Leave to live by no man's leave
[The title of this post is taken from a poem by Kipling The Old Issue.]
I've alluded in the past for a Big Day coming. It had come today!
Today, 28/07/2005 @ 11:03 AM I was released from the IDF after four years of service.
This was one hell of a good day, to say the least. I'm now officially a
mere citizen of Israel. The last four years have been... interesting.
I have served exclusively in military prisons, starting as a warder in
Prison 6, which is a prison for holding IDF soldiers. The work load was
crazy (19 hours a day was the norm) and the work wasn't fun. I met a
lot of people that I wouldn't have met otherwise, I got to help to some
of them, had two separate attempts by drug dealers (two different
ones) to have a contract (the fatal kind) on me. I got a lot of
people skill (mostly by necessity) and an aversion to Noblesse, which is the cigarette that the prisoners smoke.
Then I went for officers training and had the time of my life during
Bahad 1 (the training base for officers in the IDF). I had a lot of
really good people with me and I got to work on interesting problems
(mostly unrelated to what I would do, but it's good to know that I can
conquer the mountain if I have to.).
Afterward it was a post
in the biggest prison in the Middle East. This time it was a
prison for Palestinians terrorists, the place is called Qteziot, but
most of the foreign media call it Ansar 3. I was quite shock to find
out just how many horror stories there are about the prison on the net
(most of it is wrong in so many levels I couldn't formulate a rebuttal
even if I was allowed to).
The first thing I did when I got
to Qteziot was to get personally acquainted with each of the ~500
prisoners that I was in charge of, which is something that I truly
never want to do again. As a plain soldier I always thought that
officers had the easy life, since they didn't deal with all the boring
/ ugly / annoying stuff, but for the first six months as an officer I
worked much harder then I ever worked as a soldier. I had a lot of fun,
and it was a good place to be in. The prison had just started to get
established and I was able to influence quite a bit there (in fact, I
designed the prison's logo, which caused a redesign in the logos of all
the military prisons in Israel :-D ).
I served there just under
two years, first as a Company Commander's Second (probably bad
translation of the term), then as the prison's Operations Officer. I
was also in charge of (the literal translation is Escorts Officer,
which sound just as bad in Hebrew as it is in English) of securely
transporting terrorists to courts, hospitals and other prisons. Near
the end I was the prison's Instruction Officer, which allowed me to
create some spectacularly bad Power Point presentations and some really
cool movies ( in Windows Movie Maker, no less :-) ). At that point I
was getting sick of the prison, there were quite a few personal
changes, and I didn't like the atmosphere in the place so I had a stint
in instruction soldiers fresh off Basic Training for about a month.
My new position was a prison's commander near Jenin. It is a small
prison, which means that I was in charge of pretty much everything. The
good side was that I was free to do mostly as I pleased, but the flip
side was that I also had to handle a lot of the routine stuff myself.
I'm not sure if it's good or bad that I couldn't blog about that time.
Although what I'd to say would be of interest to very
few. Nevertheless, it would have felt better to tell someone
all those strange stories. Take for example the mess that crazy inmate
in cell #3 did when he set fire to the cell because he wanted a bottle
of coke (the drink, not the drug), or what happened when the transport
to the asylum got to a completely different prison. Oh the
other hand, maybe it's better that I didn't post those things, they are
mostly insider's jokes. And I don't suppose that anyone who read this
blog has spend any time working at a prison.
During the time I was in the army I had to deal with the strangest situations. What do you do when a soldier hands you a live scorpion as a parting gift, for instance? That is not something that Miss Manners ever covered, I bet. :-)
Four years have passed, I'm now a part of the reserve army of the IDF
(and likely would continue serving in prisons when on reserve duty :-(
), looking back, it was interesting at times, often frustrating and
hard, almost always the situation was when I had to a choice between
what I was supposed to do and what I wanted to do. I got to discuss
politics with a panel that included the Islamic Jihad, the
Hamas and the PLO (the three main terrorists organizations) with
side comments from the Democratic Front and the Communist Front (the
two minor terrorists organization, which are even more fanatics than
the rest, if this is possible). That was a good way to pass the night
shits; we usually managed to resolve all the problems in a reasonable
manner and reach world peace by 4:10 AM, by which time we had to stop
so they could pray.
I was part of the Derech Chadasha (New
Path) operation, during the Hudna's days (when it seemed that there
might be peace in the Middle East), as Israel released close to three
hundred prisoners, all of them have signed a declaration saying that
they will not deal with Terror again. Just over a month later, two bombings, in Tzriffin and Jerusalem both
of them were released in Derech Chadasha. It was this, among many other
things, that made serving there so hard. On the one hand you are
required to provide the prisoners with proper treatment and on the
other hand... you listen to the news and see a bombing in Jerusalem and
hear them celebrating. And that is in addition to the usual conflict of
being in a position where you need to take care of people who would truly like to kill you.
I'm glad beyond words that I've finished with all of this.
I look back, and four years have passed. I'm not the same man I was
when I entered the army. I grew, I learned (mostly thing I didn't want
to know), I experienced both joy and sadness, had successes and
failures. I wouldn't repeat it for anything, yet I wouldn't give up the
experience for the world. How did a geek like me ended up being in such
a place, I truly cannot say.
I remember that on the first few days of my last post I was in an interview with my commander and he mentioned that no one
have ever finished such a post without at least a single criminal
investigation. Talk about encouragement. I was the first to manage
to do that. Thinking about it, I never once was on trial (and in this
army, this means a lot, they put you to trail for losing a magazine).
I'm free to do as I please now, the Army's Phone (which they call VPN,
for some reason) is no longer. I will not get calls in the middle of
the night, or Friday's Shabbat Supper about whatever strange thing this
or that prisoner did which require my personal attention. I will wake
up in Sunday and I'll not have to go back to prison. I can now
leave by no man's leave, underneath the law. Time to start a new life.
Most soldiers go to a trip abroad when they are released from the army,
usually to the Far East, it's called "To Sit Under A Mushroom" and
include high levels of alcohol and drugs and low level of personal
hygiene. There is a nice song about such a boy, called: "Moshe, You're
Not A Hedgehog." I've considered it carefully and decided that I've
objections on several levels to that, so I'll pass.
Now I need to get a job and start living the life where you get up in the morning and you got a choice at what you wear.