Its been a very long time since I updated this blog which I hope to rectify with at least a partial account of what has happened during the last three weeks. Sadly, a soldier’s memory isn’t very good. Ask me what I did on base the same day, and I am likely to forget even the most interesting moment. That’s just how it is when you do a lot of nothing mixed in with a lot of something while also feeling tired all the time.

So here is an attempt at my memory:

All the battalions at our base were woken up at 3am for a drive to Mt. Gilboa near Beth Shean. We ran 5km around this mountain full of history. This is where King Saul, Israel’s first monarch, led a charge against the Philistines. The battle ends with the king falling on his own sword and Jonathan being killed in battle.

We were all wearing our sports shirt with the Battalion motto “Don’t fear Israel, for you are lions” which is a part of a longer verse “Don’t fear Israel, for you are lions, and when a lion roars who isn’t afraid!?”

And it has our tag, a lion roaring. I remember as we were 3 kilometers into the run, enough to have spaced out distances between the various participants in my battalion. I was passing two civilians also jogging along the trail. As I passed the obviously athletic males, they waited till I was a bit farther away and one turned to the other and said “See those lions running around the mountain?” The man didn’t understand what he meant,

I guess he hadn’t read the shirts. His friend responded “The lions, there!”

I knew we had those shirts for a reason.