Gibush Lechimah

Yesterday I returned from a two-day gibush for combat positions for girls. It was pretty badass (except they didn’t have us sleeping in tents…I was a little disappointed…), but now pretty much every possible part of my body is sore.

It was actually interesting how much army protocol is supposed to be intuitive for Israelis. For example, you’re not supposed to know your commander’s name until a certain point in time, and somehow you’re simply supposed to know that that’s the way things are. So when we started the gibush, my 16 person team (though towards the end it was about 13 or so) stood in the shape of a chet in front of our commander, and the commander introduced herself as our commander. After her short introduction, one of the girls asked in total innocence and without a hint of sarcasm, “What’s your name, commander?” And the commander scowled, and the other girls looked at this girl as if she were a total idiot, like what a complete fool she was for asking a basic question about her commander. I mean, I already happened to know the rules about that, but I kind of felt bad for the girl because that’s an easy mistake to make if you don’t know in advance that you’re not supposed to ask…

If I had to describe this two-day experience in one word, it’d be “shocking.” To understand what I mean by that, you have to understand that this army test is 100 percent voluntary, and that there are plenty of interesting jobs you can get without doing this test (just not combat jobs). In order to get an invitation to this test, you have to actually go to the trouble of faxing the army enlistment center asking to be considered for it. One would assume, therefore, that the people coming to this test would be a little more motivated than the average girl, or a least a bit more determined to get these specific army jobs that we were trying out for.

What was shocking then? Maybe it was just my group that was like this, but the one phrase I heard non-stop was “Ein li coach.” Literally, “I don’t have strength.” The girls in my team just whined non-stop, “Ein li coooo-aaaaaachhh…..” They constantly complained that they were tired, or that they were sore, or that they didn’t feel like doing what we were told to do.

That’s not to say that I wasn’t sore or tired or that I really felt like running a mile. But I just shut up about it. Why? Because I knew I was there of my own accord, and that I could leave whenever I wanted to if I really didn’t feel like doing anything. But for some reason these girls didn’t realize the same.

We had to do this one drill where there were nine bags of sand scattered around a field, and in groups of four we had to crawl on our bellies through the dirt to each bag, competing to do it before the other groups. The catch was that if even one of the four didn’t keep up with the pace of her group (either too fast or too slow), the entire group had to crawl back to the base they were coming from. And if the group stopped in between bases to rest, they had to crawl back to the base they were coming from and do it all over again.
So my group finally got to the second base and started moving to the third one, and one girl in the group (who was in MUCH better physical condition than me!) said she was too tired to go on and that we could go on without her. We called out to the commander to ask if we could go on without her, and the commander said NO. So then we started begging the girl to go on with us so that we could get good marks in the gibush, and she still refused. Then the commander saw that we were spending too long in between bases, so she ordered us to crawl back to the second base. So we started crawling, but the lazy girl refused. So then we had to crawl back to the lazy girl. By this point the Israeli girls were yelling at this girl to get her ass in gear, whereas I was saying, “Please….we don’t have to finish, but can we at least do one more?” Because I feel like sometimes the bigger picture is overwhelming, and it’s much easier to do something one step at a time. Finally the girl agreed, and we crawled back together to the second base. But once we got there, the girl refused to go on. So the commander told us we had to crawl back to the first base. So we started crawling back to the first base, but lazy girl refused to move. So we were ordered to crawl back to the second base. Followed by more screaming from the Israelis, and more of my begging to crawl to at least one more base.
Long story short…this is how I spent a solid 30 minutes of my life. We didn’t finish, and I have bruises all over my legs and arms from the experience. Most of all though, I’m just shocked that someone could be so lazy (she was in better physical condition than me—if I could do it, she can do it!), and so inconsiderate towards other people.


At night one of the girls was having a conversation with me in English. Actually, throughout the experience there were two girls that every now and then would try to “help” me by translating something that the commander said in Hebrew into bizarre pidgin English. This despite the fact that they clearly saw that without their translations I was somehow doing fine on my own. Anyway, one of the girls was talking to me and asked what I thought of the commander. I responded that I thought the commander was just fine. The Israeli said, “I think she’s a bitch, and I hate her.”

I explained that her role wasn’t to be a nice person who fed us muffins and cakes all day. Yeah, our commander was tough, and in general it’s not fun to have someone telling you when to sleep, when to stand, when to run, and even when to go to the bathroom, but that’s the army, and our commander was like any other commander in that sense.

But the Israeli said, “Yes…but I think she is a ‘bat zonah.’ “ (Daughter of a whore).

I think heard a slight noise behind me, and I turned my head a bit and…lo and behold…it turns out our commander was standing behind us the entire time. Thank G-d I didn’t say anything against her!!



On the Hebrew-front, I think I did really well. I understood almost everything that the commander said, and for the most part kept up with things during the two assemblies we had (one about rules and one about job options). Actually, there were times when I was rather grateful that I’m not very quick in Hebrew yet. Why? Because if you did something wrong the commander would yell something like, “WHY DID YOU MOVE AFTER WE SAID ‘HAKSHEV’?!?!?!” And your normal reaction to someone asking you a question like this is to explain your reasons (“I had an itch,” or “I forgot” or “I saw a bee.”) The problem is that the commander doesn’t want a response. The commander simply likes to tell you that you did something wrong, but she wants to do it in the form of a question, just like Jeopardy. So when the commander would do this question-criticism of an Israeli girl, they would accidentally blurt out a response. But with me, it’s a little bit harder for me to blurt things out in Hebrew. I had a little bit more time, like a second extra, in my head as I translated to think to myself if I really wanted to respond. And so I didn’t. And this really worked in my favor.

Actually, my Hebrew skills were the one thing that caused the commander to stifle a laugh during the entire process. Normally the commander doesn’t smile or laugh in front of her team at the beginning. But there was one moment where we were walking in two lines to somewhere, and the commander turned around and started saying that our line looked terrible. She asked what we didn’t understand in the word straight, and told us that she wanted the lines to look like a BLANK. I say BLANK because I don’t remember exactly what the word was. “Do you not understand me? I want these two lines to be like a BLANK. You all know what a BLANK is, or is there someone here who does not know what a BLANK is????” she said, as if there better not be anybody who didn’t understand. Then I raised my hand, “Attention commander.”
The commander nodded for me to continue.

“I don’t know what a BLANK is.”

There was then a brief moment where the commanders face crumpled into a stifled laugh as suddenly she was reminded that she had a foreigner in the group, and she promised to explain to me later, and then completely regained her composure: “OKAY. APART FROM THE AMERICAN, IS THERE SOMEONE HERE THAT DOESN’T UNDERSTAND? GREAT, NOW MOVE!!!”


We then moved on to an assembly where female combat job options were to be presented. Each job had made a video of pictures and pop music, and two out of the 7 or so groups used the song “Eye of the Tiger.” For some reason I seemed to be the only person who was amused by this. I especially liked the “Eye of the Tiger” video that synced bullets flying out of guns and explosions from tanks with the music, because I thought there was something slightly vulgar and callous about it. I feel like I should inform the American army, because maybe if they made stuff like this instead of “Army of One” or “Army Strong” commercials it might help with enlistment rates. Or maybe it’d hurt.

At one point the anti-aircraft unit (I say unit because I don’t know the proper term, but I think it’s much bigger than a unit) put on their video…which started with a clip of planes slamming into the World Trade Center. A couple seconds later, they indirectly suggested that their unit could have prevented 9/11, which caused me to kind of gasp with shock. Later, during a more intimate presentation to just my team, the soldiers made the exact same claim.

I think it’s a pretty horrid claim to make. First of all, even if you could get the equipment positioned in Manhattan in time to shoot the planes down before they hit the buildings (though you almost certainly couldn’t), there’s still several problems: 1) there were still a LOT of civilians on those planes, and they still would have died and it still would have been an enormous tragedy, 2) if you blow up low-flying planes in the middle of Manhattan, it’s going to cause not only the deaths of the people on the planes but also death to many people on the street, and people in office buildings near the site of the explosion, so it’d still be an enormous tragedy, and 3) there is something particularly horrid about the thought of an army shooting down its own citizens, even if it’s to prevent even more loss of life. But the point though is that I wouldn’t have minded as much if the claim that the soldiers were making was that the tragedy could have been reduced, but they were in fact making it sound like had their unit been in Manhattan at the time, there would have been a happy ending…. Anyway, it just horrified me, and I didn’t really like that the Israelis were talking about it in this way. Whatever.

One job, however, ended up making such an impressive presentation that it booted out karakal for my first-choice job. Field intelligence gave a couple sentences about their jobs, and then said to us, “In that small field over there, there is a man watching you and taking notes on all of you. Can you see him?” And no matter how hard we all looked, we couldn’t see him. “THAT’s what our job is about.” Anyway, I thought that was just so bad-ass that I had to put it first choice. I want to sit in fields and take notes on people and be completely invisible. I’m almost 100 percent positive that I won’t be allowed to do that job, just based on my eyes and physical condition, and also because I’m considered a security risk cos I’m new in the country and without family (did I tell you that the first night of the gibush I had to have a security interview that none of the other girls had to do?), but oh well. Hopefully I’ll be allowed to do A combat job (I won’t know for another couple weeks if I passed), and I’ll worry about specific jobs later.



Anyway, I have a lot more to share, but one step at a time, I think…..stay tuned!