intense, willful girl I’d left behind. I longed to remember how it felt to walk the streets of Tel Aviv with friends in my jeans, or long flowery skirts, on the way to a club or cafe, to listen to music and dance, write poetry, dream of the possibilities of a future full of creativity and beauty. I felt so detached from any of this, barely able to hold phone conversations with my boyfriend when I finally made it to the front of the long payphone line.
Vacant and devoid of my former sense of self, it was a rare moment of silence that finally made me crack. Sitting on the ground with my fellow soldiers around midday, about halfway through one of the gun lessons, I found myself in tears. I looked down and realized where I was and what I was doing—cleaning gun parts. Taking apart a fucking Uzi and carefully cleaning every millimeter, in and out, with the same hands that made art and wrote poems against war since I was a little girl. Pure, and what seemed like endless, tears slid down my cheeks. I didn’t care that everyone was staring at me; what mattered was that I was actually feeling something.
As difficult as the first week of boot camp was, the final days turned out to be the hardest. I tried to motivate myself by fantasizing about all things I’d do when I got back home: hug my boyfriend and let his arms soften the hard shell I’d built around me, eat anything and everything that wasn’t military food, take a long hot shower, stare aimlessly at the walls of my bedroom watching the day turn into night. But I was so disconnected from my old self that I couldn’t imagine how those things would really feel – nothing could pull me out of this numbness. I’d stare at the words my boyfriend had penned so beautifully in the letters he sent every few days, but I felt nothing. Eventually my tent mates asked to see what he’d written and began sharing their own pieces of evidence of life outside this camp: letters from parents, younger siblings, a photo or two. This became our daily ritual – an attempt to bring to light the lost pieces of ourselves.
On the last day of bootcamp, I woke up in what was now a familiar tent with its heavy canvas walls, flimsy cots with scratchy gray army blankets and one lamp hanging from the center pole. I lingered in my sleeping bag for the first time since I had arrived, listening to the voices of my fellow soldiers who sounded distressed, hurrying to get dressed, fixing up the beds for the commanders. Bootcamp was about to come to an end, and this meant that the induction ceremony was only hours away. I was torn inside, and afraid to speak my mind to anyone.
We had practiced for this ceremony over and over again, memorizing words that held meaning far beyond what our eighteen-year-old minds could understand. I felt we’d been stripped of any critical thinking skills, and, for most of us, these words made sense on the surface: we were devoting ourselves to service, to the country, and to our people. Only after many years and the perspective gained from them, have I come to appreciate my instincts at a time when I was so young and inexperienced. Standing in straight lines with hundreds of young women, about to become property of the Israeli Defense Force, I knew that holding a gun in one hand, and a bible in the other while swearing loyalty to any kind of authority or power went against every bone in my body, every part of me. It was not the right thing to do.
We were greeted by long tables with stacks of bibles as we each took our place for the ceremony in a huge open field. Commanders all around shouted to one another over our heads as we lined up just as we had rehearsed. I began to feel lightheaded, my stomach aching. The festive atmosphere reminded me of high school graduation ceremonies, yet instead of excitement, I felt dread. I couldn’t quite tell from their faces how the soldiers around me were feeling. I tried to lock eyes with a few who smiled at me nervously, others seemed distracted. The crowd quieted down as a voice over the microphone grew louder and louder.
“Congratulations, Soldiers!” a man’s voice bellowed. “You have made it through bootcamp and are about to take on the biggest honor of your life.”
I looked down at my boots, the oath of allegiance running through my head like a broken record: I swear and undertake to justify my faith in the State of Israel, its laws and its competent authorities, to accept upon myself unconditionally and unreservedly the discipline of the Israel Defense Forces and to obey all the ordinances and instructions issued by the authorities. The words had become devoid of meaning, yet inside me was a roar still unwilling to settle down. Do not do this.
But I did. The pressure to repeat those words was unbearable. I walked up to the bible table, accepted my very own copy and held it tightly, my Uzi upright in the other hand. Just like all the news clips we’d seen of our enemies holding their own weapons and books of prayer – enemies we called terrorists, fundamentalists, and war criminals. I held my breath and mumbled the words, barely pronouncing them. My insides were twisting and turning in an uncontrollable tantrum. A voice deep within screamed with all its might. In going against the grain of my whole existence, I had finally come back to life.
The line for the bus was long and restless. Physically depleted and mentally drained, I was a changed individual from the one who apprehensively climbed those stairs twelve days earlier. Bootcamp had shown me a side of my culture I could no longer ignore, and even more importantly, the experience made me realize just how fragile a sense of self can be when beaten down and molded by forces too powerful to ignore. As Jews we had all grown up on the notion of how dangerous it was to follow blindly, to accept injustices, to obey without questioning. Our people had been victims of such behavior time and again throughout history. Yet I had done just that, along with other young and bright women my age, conforming to rules and rituals that made no sense outside of camp. Outside of the military.
I sat down and leaned my head on the bus window, afraid to imagine what would come next in my life as a soldier. Closing my tired eyes, finally alone without training tasks or commanders to humiliate me, I tried to settle into my own skin again. This experience had introduced me to unknown parts of myself––parts that helped me get through an impossible world where not speaking my mind was the only way to survive, those same parts that now would not let me rest in this new reality. I didn’t have a word for them at the time – perhaps it was my conscience, perhaps deep wisdom. Maybe morals, or even my soul. Thoughts swirled in my mind and I felt a deep disappointment that I had betrayed myself and not spoken up about how wrong it felt to go through with the closing ceremony. As the sun set, I drifted off to sleep to the lull of the bus as it made its way back to civilization.
An hour later I awoke with a startle and hurriedly gathered my stuff so I wouldn’t miss the connecting bus to Tel Aviv. “Hey, Soldier! Soldier!” someone called as I was running through the bus terminal still drowsy from sleep. It took me a moment to realize that I was the one being called – I shuddered at this realization, looking down at myself in this uniform that had engulfed my identity. A young man rushed towards me and handed me my blue-grey sweater that had come loose from around my waist. I grabbed the sweater and continued running, soldier, soldier echoing in my head with every step. I kept running, trying to ignore the voice in my head, and knew that this was the beginning of the end. Getting to that end meant months of calling back the lost parts of my identity and reconstructing the person who would finally push her way through the endless barricades of early military release, one at a time, until she was free.
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Naomi Anne Goldner is a San Francisco-based writer of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Her work has been published in various journals, including Entropy Magazine, The Blue Nib Literary Review, and Quiet Lightning, to name a few. Founder of WordSpaceStudios Literary Arts Center, she is currently editing her first novel which spans four generations and three continents.
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