Lola the Tank Mechanic

Lola the Tank Mechanic:

A Volunteer in Israel

That first morning, Lola found herself standing at the barracks window, watching the sun come up and listening to the local dogs barking a canine reveille to awaken the sleeping army base. She watched the mist rising from the distant hills and the leaves on the trees below her rustling in the soft breeze.

It was May, 1987, and Lola had arrived in Israel the previous afternoon, after a tedious 12-hour flight from New York. She had come to volunteer on an Israeli army base for two weeks, joining a group of other volunteers who assembled at Ben-Gurion airport.  The program had been initiated several years before, following Israel’s military involvement in Lebanon.  It was intended to reduce the number of reservists that the army—the Israel Defense Forces, known in Hebrew as Zahal—needed to call up to active duty, by inviting volunteers from the U.S. and other countries to provide assistance on certain bases.  When it turned out that their group would be sent to a tank repair facility, Lola had doubts about that theory.

It was the first time Lola was returning to Israel in 13 years.  She had moved to Israel in 1970, seeking the sort of freedom and adventure that one often looks for in one’s early 20s.  After completing an intensive five-month Hebrew language program, she lived in Tel Aviv and worked at a community mental health center, a job she’d loved. Although she found both freedom and adventure, the sense of despair and isolation that followed the 1973 Yom Kippur War had made her question where she belonged. Recognizing that she was homesick for America and her family, she returned to the U.S. seven months after the war. 

On the two-hour ride from the airport to their assigned base near Ashkelon, Lola peered out of the dust-streaked bus window, looking for landmarks. The scenery seemed different from what she remembered.  Yet oddly, everything she saw also felt familiar and somehow comforting.  The road signs and the highways had changed, and there were many new apartment blocks, but the orchards, fields, and small stucco houses that they passed felt known to her—hers—in a visceral way.

It had been years since Lola had spoken Hebrew, and as they arrived at the base, she was concerned that she might have forgotten whatever she once knew. But as they got off the bus, David, the IDF officer in charge of the volunteers, asked Lola an abrupt question. Without thinking, Lola gave him a sarcastic Hebrew reply. His surprised laugh and equally sarcastic retort reassured Lola that she didn’t have to worry about being regarded as a tourist.  Her Hebrew, amazingly, had remained intact.

Having been awake for over 24 hours, there were few things that Lola and the other volunteers felt less like doing than touring the army base—nevertheless, that was the first order of business. They started with a lunch of peas and schnitzel served in a huge, echoing dining hall shared by several hundred soldiers at long tables, as a group of noisy sparrows swooped in and out of the open windows. Then the group of weary volunteers trudged around the base in 90-degree midday heat with their leader, carrying the two sets of khaki fatigue uniforms that they had been issued. 

When at last they arrived at the barracks, they found it to be very basic: a three-story prefabricated concrete structure with a communal toilet and shower room on each floor. Lola was assigned to a small, bare room, which she was to share with an older girl from Canada.  The room held two metal cots, two wooden cupboards, and a small table. Despite the austere accommodations, Lola unexpectedly slept very well that first night, and awoke at 5:30am, feeling refreshed and energetic.

After breakfast in the dining hall, Lola discovered that most of the volunteers did not speak Hebrew, so they were assigned to laundry or kitchen duties or other chores that required little explanation. But because she was fluent in the language, Lola’s work assignment was in the machine shop, fabricating parts to help repair tanks. She was excited and nervous, but eager for this new challenge. Dressed in her fatigues, clomping happily around in the sturdy combat boots that she had brought, she was listening attentively to a handsome young soldier named Yossi who showing her what to do. He handed her a huge screwdriver and demonstrated how to remove the bolts from a minesweeping device that reminded Lola of a cowcatcher one would see in an old-time movie, mounted on the front of a locomotive. An hour later, totally absorbed in this task, Lola was enthusiastically unscrewing all the bolts from one side of the device when several soldiers intervened. Apparently, if she’d continued on the other side, they’d never have been able to put the whole thing back together. Lola began to understand why they didn’t send volunteers to work on airplanes.      

The calm, pleasant anticipation that Lola felt that first dawn greeted her every morning of her three-week stay on the base. Perhaps it was the unfamiliar rural sounds, so different from the honking cars and buses that routinely awakened her in her apartment in downtown Washington, DC. Perhaps it was the smell of grasses and flowers and fields, and the faint hint of mist drifting through the open window. And perhaps it was being among so many people with a common purpose and a common identity that gave her a sense of belonging she hadn’t felt in a long time.

True, some of the sounds and smells she encountered during the days on the base were not quite so peaceful.  Lola discovered that when a huge tank is parked right next to you for half an hour, with its engine revving noisily and diesel exhaust fumes filling the air, it can be pretty hard to ignore. But that was just part of the scene, and even seemed sort of fun. And the physical labor—climbing, hammering, reaching to paint something or crouching to unscrew a part underneath a tank—was a welcome change from her usual mundane duties as a policy analyst back in Washington. 

Lola was thrilled that the soldiers had enough confidence in her to allow her to operate a huge motorized circular saw.  Realizing that she could understand their instructions, they taught her how to make parts for the tanks, for which ready-made replacement parts were not easily available. She was proud when she learned she was working on Israeli tanks, called Merkava, rather than on the Russian or American-made tanks that were scattered around the base. The soldiers showed her how to measure, mark, and cut the proper lengths of heavy iron ingots, how to operate a drill press to bore holes in the sections of ingot, and how to paint the parts properly so they wouldn’t rust. She did, however, decline their generous offer teach her how to weld; that turned out to be a step too far.

 Lola felt buoyed by the sense of vitality and camaraderie that surrounded her on the base. Occasional arguments and disagreements were quickly forgotten, and the prevailing mood was characterized by high spirits, intense activity, and close friendships. She began to feel like ‘one of the boys’—accepted and respected, but also like a desirable and attractive female, admired and sought after. And she had to admit that breakfast with several hundred Israeli soldiers--a few of whom took turns bringing her delicious pastries from a bakery--certainly beat an English muffin alone in her apartment.

During her three weeks on the base, Lola drank enough Turkish coffee to keep the entire Turkish army awake for a month (one or another of the officers was always coming around to gesture surreptitiously, inviting a couple of the volunteers to take a break in his office). She learned to wash the grease off of here hands with strong soap, flicking the excess water on the first unsuspecting soldier who walked by. 

When she was sent to the parts window to ask for more screws, she learned not to ask who was the last in line—since, if she did, all the soldiers in front of her would immediately turn around and shout in unison, “You are!” She learned that coffee was not served at breakfast, because it was much more expensive than tea, and she learned not to complain about similar minor inconveniences, since the solders lived with these conditions all the time.

Of course, Lola learned a lot of new Hebrew words during her time as a tank mechanic: words for extension cord, grinding wheel, words that she had never needed in her vocabulary before. She also learned some important things about herself:  for many reasons, Israel continued to hold a special place in her heart, and the way she felt there was unlike anything she felt anywhere else. 

After Lola returned home to her normal life in the U.S., she would occasionally find herself smiling unexpectedly at the thought that somewhere in the Golan or the Negev, there was a tank with a part that she made, a fender she painted, a gasket that she replaced. 

She liked that thought.

[Note: This story is adapted from a personal essay that I wrote, “Breakfast with 300 Men,” which appeared in the Washington Jewish Week on August 13, 1987.]