For girls, it’s two years. For boys, three.

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Welcome to mandatory military service in Israel.

 

Lee Alpert is a twenty-one-year-old Israeli living in Serra this year as a freshman. The past two years, she worked as a medic in the army.

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She loved it.

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Her unit, focused on combat field intelligence, was stationed in the north of Israel, near Golan Heights and pretty close to the Syrian border.

 

Unit

The tone was very different from the professional military a lot of people think of with the U.S. military, she says. Think of the girliest girl you can imagine, and the toughest boy and the loner kid, and they’re all required to serve. Together.

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While you can get out of the service for health issues, psychological reasons, or, for girls, if they marry, most people don’t. There’s quite a few misconceptions people have about possible positions in the military, Lee explains: it’s not all charging forward with a gun on attack.

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There are office jobs, where you sort papers all day. You can sleep in the field if you’d like, or be in combat. You could even be the person who turns the sprinklers on for the base, or sell candy in a military store.

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It’s a juxtaposition that sticks sharply in her mind: the military she served in was a bunch of eighteen-year-olds, but still…what everyone was doing was serious.

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Nostalgically, she says she misses it—but there were plenty of times when it was atrocious, too.

 

Lessons

If something didn’t work the way she wanted it to, Lee learned how to fight for herself. And while to some extent, enjoyment of her service depended on others, she definitely forged close friendships with people that could cover for each other.

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Military service is something so different from what she’s done before, and so different from anything she’ll do in the future.

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But she also believes it’s served her well.

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You do get close with people in your unit. Her last weekend of service, the people in her unit decided to remain on base with her, forfeiting their leave to go home. That meant they’d spend a consecutive month on base: but they’d do it for her.

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Some would cover her guards, or a friend would bring her breakfast, and she’d do the same. She got to meet and become close with people so different from you. And while that’s true in a lot of new and overwhelming circumstances, it was particularly true for Lee.

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Her experiences put things in perspective.

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As she’s come to Stanford, her experiences have put things in a bit of perspective. When she feels like crying over integrals in math, for example, she thinks back to a year ago: when she, gun strapped to her waist, was leaning over someone who had just came from the war front.

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It’s not like she doesn’t appreciate a nice bed and good food, but she can handle now being dirty and scarfing down what’s given. She’s done things that she never thought she could.

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Part of that is living in Israel itself, especially as a soldier: she tells me of course there’s a sort of existential fear, but if you live your life in that fear, you won’t or can’t do anything.

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She also found her story useful in a Stanford application: when it asked what she had done her past two summers, she talked about the responsibilities she’d had for her country and for herself, and how serving in Israel made her feel more connected, more like an Israeli.

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She laughs and adds that a lot of people don’t realize the value of toilet paper—“I used to hoard that,” she says.

 

Dangers

On base, when you’re there, you don’t belong to yourself. You’re part of something, something more.

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Outside of the base though, walking around the city and country in uniform made Lee a target. The first time she realized, she was startled.

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But her uniform also made people come up and ask for directions because they expected her to know. On the train or bus, even if she happened to be tired and dirty, citizens thought she should move and give up her seat to them.

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She did.

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In uniform even more so, she felt this obligation to people. But sometimes people gave her food, or there were discounts. People liked to stop and wave, or have sympathy when she was trying to cross a busy road. Sometimes the cars would just stop for her.

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The first weekend she was home from basic, she was treated like the queen of her house, she says. And it was a different feeling, but not necessarily bad.

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100 percent of fellow soldiers complained. Everyone vocalized it often, that allure of running away or escaping from the service. The slang was even slanted towards it. Getting on the plane back from leave, that is often the roughest part, she says.

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Lee’s known people who didn’t. But at the same time, then those soldiers were aware of the consequences if they did it. There’s certain levels of punishment, and all time missed tacks on to the end of your service. But sometimes you need a break.

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Lee might not have, but she definitely knew people who did.

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Especially it can be hard for guys, who have that extra year of service—for them, to see the girls that started with them get out already can be really hard, she explains.

 

Training

Training as a medic is pretty crazy, in Lee’s words.

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While it might be more lowkey than a paramedic, it’s so fast. Anywhere else, before you get to touch someone, a patient, you have years of training beforehand. But it’s not like that in the Israeli military. They have to train you fast, within a short period of time, to do real things.

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It’s very intense.

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Sometimes Lee and her unit would open each others’ veins on purpose, or in the dark, or watch the blood spill out and spell letters and words on the ground with it.

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She acknowledges that might be a little dark, but it was good practice. Doing simulations in trauma rooms, with the lights and the bandaging and the blood, was exciting to her.

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Sometimes the medics would have to give themselves vaccines, stabbing big needles, and they’d have to stay until everyone was finished.

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Giving IVs was learned by practicing on fellow soldiers: you struggle and fumble around and it hurts a little, she says, but then you sit back later and compare bruises with others in the unit and joke about being drug addicts.

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Yet there was a surprising amount of classwork. Learning and studying occupied much of her time as well.

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As far as time went…

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Well, there wasn’t really any. During training, every minute of a day was planned out. No freedom existed—not even to choose what to wear.

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Higher-up, however, Lee found herself with the ability to occasionally go take naps and such in between activities.

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Unfortunately, paperwork was a large part of her formalized job as well: people want to get out of things, and they’d try to use her to do so. Of course, many of the injuries (the vast majority, she says) came from “friendly” games like soccer. She once cleared two people in one game of dodgeball to send to the hospital.

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And her proudest moment?

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Opening a vein while in a full hazmat suit. While it might not be something she’ll spend time at Stanford doing, it was an experience she’ll never forget.