The Two Week Adventure

This post has been submitted to the Write-Away Contest at Michele Mitchell's blog. This month's theme is Adventures.



For somebody who was brought up to wear a sweater in fifty degree heat and was handed an article on lung cancer at the age of thirteen , I never thought that I would find myself in the middle of the Arava desert in Israel at the age of eighteen full clad in a soldier's uniform trying to shoot the bull's eye.

My mom would never know up until this day, that the Greenwich Village spoiled city girl was on the adventure of a lifetime while learning Hebrew, running around picking smelly tomatoes from an abandoned airfield, raising and carrying Russian girls who knew no English on a stretcher while running with two M-16's on her back on a nineteen kilometer race so as to qualify for an officer's course. Every picture I sent back home seemed to reverberate the last smile: "yes, I'm having a good time and yes, don't worry."

She thought I was on one of those, you know, experience tours for young teens who want to experience Israel in two weeks. Well at least, that's what I told her. In 1990.

Truthfully, I thought I would do like most Americans my age. I would do my little 'charity work' serving in the Israeli army and come back home. After all mom had said, an education is your future. Well, it would take me many hikes through the Golan heights and alongside the Dea Sea to find my Israeli identity. And yes, I'm still looking for it.

I have said "pay attention" in Hebrew to many soldiers more times than I choose to remember. I have been in Gaza Strip more times than I care to tell about it. I have witnessed quite a few deaths and injuries than I care to write. But my two year old redhead thinks it is fun to answer me in English when I say 'pay attention' as he throws pebbles in the Jordan River.

Many runs and hikes later, my hands have written a good many letters about that my experiences as a soldier both from both left (English) and right (Hebrew). The words of what became a 'two week adventure' bypass what language and side you are from from.

But of course, it depends on which way you choose to live your life.