BY MICHAEL RIPSTEIN
In 20 years of military service, I thought I’d seen all the crappy training camps the Israeli army had to offer. But there I was, early one morning last spring, walking from the glorified gravel pit that passed for a parking lot at the Southern Command training base, under the unforgiving Negev sun, beginning another reserve deployment in the Israel Defense Forces. And since I’d just passed my 40th birthday, the tour I was starting was quite possibly my last.
If it had been a normal Monday morning for me, I would have been checking emails, attending sales meetings, writing proposals, or doing any number of the activities associated with my job at a software company in the high-tech industrial park of Ranaana, north of Tel Aviv. On this day, however, I was clad in green, wiping the oil off my rifle, squaring away gear, and trudging off to some range to make sure that both man and machine were in functioning order. The smells of cordite, grease, and diesel fumes accompanied the switch—from citizen to soldier—which, despite having made it some dozen times in the last two decades, never ceased to amaze me. Read more »
