Memoirs of a mefakedet

A first-person account of what it’s like to be in the army – from a commander’s perspective.

By REBECCA BASKIN
Rebecca Baskin 521 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Rebecca Baskin 521
(photo credit: Courtesy)
When the mothers of my soldiers said good-bye to their children on the day of their army draft, I doubt any of them expected someone like me to be the commander waiting at the other end.
Before joining the IDF, my idea of a basic training commander didn’t extend much further than a vague mental picture of a villain out of the Vietnam War movie Full Metal Jacket – aggressive, unshakeable, never speaking in a tone under a yell, always with hat and whistle.
As a 19-year-old girl from Canada, I had no way or reason to know otherwise.
That is, until the day that I received the phone call informing me that I would be spending my army service in the air force as a mefakedet kitat tironim – basic training squad commander. Makit for short.
My older brother asked me if I knew how to say “filthy maggots” in Hebrew yet.
My repertoire of insults wasn’t, at that point, the only part of my Hebrew vocabulary that was limited. I had more than enough Hebrew to navigate the challenges of daily life in Israel, but enough to give orders? I wasn’t sure. Moreover, I had no idea how my decidedly unaggressive Canadian instincts would be up to the task of commanding Israelis with significantly more chutzpa than me.
Over six months of grueling training – three in basic training, and three in the air force’s commanders’ course – I learned what a commander really was, and how to be one. Every soldier is part of a 10-15 person squad (kita), which is part of a larger platoon (mahlaka) and even larger company (pluga). Simply put, the commander of the soldier’s squad – his (male) mak or (female) makit – is the single most important person in the first stage of his time in the army, and can have an influence long after training is over. For a new soldier, that commander is the army. A good commander can make a big contribution to putting the soldier on the road to a positive and meaningful service, just as a bad commander can do exactly the opposite.
A commander is part social worker, part jailer, part camp counsellor, part parent. He must keep strict “distance” – soldiers don’t know anything about their commander except his or her first name, refer to him only as Hamefaked, “The commander,” and must stand and speak a certain way when addressing him. However, with this distance comes an odd kind of closeness. The commander is the person whose job it is to know the soldier best; the first person he goes to with a problem of any kind; the person whose job it is to be the soldier’s advocate, and to make sure that all of his needs are taken care of; the one personally responsible for making sure that the soldier is adequately trained, ready and motivated to continue the rest of his service.
Commanders also deliver punishments for the smallest infractions, enforce strict discipline and often draconian rules, and do, indeed, wear hats pulled down over their eyes.
There’s no shortage of yelling or push-ups in basic training, but commanders are governed by a strict set of regulations outlining precisely what kinds of punishments are permissible – for instance, how far a soldier can be ordered to run. (Of course, use of the phrase “filthy maggots” falls under the category of “forbidden.”) The commander’s job, put simply, is to take a new recruit and turn him into a soldier. My commanders certainly weren’t my friends – but they were also far from being the villains that I had imagined.
Not all of my fears were allayed during training.
My nightmare was that I would find myself standing in front of a group of soldiers, all of them laughing at me because of my accent or some minor grammatical error. How was I supposed to assert my authority when the language and culture, though far more familiar than they once were, still weren’t mine? Really, what was a Canadian doing as a commander in the Israel Air Force? Reservations aside, I felt I was ready, and I was proud to be doing a job that I knew firsthand, through my experience with my own commanders, had the potential to be incredibly meaningful.
I was assigned to be a commander at the air force’s Technical College in Haifa. Unlike the soldiers with whom I had trained, the ones that arrive at the “Techni” are part of the “general draft” – they’d be assigned jobs only at the end of their three- to four-week training, with most going on to become aircraft technicians.
Whenever an IAF plane or helicopter takes off, our soldiers have had something to do with it.
THE MORNING that my first group of soldiers was drafted, I sat in a coffee shop and pondered what they would be like. Squad 11. My soldiers. A few hours later I was at the army’s recruiting center, with my hat pulled down over my eyes for the first time, about to introduce myself to my soldiers.
I spoke. I sounded, well, like a commander should. Nobody laughed. They all listened.
That was it – I was a makit.
I soon settled into the rhythm of being a commander.
Days started well before sunrise and ended well after sunset – I often asked myself how I dared to complain of fatigue during my own training, because I would have given almost anything to sleep as much as my soldiers did.
I didn’t go anywhere without my hat on.
I taught lesson after lesson: weapons, first aid, army values.
I wouldn’t answer to any soldier whose uniform was untidy, who wasn’t standing properly, or who didn’t address me as they should: “Attention, commander;” until they fixed whatever was wrong.
We cleaned for hours – and hours, and hours – until all of the commanders were fantasizing about the nuclear blast that would take away their living quarters even more than the soldiers were.
The other commanders and I became closer than I could have imagined; we ate, worked, slept, fought, laughed and cried together.
We laughed a lot. We tried to hide it from the soldiers. Commanders, of course, don’t ever laugh.
I yelled until I lost my voice, trying to teach and motivate my soldiers during the dry exercises leading up to our two days in the shooting range.
I stifled the sheer terror that I felt watching my soldiers load their guns for the first time.
I got used to living my life according to the seconds ticking down on my stopwatch.
In some ways, commanders must be mechanical. We don’t laugh, we don’t smile, our boots are always shined and our shirts are always tucked in. We don’t let on that we’re hot, cold, tired or bored. We don’t speak to the soldiers as we do to each other or to our friends at home.
Inevitably, though, a lot of personality comes through. With Facebook (and the simple fact that in Israel, the usual six degrees of separation are reduced to two at best), it’s just a matter of time before the soldiers manage to figure out a lot more than we might like them to know. They quickly pick up on which commanders are grouchiest in the mornings and which are most likely to let slight infractions slide. With the commander standing in front and talking all day, every day, the soldiers don’t miss anything. Because of this, one of the most important aspects of being a commander is setting a personal example; how can we expect our soldiers to be disciplined, motivated and professional if we aren’t ourselves? Within the framework and the rules, every commander has his or her own way of taking charge. Creativity is a must. We each tried to find our own way of getting through to our soldiers and making their basic training significant.
All of the commanders I worked with felt a true sense of duty with the job that we did – setting the soldier on the right track for the rest of his service.
The most important part of commanding was not to let our soldiers forget, and not to forget ourselves, that we weren’t really so different from one another. Beyond the “distance,” we’re all human. Not only that, we’re all soldiers in the same army, dealing with the same realities.
The human aspect was my favourite part of commanding – getting to know my soldiers one-on-one. I’ve never been as exhausted or as frustrated as I was in the army, but when I think of my soldiers I know that there was a reason for all of it. I commanded 64 soldiers overall: three squads of women and two of men. Standing at each of the five swearing-in ceremonies, I was unspeakably proud of all of them and felt a true sense of privilege.
There were soldiers for whom I know I made a difference and soldiers that I know I failed to reach. Many I keep in touch with; some have even become close friends. Some I was happy to see the back of – and I’m sure they were just as happy never to have to hear my voice again. One of my soldiers has since gone on to join a combat unit, and I always look forward to hearing his reports from his second round of training.
A particularly rewarding aspect of the job was commanding five “lone soldiers” who, like me, had left their families behind in far-off countries in order to serve in the IDF. When a French soldier cried to me on her first day, worrying that she wouldn’t make it through training or connect to any other recruits due to the language barrier, it was all I could do to keep my distance instead of hugging her and saying “me too.”
My nightmare of a whole group of soldiers laughing at me came true only once. I asked an entire platoon in Arabic which of them wanted to pray, and mispronounced the name of the evening prayer.
With every new group of soldiers, I insisted on doing a lesson about Michael Levin, a lone soldier from America who was killed during the Second Lebanon War. During the lesson, I would sometimes share my own personal story, which was met with combined reactions of curiosity, surprise and admiration that always reaffirmed for me the reasons why I was standing where I was. After that lesson, there would be no more occasional chuckles when I spoke.
With the end of each basic training came the long-awaited “breaking distance.” One by one, the commanders would introduce themselves to the soldiers: name, age, hometown, and how long they had been in the army. With that, it was all over. No more “Attention, commander.” Finally a chance to talk normally.
Many soldiers had wellpracticed imitations of the commanders ready to go; after weeks of seeing and hearing us endlessly, they had plenty of ammunition.
I was, of course, an easy target.
Breaking distance was always a huge release of tension, a reward for all of the work we’d done. One of the soldiers in my second squad had a particularly memorable way of summing up her gratitude: “Commander, for you, I would even do 20 pushups.”