The homecoming

March 18, 2007 - 11:29 AM by David Brinn

The first thing parents of new soldiers realize when their child comes home for the first time is how much they can sleep!

That, and how much laundry can be generated by one generally clean and neat young girl.

sleep

We didn’t really get to see so much of her during her Friday afternoon to Sunday morning leave from basic training. Between the afternoon nap, going out with her friends Friday night, sleeping till 2pm on Shabbat, and going out on again on Saturday night, we were thrilled with taking her to the mall when Shabbat ended to stock her up on supplies to get her through the week.

She regaled us with stories about using her M-16, guarding in the towers till she and her comrades felt giddy and began singing songs and dancing to stay awake, coping with one psychotic fellow recruit who sounds like a combination of Paris Hilton and Max Klinger from MASH, and other tidbits which made me feel warm and fuzzy that I no longer have to deal with the mishigas of our military apparatus.

Stuff like her having to be at the Hadera train station this morning at 8:00 am – which meant she had to leave home at 5:30 to get the first bus to Jerusalem, another bus to Tel Aviv, and the train to Hadera.

I got a frantic call around 7:45 saying “I’m at Arlozoroff (bus/train station) but there’s no train station here, and I can’t find the bus to Hadera.”

“Um.. well, there is a train station there, just ask someone,” I responded.

“Nobody will help me,” she answered, her voice beginning to waver and I feared a repeat of her first day in the army call when she broke down in tears.

She called a while later, said she had run into some girls from her unit in the same situation, they had found the train and they were arriving in Hadera at around 9:30, four hours after she set off in the morning.

“Won’t you get in trouble being an hour and a half late?” I asked.

“Nah, there’s too many of us, they can’t punish all of us.”

Moral is, if you’re going to do something wrong, do it in numbers…

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