Going to Shabbat services was quite an enjoyable experience. I was getting special treatment. Friday evenings I was taken to the adjacent Navel Training Center. After services I was given soda and cookies for kiddush. These goodies were considered contraband and a big ‘no-no’ in boot camp. Best of all, I got to escape from my drill instructors for a few hours.
Plus, on Sunday mornings, when most of the other recruits were in church, I had extra time and sink space to do my laundry – which we did the old-fashioned way, by hand!
After twelve weeks of grueling physical and mental basic training, I accomplished my life goal. I became one of ‘the few, the proud’ – a United States Marine.
When I first enlisted, I wanted to be a combat engineer, one of the guys who build and blow stuff up, but the military’s needs come first and they send the smarter kids to do the smarter jobs. So, given my ‘Yiddishe kop,’ they told me I was going to be an artillery meteorologist. “What the heck is an artillery meteorologist?” I asked. I soon found out.
I was sent to Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, for a four-month course. I learned how to survey weather conditions in order to precisely adjust artillery fire for accuracy up to ranges of 10 miles or more.
After my schooling and a few weeks’ home leave, I was sent overseas for my desired travel and adventure. I spent the next year in Okinaw, Japan. I also got to travel to other exotic locations like Korea, the Philippines, and Bangladesh. During the first Gulf War, I was deployed for seven months on a Navy ship to the less exotic Arab Middle East. That winter, I again lit Chanukah candles, but this time in the middle of the Persian Gulf.
When the ground war started we disembarked in a port in Saudi Arabia. That first evening, craving more adventure, I decided to go explore the port by myself. The Saudi soldiers on guard duty stopped me. Upon seeing that I was an American Marine, they invited me into their guard-house for tea. We tried to communicate in their broken English and sign language and I sat there grinning and enjoying their hospitality. The whole time I kept thinking to myself, “If they knew I was Jewish, would they be as hospitable?” The irony made me grin even more.
“How Do You ‘Do’ Jewish?”
After the war and four years of active duty service, I returned to Seattle and went to college. Being a civilian wasn’t the same. I missed the camaraderie of the Corps, so I came back in to serve one weekend a month and two weeks a year in the Marine Reserves, this time as a combat engineer.
In March 1998 I accomplished my next life goal, graduating from the University of Washington as a civil engineer. After college I spent a few months in Israel – my fourth visit. It was on that trip, and after reading Leon Uris’s novel Exodus, that I decided I needed to learn more about what it meant to be a Jew. I was always proud of my ‘Jewishness,’ but so what? How was I going to pass on that pride to my future children?
My rabbi, Daniel Lapin, once told me: “In order to be Jewish, you have to do Jewish.” How do you ‘do’ Jewish? I had to know what to do and how to do it. So I enrolled myself in a two-year program of basic Judaism classes for adults and started reading religious books.
