Young gun: life in the Israel Defense Forces

On the second day of 2013, a girl was shot twice, in the chest and limbs, from a very close distance. The girl is 20 and an Israeli soldier. A commander, actually. Her condition is now reported to be serious but stable.

On the first day of 2013, I woke up afraid. I was scared that a rat had crawled up my trousers while I was asleep. I could almost feel it, furry and warm, sniffing its path past my knee and along my thigh. I jumped out of the bed and shook my trousers. I flung the covers, looked under the bed. There was no rat.

This is not the first time I have been woken up by this particular imaginary and persistent rat over the past year. I never seem to find it.

The person who shot the girl who was injured on the second day of 2013 was also a girl, and an Israeli soldier. The shooter is still in boot camp, which means she is probably 18. She is under the command of the very person she shot.

During a routine day in the shooting ranges, the boot camp commander crossed the shooting lines towards the targets. At least as far as anyone knows, the soldiers on the shooting line were instructed to aim their weapons at a 45-degree angle and keep the safety on. But for some unexplained reason, one that in a later report I am sure would be referred to as "human error", one of the girls' M16s was on automatic mode and she fired two bullets that hit her commander. She then threw the weapon on the ground in panic.

Hearing this news, I was afraid. I was afraid of something that did not happen to me in 2006, when I was a soldier. Of a day a fellow soldier could have shot me in the ranges, but didn't.

I have never experienced war, but I did serve in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as a weaponry instructor. I was 18, and the service was mandatory to all citizens. I don't remember ever being afraid while I was in the army. Yet this does not mean I am not afraid now, of things that happened while I was a soldier. For me, fear is a delayed emotion. A message in a bottle that your older self does not remember your younger self ever writing, and that your older self nonetheless receives. The bottle with the message comes flying from above and smashes on your face, years later.

I remember I woke up to a fight with a fellow soldier, a condescending neat freak who always harassed me about how I kept food under my bed. She claimed the food would bring bugs into the caravan we shared, which was just about the dumbest thing I ever heard. She threatened to tell on me, but she never did. I remember I was particularly mean in my reply to her that day, because I had a lonely four-hour guarding shift on a mountain by the ammunition bunker the night before. It left my nerves frayed.

I was so bored during that shift and the minutes seemed to crawl. I broke the rules by reading a Murakami book, holding it hidden behind the barricade and looking up every fourth sentence to make sure no officer was passing by. It was dark, and every sentence took a couple of minutes to make out, the words slippery and somehow made more precious. I didn't dare lift the book up into the light, because I had already been caught reading a few weeks earlier. I promised I would never do it again in exchange for not being punished.

The soldiers I was assigned to for that month were Bedouin foot trackers in early training. My job was to supervise their first encounters with their personal M16s and administer the various shooting drills they had to go through in order to complete boot camp. I loved being assigned to train them. Their level of discipline was not very high, but they were always hilarious and kind to me, maybe because I was the only girl involved in their training. One time, a soldier got so frustrated during a dry drill, he threw his gun at his commander and declared he'd had a change of heart – he did not feel like being a soldier any more. Another time, a soldier came into the range in his socks after deciding that the new army boots were hurting his feet.

Because of this loose discipline, the officer in charge of the unit was especially strict when it came to following safety procedures on the range. Training accidents happen in the IDF every month, but to me they never seemed like a real possibility. The soldiers had to hear the safety procedures five or six times a day, and at length. I listened to them as I listen to the security instructions on planes, but the officer took them seriously, since this was his responsibility.

Whenever someone spoke or even smiled while standing in the shooting range, the officer erupted in screams about how that soldier was endangering the lives of his friends. It got to be exhausting. I for one never believed there was any danger. The soldiers were silly, but they took the procedures of the shooting range as almost holy, given how strict their officer was about them.

On that almost-fateful day, we were nearing the soldiers' last days in the range for their boot camp training. It was customary to use those last days for drills that were more fun and interactive. In my mind, those last days were more like the last days of summer camp than the last days of shooting training.

Each team was given its own set of targets at increasing distances. The soldiers loved blowing up the balloons and putting them on the cardboard targets. The teams stood in lines on the sand, and each soldier got his turn to fire one shot at a balloon. The team that exploded all of the balloons first would win. It was a simple contest, and the soldiers got very excited. I supervised one team while the officer took on another. I must have known somewhere in my head that the soldiers were trained to shoot humans, that the balloons represented human heads, but I don't remember it ever lingering in my mind. I do remember being preoccupied with the colours of the balloons for each team being in the same colour scheme and with how to divide the soldiers into competing teams that would be evenly matched, so that the games (sorry, drills) would be worth playing. I was 19 at the time.

The officer was worried about how the soldiers would do with these drills, but the first part of that day passed without incident. At lunch, we got cake delivered from the kitchen to the ranges for no reason, which rarely happened, so the day started feeling like a birthday party. The smell of the gunpowder had the scent of candles.

It was the last drill before sundown. Each team was down to its last balloon. Four of my soldiers took their turns firing and missed. I kept on waiting for the other team to declare victory, but they kept missing as well. Then it was the turn of a soldier on my team, the one who once showed up to the range in socks. I'd always liked him. I put my hand on his shoulder and told him to take all the time in the world. This must have been difficult to do, considering the pressure he was under, but he listened and aimed slowly, much more slowly than any of his excited peers had done.

And then it happened. The last balloon target for my team popped. I stared at it mesmerised. It was there one second and then it was completely gone, as if by its own accord. I looked at the disappointed stares of the soldiers on the other team. I could hear the soldiers behind me cheering and clapping. I was laughing. That's when I heard the distant shout of the officer. It reached my ears full of fury and ugliness that felt altogether unbefitting of the joyful moment I was busy living.

"LOOK AT YOUR WEAPON," he shouted.

I moved my stare from the sad losing team to the soldier standing near me, the one who had just popped the balloon. I could smell his sweat mixed with gunpowder, which no longer reminded me of candles. The expression on his face reminded me of a confused kitten. I looked down and saw that his weapon was pointing straight at my stomach. The safety was off. His finger was caressing the trigger.

Later, only a few minutes later, I would convince myself that this was not how this happened. That I was exaggerating the riskiness of the situation. But now, seven years later, as this day came to my mind out of a bottle I did not know I had put it in, I am sure I am remembering it all the way it was. The weapon pointing. My stomach. The position of the safety. The finger on the trigger.

It was over before I could feel it all. Before I had the chance to become afraid. The officer rushed over, slowly approached and clicked on the safety, then took the weapon from the soldier's hands.

Later, the soldiers got a long safety scolding. I never told my family or my fellow soldiers what had happened. I think it took me less than an hour to forget that anything had happened at all. After all, nothing happened. By evening, I was busy getting ready for another guarding shift, stuffing my pockets with the bread and chocolate spread I hid under my bed. That day was only almost fateful, and as such I should have condemned it to be forgotten, except it somehow came back to me, on the second day of 2013, upon hearing of the shooting of a girl I never met.

I was sad, lonely, annoyed, angry and bored during my service days, but never afraid. I am only afraid in hindsight, years later. When you are young, you do not yet know all the reasons you should be afraid. Bad things have yet to happen to most of the people your age. You think you are invincible. I am 25 now, but I sometimes look at older people on the train or walking the streets, and think they are the ones who are truly brave, rather than the young. To have lived for so long and to know all that there is to be afraid of and still leave the house in the morning is to me the truly courageous act.

I look at the 30- or 40-year-old politicians in my country and I have no idea how they do it. The only time I ever voted was back when I was an 18-year-old soldier. I voted for Kadima, the largest party at the time, and the one that ended up winning. I did it because so many people were doing it. The truth is, I did not really give it much thought. I was more concerned about the girl who was threatening to tell on me about the food I hid under my bed.

That summer, under the leadership I chose, the second Lebanon war broke out. Many in the army felt we were not prepared. People died on both sides. My hometown was showered with missiles and residents were told to flee. Later, the prime minister I voted for would become the first Israeli prime minister ever convicted of a crime. When I cast my first and only vote, I was not afraid of what would become of it. Now I am afraid to vote again. I am truly in awe when I meet the rare Israeli person around my age who isn't afraid, who dares to parade a concrete political passion.

In the end, the food I left under my bed never brought bugs into our caravan. It brought a rat. I was deep in sleep in my army bed after another never-ending guarding shift when I felt something climb up my leg, warm and fuzzy. I was still wearing my uniform because I had to wake up a couple of hours after my shift anyway. I tossed and tried to ignore it, but then I felt something climbing higher. I sat up and shook my leg.

And then a rat scurried out from the bottom of my trousers and down to the floor. I yawned and kept on sleeping just as soundly as I had been before. I didn't tell any of the other girls in the caravan, or anyone since, about the rat. I would like to tell you that, ever since that night, I became so afraid of rats that I threw out all of the food from under my bed, but that would not be true. I continued to keep food under my bed until the day I finished my service, and never once as a soldier woke up thinking about that rat. That fear came only years later. Back then, I was young, and nothing could scare me