November 7, 2015 - Commander - Tze'elim, Israel

November 7th, 2015
Tze’elim, Israel

Hi,
“Hi Gad, listen it is Moshe from the Military reserve. We want you to be in the staff.”
It was a surprising call. I don’t know who is Moshe (latter on I realized it is Moshe Sokler, our platoon commander. Nobody uses private names in the army… ), It was a pretty quick call to convince me to another two weeks of reserve per a year (!), and who ever knows me from the military service know I am not a person to be a commander…
I was cleaning the house and didn’t real had time to talk so I ask for a couple of days to answer (later I learned that Moshe had to save his wife from a spider, that’s why he ended the call so fast ).
Two days later I get to the reserve as a soldier (driving an M113 APC. The day after I was a commander and the day after became the sergeant (our officer didn’t came, and the only other commander got injured and was sent home).
It was like 10 years ago – I became the insecure commander that don’t really know what to do and try to learn its way.
I really hope I could fix my ways, and I did a bit. Hope I will better commander next training
What really surprised me – was the stupid soldier.
See, each time you get a new group of soldiers (that were civilians 2 hours ago), there was the stupid one.
The one you look on, and say to yourself – “No way he is 18 years old, how could he finish high school!”.
Now we got a soldier and you think to yourself – “No way he is 24 years old, he passed the army, how could he still be so stupid?”