August 22, 2009
Because the world moves at turbo speed, it sometimes becomes difficult to even find time to breathe. My time in America flew and then I had to return from the dream life of vacation back to reality which is the army. No more waking up when I wanted to. No more eating what I wanted to when I wanted to. No more sleeping on a comfortable bed every night. I chose to make the transition fast in order to not allow myself second thoughts about the army thing, even though it didn’t really make a difference seeing that I had signed a two-year contract of sorts the October before. However, making a fast transition back into the army into an intense course, not just everyday training like I had done up until this point, changes the entire ballgame. This was going to be a commander’s course – a lot more was to be expected of me and it was going to be more challenging mentally and physically than ever before, with more responsibility being at the head of the new expectations.
I returned to base for the first time in a few weeks and it felt a little weird to be back but at the same time I was happy to see my friends again and tell them my “wild stories” as they called them from my time in the states. There wasn’t very much time for anything like that – the army doesn’t like to waste time, especially when they only have three months to train you to become a tank commander. We filled out all of our paperwork, learned the new rules for the course, and were off and rolling. The first two weeks were going to be just classes on the tank followed by a week of practical learning training about what we learned at a basic level, similar to what I had in basic training when I had 7 weeks of the tank driving course. The only difference was this was three weeks overall…on the entire tank…at a much higher level of learning because, let’s face it, knowing how to command a position and how to simply operate it at a simple level is very different. Talk about a two-week crash course in tanks that felt sometimes like it hit me head on like, well, a tank.
The classes started every day at 7:30 every morning and lasted until 10:00 every night, with an hour break for lunch and 30 minutes for dinner. And there wasn’t a theme of sorts to the day’s lessons – the material popped all over the place and didn’t focus on one position’s information. Let’s just say my brain was already exploding after one day’s worth of classes. And, in addition to the long day of classes, there was also nightly homework and a test every morning on everything that was learned the day before. Every night, the teachers, the girls who were specialized in different subjects, would come and help us with what we had learned. For me, this turned into almost a review in a private lesson format because of the amount of the information being thrown in our direction. Most people would finish all of their work by about 12 or 1 at night and head to bed. In case it wasn’t known, Hebrew is not my first language – therefore, it would take me much more time to not only finish the work, or even half of it. I averaged about three hours of sleep each night during the classes and I would go to sleep without having finished the work because, well, I knew I wouldn’t last on one hour of sleep.
Everyone was very helpful and really tried hard to make sure I understood what was going on. I even had two of my friends from my Garin who are tank instructors, Maor and Inbal (the latter actually taught one of my lessons), and this made things a lot easier. But changin the level of difficulty from almost impossible to very challenging doesn’t cause one to feel so confident in absorption of the material. I was receiving 50% and 60% on the tests – and let me say I was thrilled with myself. I was learning and could see it, and sure I wasn’t remembering everything but I was making progress. It was then I reminded myself that I just need to try my best and give it my all and that’s all anyone can ask of me, and the rest would work out. I also knew that once we left the classroom and got into the tanks and used our learning for practicality, I would start feeling more comfortable and I would be able to show that I knew what was going on and I wasn’t just some guy who didn’t understand anything.
The third week we finally left the classroom and went to start training and it was probably the happiest I had ever been to do something like this since starting the army. The commanders, or “gardeners” as they’re called in the course, were very surprised at how well I was doing, partly because during the lessons I was somewhat behind the other guys because of the language barrier. But I used the skills I had obtained throughout my service of watching really closely what to do and remembering what to say from when my friends would start their practicing and this is how I learned the best. I was even surprising myself with how well I did in certain things, specifically shooting from the tank for the first time and simply doing everything with the most energy (that I didn’t have) I could, such as the loading (which is all about will).
When it was all said and done, I felt like I had accomplished a lot in the first three weeks. However, this was the first step in what we were here to do and that was learning how to become tank commanders. What we had done up until this point was learning the other positions in the tank besides the commander. We were really just getting started and a lot lay ahead of us in terms of knowledge and training. It is somewhat humorous that within three weeks I was officially trained enough to be the other two positions in the tank when it had taken seven just to be a driver. That is a great picture of how the army works sometimes – they want to get their most bang for their buck and get the most results in the shortest amount of time possible. But from a basic standpoint, we all felt like within three weeks we were much more confident in what the tank can do and how we can use that knowledge to our advantage. We had passed this level and now it was on to the real deal – taking the reigns as the commander.
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