Game of silence, p.2
Game of Silence, page 2
When he’d finished, he went over to get a bar stool that he carried from the front section of the shack, sat in front of me, and while looking straight at me, he inhaled deeply, until he finally blurted out: “When the waves get stronger, the strong get revealed.” And added after a short delay, allowing the words to sink in: “it’s all in your head.”
I sat up in the hammock stifling a cry of pain.
“This look you have right now on your face is the kind I got to see only twice in my life up until now,” he continued. “The other person who had this look became one of the best combat soldiers and commanders in the Navy commando. I have been around here for the past forty years; I have seen it all.”
“And who was the first?” I was curious.
“Someone you probably know,” his eyes squinted in a mysterious smile. Under his thick, black hair, which was surprising given his age, a pair of piercing hazel eyes which projected internal strength looked at me.
“Really?! Who?” I asked surprised, “and what do you see in this look?”
He smiled at me pensively, and with his eyes wandering away from me towards the horizon, he said: “Well, what you are about to hear, I have told no one since the debriefing that took place after the operation. But it would seem that the timing calls for it.”
He began telling me his life story.
He graduated from the training course with honors, and as such he was selected to be in the raiders’ unit – the Navy commando elite unit. There he accumulated a great deal of operational experience, and when he returned from the officers’ course, he commanded a squad in the unit. Omer, his friend who was like a brother to him, was his deputy.
During the ‘War of Attrition’, after the Egyptians struck Israeli targets along the canal, his team was selected to lead a famous raid, one that every combat soldier in the IDF was familiar with, on the Island of Green – A coral island that had an old British fortress standing on it. The fortress controlled a strategic point at the entrance to the Suez Canal, which was Egypt’s most important marine asset.
He described the long days of preparing for battle, the dives in a group of twenty raiders, the training of the “pigs” squad of the holding force, the long dive which was delayed on the way to its destination due to a strong and unpredictable current, in pitch darkness, and how they almost missed the zero-hour, cutting it so close they nearly aborted the entire operation.
After he described in length the raid from the sea to their destination, he told of how they took over the stronghold’s roof which enabled a break-in point for the forces coming from the sea. The more he dove into the story, the more his eyes gleamed as they filled with a spark of sadness and joy simultaneously, in a kind of painful longing.
I was riveted. For a few moments I forgot that I was lying in a hammock in front of a view of the bay.
The story of the battle that took place there against one hundred fortified Egyptians behind machine gun stances caused my hair to stand on end.
He then suddenly stopped and became silent. His strong gaze weakened for a moment, after which he pinned his look to the ground for a long while. “One of the Egyptian soldiers who was hiding,” he continued, “threw a grenade at our squad. Omer didn’t think twice. He jumped on top of the grenade and even before anyone could figure out what was happening – He was killed instantly. Omer saved my life. In fact, he saved the lives of all the soldiers in our squad. But there was no time to dwell on it. This same terrifying fear, in the literal sense of the word, is what urges you to become the most sophisticated machine in existence. This is what they have toughened you up for.”
He went on to describe how he operated instinctively, killing the Egyptian standing next to them, and going on to clear the target by throwing a grenade toward the machine-gun stance next to him. About having returned without Omer, he did not elaborate.
“We had no time to mourn. The ‘War of Attrition’ left the feeling in the air that any day could turn into an all-out war. Immediately after the funeral, we returned for a briefing prior to our next operation in Syria. The State of Israel had to send a message to the Syrians and Egyptians that they will not benefit from messing with it.”
He said the words with a veiled gaze filled with rage, and it was quite evident that for a moment, he was pulled back into that period of time.
“It was the lesson that we were assigned to teach. We felt that the security of the entire country was on our shoulders. There is no room for weakness. It’s a war of survival, of to be or cease to exist.” He took a deep breath in, looked straight at me, and continued. “The incessant activities while fighting a life-threatening battle on a daily basis, became routine. The routine of death. And when the bullets are whistling around, you have no time for mourning. But it didn’t take long to affect me. And when it did, it caught me off guard.
“A few months later, when I was discharged from the army, all of a sudden I was hit with a desolate emptiness. It was a sharp transition from a daily game of roulette with death to complete freedom. I had time to think which now allowed for the voices to come out. Thoughts from the depths of consciousness, which emerged at the most unexpected times. The pain was of a different kind. The kind I wasn’t able to contain, and certainly didn’t know how to handle, so I suppressed it. I felt the intense need to disengage, disappear, and wander.
“Without saying goodbye to anyone, I got on a plane and joined a friend from the unit who was discharged before me and who offered me to join a team of divers on an oil rig. I must have missed doing the salsa with death, only this time, I’d do it a little differently,” He laughed out loud.
For six months I worked on an oil rig in the Northern Sea, and in a few months I became the senior diver,” the Malabi man continued his story. “Impossible repairs in the deep were my specialty. And when the voices returned, I continued on my journey. I had to roam and suppress everything in order to survive – no sadness, no joy, no longing, no love.”
After a while he joined a salmon fishing boat, and following that he hitchhiked for a month up to Texas, where he worked as a cattle driver from the southern plains to the green pastures. He roamed throughout the southern United States and the Mid-West, wearing himself out amongst thousands of cattle heads in a dream-crushing ride.
There were three years in which he moved between islands in the Eastern Pacific, lived in Papua New Guinea for a year and a half with the Jahai tribe, which had accepted him as one of their own. He became a hunter, lived in a wooden hut covered with coconut palms and surrounded by banana trees for beauty, and when his inner voice called out to him to continue – he migrated with the spirits of the ancient gods to the east, crossed the Atlantic Ocean and settled in the Fernando de Noronha Island in Northern Brazil, together with Luciana – a mulatto beauty.
Luciana adored him. She wrapped him with love, which healed old scabs. For the first time it seemed that something in the roughness of his heart had cracked. A warm ray which came from her ocean of love, managed to penetrate the walls of silence. He suddenly began to feel, and to dream without fear.
But then, for the first time, Omer came to him in his dream. It was so real, as if he was with him. He could truly feel Omer, and talked to him about his guilt, of how he couldn’t save him, how he failed to see the Egyptian there in the search, how he continued living while his friend was already dead. However, Omer was peaceful and smiling. He hugged him with an aura of love and whispered: “It’s all in your head. Go on, finish for me all that I wasn’t able to do, we will meet in the next reincarnation,” and then vanished.
When he awoke from his dream, he felt he was being filled with an inner strength he never experienced before. For years he wandered, disconnected, in a world where schedules are set by the celestial bodies in the sky. At that moment he remembered that in a week’s time, Omer’s fifth anniversary of his passing will take place.
He didn’t wait for dawn to break. Right there and then he packed his things and set out on his way, without even saying goodbye to his Brazilian lover. At the end of the memorial service, all his friends from the unit he hadn’t seen in years went to Omer’s parents’ house, to reminisce.
He stopped and filled his lungs with air. “And then she walked into the yard wearing a simple pair of jeans and a white t-shirt,” he described with a glimmer of light in his eyes. “With radiant eyes she came to me, for a hug that was of complete longing. It was Meirav, Omer’s girlfriend. Up until that moment I had forgotten about her existence.
“At the end of the evening we drove to the sea, to Omer’s secret beach; the one at the foot of a cliff on the Mediterranean coastal plain. Meirav told me about the years she spent escaping from the memories, her stay in the monasteries of Northern Thailand and Tibet — attempting to find inner peace, searching to heal her soul, looking for the enlightenment that was so late to arrive. And then a month ago, unexpectedly, she decided it was time to return to Israel, for the memorial service. By the end of the night, I understood everything.”
“What? What do you mean?” I asked as if waking from a dream.
He smiled and said that on that evening, when Meirav’s hand stroked him, the magic was created, and in place of the infinite sadness and suppression – a new love was born. A love that proceeded to marriage, three children and six grandchildren.
“Each of us has a life path we must follow during this reincarnation. Meirav was the most important part on my path to fulfillment,” he said.
And even before he managed to finish the last sentence, a bunch of barefooted sunburnt lads emerged from the nearby dune.
“Grandpa,” one of the boys called, “the guys are all here for a Malabi.”
“Say hello,” he told me, “This is my grandson,” as he immediately turned to service the gang.
“Hi,” I said to them with a smile now newly recharged with energy as I rose from the hammock.
He turned to me, winked, and pointed at his temple as if to silence a secret. “It’s all in your head,” his words echoed within.
I lifted the backpack over my shoulder, and as I passed the shack, signaling goodbye to him, I heard him call out to his grandson: “Omeriko, lots of coconut?”
I managed to still see him pouring from the red concentrate liquid winking at me with his bright smile, and that was the moment I realized: No matter what – I will complete the training course. After all, “it’s all in my head.”
There are days when you realize that your life is changing. That Friday was such a day.
2.
Annihilate Mr. Cuddles
The training course for a combat soldier was designed to forge the body, but especially the mind.
In hindsight, I understand there was no way to avoid the abuse we endured. It was meant to teach us that there was only one way to go – to complete our task at any cost. In fact, we learned to embrace the pain a little morbidly, or perhaps even love it. The understanding that failure simply wasn’t an option was etched into physical aggressiveness.
We learned to train our consciousness to annihilate Mr. Cuddles – that same part in us that is responsible for everything that is fun, soft, and pleasant; the part in our soul that feels. There is no room for a pampered soul in a Sisyphean life.
The reality they have created for us left us no choice but to turn into a type of machine, which despite looking completely human on the outside, is still a machine. A war machine, which was programmed to operate successfully in the various and strange assignments they gave us, without asking questions, under pressure, being exhausted, starving, in the cold and damp. To operate under any condition that stretches the limits of the body. And we kept searching for this unknown borderline at all times.
In order to survive the training course, we had to annihilate Mr. Cuddles, and the sooner the better.
Now I understand, that in order to teach your mind to annihilate Mr. Cuddles, you need to bring your body to the brink of exhaustion. A threshold which brings up thoughts of weakness, the kind that make you believe that that’s it, no more, the body simply can’t take it. Only then you discover that it is possible. Only then you realize that the limitation is in fact in your head. Only then you understand that there is really no limit to what you are capable of.
It is also the moment you become a “believer”. First of all you believe in yourself. The longer the training course lasts, the less the number of people around you, and you become a devout believer, until eventually you are turned into a true zealot. A fanatical believer in the religion of the kalash-(nikov). There’s no need to especially baptize you to become a member of this religion – you do it anyway, every day, all day, and all year round.
It is very hard to be accepted into this religion, but extremely easy to leave it. True believers will never convert to another faith.
Some survive it, but their bodies don’t. A significant number of the people who I was sure would finish the course, fell apart in the race for the wings.
We remained nineteen people out of sixty eight who started the course, out of thousands that wanted to get in.
There’s a sense of satisfaction filled with self-pride in it, a feeling that comes as a done deal together with the vanity of being twenty years old and which causes you to feel invincible, tough and strong. After what I have been through – don’t mess with me, it will be a pity. Just like in the “Mind Church’s” (Knesiat Ha’sechel) song, “nothing can harm me, nothing, not a woman, not a terrorist’s bullet, nothing. This I swore to my brother, sister, parents…” It’s a pity though that whoever wrote this song died during his military service. You suppress this part, or annihilate it along with Mr. Cuddles.
The day before the graduation ceremony, I was called into the office of Tamir, my instructor in the training course, for a summary talk.
When I entered, he smiled at me, got up and while giving me a strong pat on my back, he commanded: “Sit!”
Tamir let me know he recommended me for an “outstanding course graduate” merit, and that should the commander of the school for combat soldiers decide that I am one of two “outstanding course graduates” – I would be able to choose my position from a range of options in the various divisions. If not, they could choose for me.
I was surprised. Indeed all I had wanted was to survive training and finish the course. I never thought I would be a candidate for an outstanding cadet, and in my view, the friends who went through this course with me were just as worthy as me. I stood in front of him with thankful eyes, and while attempting to hide a smile of embarrassment, he reached out to my neck, grabbed on tight and shook it in a friendly gesture laughing: “Go on, get out of my sight.”
“Done,” I replied and went out. In the army you don’t say thank you.
I didn’t quite know how to respond to his attitude. I hadn’t yet managed to take in the transition from the cadet’s fear of the commander during the course, to the breaking of distance which accompanies the end of the training course.
At nine in the morning the next day, we all gathered in the briefing room for our doomsday talk. Almost two years of grueling training had now come to an end, all drained into this moment. The commander of the school for combat soldiers walked into the room holding the fateful list, while we all sat in silent anticipation.
The physical pain I had endured during the training course could not be compared to the stab I felt in my ribs at that moment, when I internalized that soon they will announce the names of the outstanding officers, and we would be assigned to the various teams as sailors, divers, or raiders.
It was clear that everyone wanted to be part of the raiders’ troops. Even those who said they prefer to be the ones sailing the boats. Being a raider – the combat soldier who comes out of the sea to execute an elimination mission – was considered like an F-16 pilot. And of course it sounds better than being a mere cargo pilot.
“Nir Avriel!” He called out the first name on the list.
Nir stood up and saluted: “Yes, Sir!”
“You are going to the divers’ unit, God speed.”
Nir sat down, and the school’s commander kept reading the names of seven more friends. Until he got to me.
“Yanai Levin!”
I rose with a sealed expression and without batting an eye. My heart was exploding on the inside. “Yes, Sir!” I replied.
“God speed. Have you thought about the unit you want to be in?”
“In the raiders, Sir!” I answered without hesitating, struggling to conquer a smile.
He looked at the list he was holding again as if trying to check something. When he lifted his eyes from the list, he gave me a concerned look, and gestured with his hand as if saying “I am sorry”.
I froze. I felt the blood draining from my face and going down to my legs. He waited for another second before smiling a comforting smile at me saying: “Congratulations. You got it. Sit down.”
I sat down with a sigh of relief to the sound of my mates laughing, trying in vain to maintain a sealed expression. I smiled in relief, but it was accompanied by a slight disappointment. Since Tamir told me about selecting me, I had hoped that at this stage the school’s commander will name me as one of the two “outstanding course graduates”.
However, the commander continued and called: “Yoav Michaeli!”
Yoav got up.
“Yoav, you are an outstanding course graduate. God Speed!” Said the commander of the school, and immediately asked him the privileged question reserved only for the outstanding graduate: “So what about you?”
“I’m with him,” replied Yoav with his smiling face which was his trademark, and pointed at me.
