Chosen Book: “The 188th Crybaby Brigade”

After graduating from college, 24-year-old Joel Chasnoff did something a lot of American Jews joke about, but almost none do: He made his dream of becoming a gun-toting badass real by voluntarily enlisting in the Israeli Army. In his new memoir, The 188th Crybaby Brigade, Chasnoff reveals what it was like for "a skinny Jewish kid from Chicago" to be in a platoon of 18-year-old Israelis and fight Hezbollah. In this chapter, titled "Cardboard Arabs," he tells about almost getting shot by one fellow IDF soldier before almost getting blown up by another.

* * *

The first time I almost die it’s a Tuesday.

It’s our third day out in the field. I’m in the firing range with nine other guys. We’re on our bellies, shooting cardboard Arabs. Pop! Pop! Suddenly, the kid next to me, a Russian named Ofir, screams, “Owww!” Then he jumps up, points his loaded rifle at my face, hops back and forth like a schoolgirl skipping Double Dutch, and yelps, “Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!” in Russian.

As he jumps and screams, Ofir points his rifle straight at my face, then chest, then balls, then knees, then balls, and then back at my face.

“Fuck,” I say. “Oh fuck Ofir fuck Ofir what the fuck stop Ofir what the fuck!”—which, given the circumstances, i.e., a Russian teenage psychopath skipping like a monkey while he points a loaded rifle at my face, is a logical thing to say.

“Stop fire!” shouts Lieutenant Yaron. “Stop fire!” we shout—except Ofir, who continues to shout “Ow! Ow!” in Russian, and me, because for the life of me I cannot stop saying “Fuck Ofir fuck stop Ofir fuck!”

What happens next happens fast.

Lieutenant Yaron charges full-speed down the firing platform and bearhugs Ofir from behind. Then he pushes Ofir’s rifle up and away from my face just as—

“Pow!”

—Ofir’s finger accidentally grazes the trigger and a bullet zings past my ear.

Lieutenant Yaron wrestles the rifle out of Ofir’s hands and switches it to safe position while at the same time Ofir rips off his shirt, Superman style, and cries, “Owwwww!”

A second later, a hot shell casing tumbles out of Ofir’s shirt and clinks to the cement.

Ofir collapses on the firing platform, and we crowd around and gasp at the sight of the huge red welt on Ofir’s stomach.

“Everyone back!” shouts Lieutenant Yaron.

We don’t move.

Lieutenant Yaron pours cold water on the welt, causing Ofir to shout “Ow!” one last time before passing out.

After Ofir comes to, Lieutenant Yaron calls an emergency platoon meeting and explains what happened.

On the Israeli-made Glilon assault rifle, hot shell casings discharge on the right. When a soldier pulls the trigger, the bullet shoots out the barrel, toward the target, and the shell casing—the metal cylinder that holds the bullet—exits through a tiny trapdoor on the right side of the rifle and flies away from the shooter.

Unless, Lieutenant Yaron explains, the shooter is left-handed—in which case the hot shell casings discharge toward the shooter, not away from him. On occasion, these hot shell casings discharge directly into the shooter himself. In Ofir’s case, the scorching metal shell discharged out the trapdoor and flew between two buttons on his shirt, searing his skin with the heat of a branding iron.

But the soldier most in danger of being killed wasn’t Ofir. It was the soldier lying next to him while Ofir jumped up and down like a maniac with a loaded rifle in his hands.

In other words—me.

Later that afternoon, I almost die again. Only this time, it’s not an accident.

I’m in the supply tent. I’m seated Indian style, reading Sports Illustrated. Next to me is a wooden crate filled with one thousand bullets. The crate’s open. Every twenty minutes, another ten soldiers return from the firing range and refill their magazines with bullets from the crate.

Sitting on the other side of the crate is a chubby kid named Chen Tal. Chen is short and plump with dark skin and a trim black beard. He looks like a Mexican Santa Claus. He is what Israelis call an arse—a greasy-haired, gold-chain-wearing, cigarette-smoking hoodlum from South Tel Aviv. As Chen tells it, most kids in his neighborhood don’t even get drafted—the army figures such hooligans are a waste of time. Practically all Chen talks about is how next Friday, when we’re home for our first Sabbath leave, his father’s going to parade him around town in his army uniform so all the neighbors will know that Chen Tal made it big.

I’m engrossed in my Sports Illustrated, miles away from the army, when all of a sudden Chen lights a match. He holds the lit match over the open crate of bullets.

“Chen—what the hell are you doing?” I say.

“Scared?” he says. He blows out the match.

“That’s not funny,” I say. “You’ll kill everyone in here.”

Chen chuckles.

If I were smart, or less lazy, I’d get up and walk away from this rascal. But I’m tired, and I’m comfortable. And anyway, he’d have to be a complete imbecile to pull that kind of stunt a second time.

What I forgot is that Chen Tal is a complete imbecile.

He lights another match.

“Chen—”

“Move and I drop it.”

I watch the flame flicker down the match. At the last possible second, Chen leans forward and blows.

Poof!

Smoke swirls up from the blackened match.

“You’re sick,” I say.

Chen cackles. Then he drops the match in the crate.

I gasp. Freeze. Wait—for the explosion that doesn’t come. Then I lean forward and, my fingers like tweezers, pull out the match where it sits between two bullets—the most ludicrous game of pick-up sticks I’ve ever played.

Before dinner, I pull Lieutenant Yaron aside and tell him about Chen Tal and the match. Fifteen minutes later, a jeep speeds up to our campsite. Chen Tal climbs inside, the jeep drives away, and we never see the bastard again.

That night, I lie awake in my pup tent and think about my two close calls. The more I think about it, the more I think it’s a miracle that hundreds of Israeli soldiers aren’t accidentally killing one another every day. I think about the situation in Platoon Two, Company B. With Chen Tal gone, we’re now fifty-eight soldiers in the platoon. Each of us has one rifle and five magazines that hold thirty-five bullets each.

I open my notebook and sketch it out:

58 scatterbrained teenagers X 1 assault rifle/teenager X 5 magazines/assault rifle X 35 bullets/magazine = approx. 10,000 scatterbrained bullets

With ten thousand bullets in our platoon, the likelihood that one of those bullets will end up inside one of us isn’t just plausible—it’s statistically probable. There are simply too many teenagers walking around with too many guns and too many bullets for one of those bullets not to end up inside someone else.

I think about all our mistakes, or fuckim—stuff like untucked shirts, unlaced boots, and showing up late for formation. I’d assumed that the longer we were in the army, the less fuckim we’d make, because we’d know the rules. That graph might look like this:

Platoon Two , Company B Fuckim: Hypothesized

But in fact, it’s the opposite. Between the stress, the fatigue, and our commanders’ never-ending demands, we’re actually making more fuckim now than we were the first few days of basic training. So the graph actually looks like this:

Pla toon Two , Company B Fuckim: Actual

—where, after an initial dip in fuckim, our mistakes increase in any given amount of time at the rate

and the sum of expected fuck-ups in any given period of time is

where

b = the number of soldiers present at any point in time, t,

and

k = (4√b-t)-1

which comes to an awful lot of potentially lethal fuckim.

While I’m journaling in the pup tent, Dror Boy Genius, who had guard duty, opens the flap and scoots in. “Why you still awake?” he asks.

“Someone’s gonna die,” I say. I show Dror my equations and explain my graphs. I tell him about our increasing rate of fuckim and how, eventually, one of those fuck-ups will involve an accidental bullet in one of us.

Dror Boy Genius chuckles. “That’s why they draft us when we’re eighteen,” he says as he slides into his sleeping bag. “We’re too stupid to know the difference.”

The 188th Crybaby Brigade goes on sale today. And catch more of Joel Chasnoff at joelchasnoff.com.

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