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

A typical day of basic training goes something like this:

At 4 a.m., whoever’s guarding the bunk sticks his head into our bedrooms, flicks on the lights, and shouts, “ Boker tov , Platoon Two. Everyone up!” We respond by telling said guard to go fuck himself.

At 4:29, one of us notices it’s 4:29 and shouts, “ Yallah! Four twenty-nine! Formation!” We sprint to the courtyard, line up in three rows, and argue over our first dilemma of the day:

Sleeves up or sleeves down.

The rule is, we can wear our sleeves either rolled up, above the elbow, or down, buttoned at the wrists, as long as we all wear our sleeves the same way.

“Everyone! Quick! Sleeves down!” I shout. As platoon scribe, my job is to decide how we wear our sleeves.

“ Koos emok! It’s gonna be hot! Sleeves up!” someone shouts. As eighteen-year-old Israelis, their job is to challenge anyone who tells them what to do.

The sleeves argument lasts anywhere from two to four minutes. Then, it takes another minute for those with the wrong kinds of sleeves to fix them.

A little after 4:30, Sergeant Eran moseys into the courtyard and shouts, “ Nu? ”

“Staff Sergeant, can I please have an extension?” I say. As platoon scribe, it is my job to ask for extensions when we are not ready on time.

“You kidding me?” Sergeant Eran shouts in my face. “It’s four-thirty and you’re still buttoning your sleeves?” As commander, it is Sergeant Eran’s job to make me feel like a schmuck. “Yallah, Yoel. Give me the count.”

As platoon scribe, I am responsible for presenting an accurate count at every formation. The problem is, I can never figure out the count because I can’t keep track of the guys. The reason I can’t keep track of the guys is that they wander off without telling me where they’re going or when they’ll be back. Therefore, every formation is a crisis. Uzi wanders off to the infirmary. Tanenbaum’s in his bedroom, on hands and knees, looking for his boot. Doni’s asleep on the toilet, pants at his ankles. And I get blamed.

Our fathers are rabbis and plumbers, policemen and architects, deputy mayors and chemical engineers. Most of our fathers are living, Hayim’s father is dying, and Etai’s father died when Etai was three.

From 4:35 until 5:30, we mop the floor, scrub the sinks, flush the toilets, collect the trash, beat our mattresses with broomsticks, and fold our blankets into eighths. We shave. Then we sit in the courtyard, Indian style, and polish our boots.

“Shoe polish!” someone shouts.

Someone tosses him a tin of shoe polish.

“Hey, that’s my shoe polish!” shouts whoever’s shoe polish just got tossed.

Each of us has his own tin of shoe polish, but on any given morning, only five of us bring shoe polish to the courtyard. The rest of us assume someone else will bring shoe polish and leave our shoe polish in our kit bags.

After we polish our boots, we clean our rifles with screwdrivers, old toothbrushes, and WD-40 that we borrow from the same five guys who brought shoe polish.

In Platoon Two, Company B, we have four Drors, three Liors, two Omers, and a Tomer. We have a Nir, a D’vir, and a Ya’ir. We have a Liran, an Elran, two Erans, and a Ron. We have a Gidi, a Gadi, a Gil, and a Gal. We have a Chen Tal. We have a Tal Chen. We have an Oren Idan or an Idan Oren—I’m not sure which one’s his first name and which is his last.

We have a Pasha, a Nikolayev, a Vladimir, an Ofir, and a Clemente. They are the Russians.

We have two Moshes. Both Moshes are Yeshiva Boys and wear yarmulkes and have beards. Yaki, Yitzi, Hudi, Yudi, Gershon, Shimon, Shlomi, Shmuel, Uziel, and Issaschar also wear yarmulkes and have beards. I’m the only soldier with a biblical name who does not have a yarmulke and beard.

At 5:29, someone shouts, “ Koos-emok! It’s five-twenty-nine! Formation!” We throw together our guns—tubes into slots, pins into holes, spring into the buttstock, click-clack. In our bedrooms, we stuff underwear, socks, candy bar wrappers, and yarmulkes into kit bags and then scramble into formation while I try to figure out the count, which is altogether different from last hour’s count because more soldiers have wandered off to God Knows Where without telling me.

“Staff Sergeant, can I please have an extension?”

“You kidding me?”

“We’re missing one!” I shout to the platoon.

“Uri’s in the kitchen!” someone shouts.

“No, Uri’s in the infirmary!” shouts someone else.

“I’m right here!” shouts Uri from over by the pay phone, guarding.

Then we eat.

We are two-thirds Ashkenazi white guys with Eastern European roots. The rest of us are dark-skinned Sephardic guys with roots in Turkey, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, and Morocco.

Ashkenazi white guys live in North Tel Aviv, Haifa, and kibbutz settle ments in the North. Dark-skinned Sephardic guys live in South Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Lod, near the airport. The Russians live in the south, in crumbling development towns on the outskirts of Be’er Sheva. A few of the Yeshiva Boys live on settlements in the West Bank, deep in the Occupied Territories.

Lieutenant Yaron, Platoon Sergeant Guy, and Sergeants Eran, Eli, and Hanoch are all Ashkenazi white guys. Every officer I’ve seen so far at the Armored School is an Ashkenazi white guy. The highest-ranking dark-skinned guy I’ve seen at the Armored School is the barber.

When I asked Dror, an Ashkenazi kid and the smartest soldier in the platoon, why it is that I don’t see any brown-skinned officers, he explained that it was a result of complex sociological phenomena, including immigration patterns, weak school systems in traditionally Sephardic working-class neighborhoods, and a value system in certain dark-skinned communities that emphasizes religion over more contemporary fields of study, all of which lead to a self-perpetuating cycle of poverty and disproportionately, but undeniably, lower levels of achievement in dark-skinned Sephardic communities writ large.

When I asked my buddy Ido, who is Yemenite, dark, and a pretty sharp guy himself, the same question, he said, “Because this army is goddamn racist.”

Breakfast is cottage cheese, hard-boiled eggs, and tea. We eat breakfast on blue dairy-meal plates. While the rest of us eat, the Yeshiva Boys pray. I find this strange: I’d expected that in the Jewish army, observant Jews would be given time to pray. But that’s not how it works; if they want to pray, they have to skip a meal. It’s like they’re being penalized for being pious.

Since the Yeshiva Boys don’t get to eat breakfast, the rest of us are supposed to make them sandwiches. Usually, we forget. When this happens, the Yeshiva Boys go hungry until lunch and Staff Sergeant Eran calls us self-centered pigs. This, in turn, makes us angry with the Yeshiva Boys.

Who knew it would be so tough to be a Jew in the Jewish army?

On the third morning of basic training, we hike into the desert for a tank show. To pump us up and get us excited for our service in the Armored Corps, Colonel Avi, the commanding officer of 188th Armored Brigade, puts on a demonstration of our tank, the Merkava 3 Baz.

We march into the desert with Platoons One and Three until we reach metal bleachers set up on a cliff. Below us, in the valley, a Merkava battle tank sits with its engine idling.

Colonel Avi, a stocky officer with clipped gray hair, peps us.

“Tank soldiers! Welcome to the Armored Corps of the Israel Defense Forces. By show of hands, how many of you requested to serve in Armored?”

Only six of us raise our hands.

Problem One: nobody wants Tanks. Unlike paratroopers and navy SEALS, who compete for coveted spots in their elite units, we tank soldiers don’t request Armored so much as end up here. We go to Armored because we have flat feet, heart murmurs, and asthma, or because the more popular units are full. In fact, the only guys in my platoon who asked for Armored are the ones whose fathers or brothers were tank soldiers before them.