Second day at Gadna Writer: Simon Italiannder

This morning began with a rather “rude” awakening at 5:40 A.M. from an angry commander with an M-16 around his shoulder. Today is the day we've all been aching for. The last 36 hours have been spent preparing ourselves to fire an M-16 gun. After going through the morning routine of making a “chet” (a formation that looks like the hebrew letter chet) and doing our chores, we packed up breakfast and got on the bus headed for the firing range. As usual, we spent another hour reviewing everything we'd learned and eating breakfast. Then, after what seemed like a few hours, it was my groups turn to shoot. Next thing I know I was firing away at a cardboard man, aiming for his legs. With each shot, the kickback of the gun jabbed me in the shoulder and the bullet shell flew into my face. My eleven bullets were all unloaded within a minute. I darted to fetch my target from the cardboard man in the distance, and I was fairly impressed to see that almost all of my bullets hit the target!

For the next activity, we made our way to a nearby park/desert field. We all broke into our

tzevets (groups) and we learned how to behave when training off of an army base; for instance, we cannot call our commander “commander” because if someone is spying, we don't want to reveal who is our leader. Our commander taught us some crawling techniques and we played a game to test our stealthiness. We then learned how to camouflage ourselves using dirt. By this time, we were all so tired, so we loaded onto the bus and got back to base just in time for lunch.

The rest of the day was spent doing discussion activities. I crawled into my sleeping bag that night, and fell asleep, completely satisfied.