Done.

2 teams. 1 surgery. Kilos gained. Kilos lost. Thousands of kilometers walked. Hundreds of kilos carried. Countless bullets fired. Endless sleepless nights. This has been my life for the past 1 year and 7 months. I am proud to stay after occasionally bleeding, profuse, constant sweating, and admittedly there was some crying too, I have finished my training.

I haven’t written for a long time and there is too much to tell so I’ll try to boil it down. Two weeks ago I had my final Krav Maga session. This basically meant we were woken from sleep with screams, had to quickly change into our Krav Maga shirts and shoes, and sprint to the gym. The entire session was dedicated beating each other up. You wear a sort of protective helmet, a chest pad, and boxing gloves. You take turns holding your hands above your head, while your partner hits you as hard as he can for thirty seconds. Unfortunately I was paired with our biggest kid, about 210 pounds of muscle. Let’s say when it was my turn to hit him back I couldn’t even breathe so he didn’t feel too much. The main part of the session has everyone standing in a circle, music blasting, and then the instructor calls one person in at a time for a few sessions. He then sends in one, two maybe even three opponents on him at once, their goal to beat the shit out of him his goal to survive to the next round. After twenty seconds you are completely gasses and just try not to die. You can see some clips of the session in the YouTube link at the end. I even make an appearance at 4:03, I’m the one on the right in the beginning with the black/green belt. At the end of the session the instructors introduced themselves and spoke to us like human beings for the first time, and then they put on a helmet, and pads, and we got to give them a taste of their own medicine.

The fifth to last week and the last week of training were very similar, so I’ll merge the two. The idea of these two weeks is to simulate war in the most extreme sense. Each soldier carries tons of gear in his pack, each one according to how much he weighs. Since I am one of the bigger guys, fittingly I carry basically the heaviest pack. Unfortunately every time i try to remind them that i had surgery a few months ago, they say everything will be okay and assign me another item to put in my bag. Both weeks all of my gear together weighed over 100 pounds. The weeks are basically structured like this. You walk with your team, complete all sorts of assignments along the way, conquering houses, capturing hilltops, valleys, shooting drills, stretcher marches, the possibilities are endless. The real difficulties of these weeks are the lack of sleep and food. You do not sleep. Period. It is hard to understand how this is possible if you’ve never not slept for a week, but apparently its possible. This means you are always in a weird state of not really awake but not asleep either. There can be fifteen minutes at a time when you suddenly trip on a rock, and realize you have been sleep walking for the past mile. In terms of food, the rations are 4 kabanos and 6-8 hot dog buns per 24 hours. You can also bring nuts, dry fruits, energy bars, even candy, depending on how much you want to carry. Kabanos are like dry hot dogs, sort of like Slim Jims. They are made from the unspoken, crunchy, otherwise inedible parts of animals. They are very high in fat and I guess they have some protein in theory. The problem is that they cause serious heart burn and the gross fatty taste sits in your throat the whole week. Because of this, and because I didn’t feel well the whole week, I really only ate about 1 dry sausage and 1-2 buns per day, and some trail mix. The first week I lost 8 pounds, and this past week I lost 10 pounds. And a week isn’t even 7 days. It’s really from Sunday afternoon to Thursday morning, around 80 hours. However, I believe some of the weight loss is also from dehydration.

Both weeks presented serious problems for me. The first week on the last day around 2 PM, we continued to march on despite the serious heat. The unit had received special approval to continue training no matter what the weather was like. I guess I was seriously dehydrated and probably overheated, because the next thing I remembered was waking up in the military ambulance. My friends told me I passed out. They stripped off my clothes and poured lots of water on me, to try to cool down my body, and took my temperature. They put an IV in my arm, and kept trying to wake me up but I didn’t respond. Then apparently all my muscles started cramping and i was shaking, so they quickly put me on a stretcher and put my in the ambulance, where I slowly woke up. I spent the night sleeping and drinking water, and felt like new the next day. Since it was near the end of the week, I didn’t participate in that final night, which I felt pretty bad about not being with my team.

This past week I also felt very dehydrated the whole time and had to stop a few times but I didn’t stop. The main issue was my muscles. Every step I took the muscles in my legs would cramp and spasm uncontrollably. It was incredibly painful but I didn’t have a choice other than to keep going. 

Finally we reached the base of the final mountain. Usually the older soldiers who have finished training come to help you up the mountain. Our commanders told us there was a problem and they couldn’t. So we started the climb without them. Suddenly from around the corner fifty guys came sprinting screaming throwing smoke grenades. We sprinted the whole way up the mountain which was extremely steep all while smoke grenades were going off  around us. I could barely move and constantly thought I was going to faint. I had two people pulling me and one pushing. Finally I reached the top and I was done. They passed around  cigarettes and cigars and snacks and soda and we went crazy, singing dancing screaming. We had done it. All that training finally culminating in one moment. I couldn’t believe I have actually reached the end after so much struggles and doubts. We were given our pins and were officially fighters. At the end of the video there is is clip of the climb. 

There was an official ceremony later that day, and lots of people came to support which was awesome. If you asked me two years ago I would never have guessed this is where I’d be now. I leaned a lot about my self and pushed myself way way past my physical, mental, and emotional limits. It is undoubtably the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. There were times where I wanted to and could have quit but I didn’t. I didn’t know I could do it but I proved to myself and I am very proud. 

Now I get to go back to my team! I’m really excited to be reunited with my guys. We have a couple month of unit wide training before we go up to our next deployment. And hopefully I’ll get to fly home for a nice break soon. 

Tired, ten pounds lighter, proud, and with a big silver pin on my chest, 

  Shaul

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=heqT3QdUtZs#