Joel Chasnoff - The 188th Crybaby Brigade - A Skinny Jewish Kid from Chicago Fights Hezbollah - A Memoir

My platoon is one of three assigned to Company B of the 188th Armored Brigade, the brigade responsible for defending Israel’s north, including the Golan Heights and the border with Syria. Three other Armored brigades protect the Galilee and Israel’s center and south. All told, about one thousand eighteen-year-old Israeli boys will arrive at the Armored School today for two months of basic training, followed by two months of Tank School, three months of advanced warfare training, and a tour of duty in Gaza, the West Bank, or Lebanon.

From the looks of it, the Armored School has everything a soldier might need. There’s a weight room, a canteen, a barbershop. There are even women—every now and then, a female soldier wanders into our bunk to check up on us and chat. The only thing missing are adults. I keep looking for some kind of authority figure, maybe a general with a chest full of ribbons, a clipboard in his hand, and a whistle around his neck—I imagine him looking like a camp director—someone who’s unequivocally in charge of the commanders, who are all nineteen and twenty years of age. But there is no such authority figure to be seen. Even the officers, designated with a silver bar or two on their shoulders, are a mere twenty-one years old. What’s clear is that I’m the oldest one here by a long shot—a proposition I find unnerving. In fact, although I’ve dreamed of serving in the Israeli Army since I was seventeen, I am, at the moment, shit scared.

A dark-skinned kid with black hair and long eyelashes shoves a piece of paper under my nose. “Ata po?” he says in Hebrew. “Is your name on this list?”

I take the paper. “What is this?”

“The Guard Duty List.”

I check the page. “No.”

“Then you’re guarding,” he says.

“Guarding what?”

“The bunk.”

“How do I guard the bunk?” I’ve got no rifle, no bayonet. Just a pocket notebook and a pen.

“How should I know?” he says with a shrug. “Just walk back and forth through the courtyard. Make sure no one goes in our rooms except guys from our platoon.”

“How do I know who’s in our platoon?” I say.

He puts a hand on my shoulder. “Look. Some sergeant told me to post a guard in the bunk. So just guard. Beseder? ”

Since I don’t have a choice, I pace the open-air courtyard in the middle of the two-story concrete bunk and try my best to look important.

At one end of the courtyard is an orange pay phone; at the other, the showers and latrine. Our bedrooms line the courtyard, lengthwise, three per side. At this particular moment, the bunk is a circus. Eighteen-year-old Israeli boys chase each other in and out of doorways, whooping and hollering like freshmen on the first night of college. Rock music blares from a boom box. In the corner near the bathroom, twenty soldiers sit in a clump and swig Coke from one-liter bottles while one of them strums a guitar. Next to them, two guys kick a soccer ball back and forth as hard as possible, nailing the occasional passerby in the head. Everyone looks alike, as if we’re genetic mutations of the same creature—a creature with closely cropped hair and Semitic features in a starchy green uniform two sizes too big.

As I watch my new platoon mates yelp and bounce off the walls like wild monkeys, I get the sick feeling that this is all a big mistake. I always thought it’d be so cool to be a gun-toting Israeli soldier. But now that I’ve done it, it’s obvious I have no business being here. I look at their faces, which are so foreign, and I wonder if I will ever know them. I have this sinking feeling I will spend this year as the outsider of the platoon, alone, constantly reminding people of my name. It’s like Dorit said: these Israeli kids will eat me alive. If I wanted to help Israel, I should’ve mailed a check to the Jewish Federation like everyone else.

As I wander back and forth, I notice two posters on the wall by the pay phone. The first poster says, in big Hebrew letters

Below the headline is a photo of masked Hamas gunmen, rifles raised high in the air. Some of the gunmen hold children dressed in black headbands with red tubes taped to their chests, like kiddie suicide bombers. Together, fathers and children burn an Israeli flag.

I’ve seen this kind of scary photo before—usually in ads for pro-Israel organizations that try to raise money by scaring the bejesus out of American Jews. In the past, I dismissed photos like this as propaganda. But today, I have a different thought:

Holy shit—these people want to kill me.

The second poster is titled

I lean in for a closer look. The poster is a crude, hand-drawn sketch of a Lebanese hillside. In the picture, three Hezbollah guerrillas set booby traps under a full moon. The guerrillas have dark skin and beards. They wear sneakers, white T-shirts, and jeans. One guerrilla stuffs dynamite into a fake rock. A few yards away, his buddy covers a land mine with a branch. The third guy holds a remote control device that, I suppose, will blow up the explosives in the rock.

I peer at the three guerrillas. In their sneakers and jeans, they look more like high school riffraff than enemies of the Jewish state. I try to imagine what it’s like in that nightmare called Lebanon, where monsters in T-shirts and jeans set booby traps by the light of the moon. Suddenly, I’m overcome with a fresh wave of fear. It hits me that my stint in the Israeli Army isn’t just some crazy adventure. It’s real.

I’m jolted from my reverie by frantic shouts of “Meesdar!”

Meesdar means “Formation.” It’s a chain reaction: one soldier shouts “Meesdar!” and sprints to the courtyard, then the few who heard him all shout “Meesdar!” and sprint to the courtyard, and so on, until every soldier in the platoon is running hysterically, like a pack of headless chickens, frantically shouting “Meesdar! Meesdar!” in each other’s faces, while they begin the impossible task of lining up in formation.

Lining up in formation should be simple. All we have to do is stand in three parallel rows:

If the number of soldiers present is not divisible by three and there are, consequently, one or two leftovers, the extra soldier(s) stand(s) in the second to last column on the left:

Easy, right?

Actually, it’s impossible. Because in our haste to line up quickly, we behave like morons. Five soldiers cram into the same column instead of just moving over to a different column in the formation. Guys fight for the right to stand in one spot instead of another as if their very lives depend on where they stand. This cramming and pushing leads to name-calling and a barrage of insults concerning one another’s mothers’ vaginas, and all while three angry sergeants stand off to the side and shake their heads at our incompetence.

We, the soldiers of Platoon Two, Company B, Battalion 71 of the 188th Armored Brigade, will train together for the next seven months. These are the comrades with whom I’ll learn to survive under the bleakest of conditions. It is for these brothers in arms that I may one day sacrifice my life. For the moment, however, we kick and whine like angry dogs.

“Nu, zuz, ya hatichat hara! Move over, you piece of shit!”