She runs the logistics tent for her plugah and spends every hour of the day answering somebody else's needs. Two small items from a donor were the first things anyone had handed her all round.
I know her job because it is my job.
She is the Rasap of a plugah on our base. A logistics officer. She sits in a tent from morning until night and the questions arrive in a steady line.
We are out of snacks. Can you get ground coffee, the powder in the dining hall is finished. The guys need uniforms, can you pull them from storage and sign for them. The showers have not been cleaned since Tuesday. Are we doing a barbecue this week. Somebody took the extension cord and nobody knows where it went.
Ask after ask. Question after question. Nothing on that list is dramatic and all of it has to happen, because a unit that runs out of toilet paper on a Thursday is a unit with a real problem on Friday.
The Rasap is the parent of the unit. That is the closest description I have found for it. You put the soldiers first, all of them, all the time. You learn who takes his coffee black, who has a bad back and needs a different mattress, who has not had a package from home since May. You track what is missing before anyone notices it is missing. And nobody is assigned to do the same for you. The Rasap does not have a Rasap.
She holds an officer's rank. She also spends part of her week chasing paper plates and toilet paper and arguing with a storeroom about a delivery that was supposed to arrive last week. Both of those are true at the same time and neither one cancels the other.
She carries a gun. She is a soldier. The rifle goes with her to the storeroom and to the dining hall and across the base four times a day, and it stands next to her while she signs forms. Fourteen hours of walking with a thin strap cutting into one shoulder.
One of our donors sent over padded rifle slings and Leatherman multitools. I brought her one of each.
I would like people to hear that sentence the way I heard it.
If I put a photo of those two items online tomorrow, a number of people would write to me and say send it to a combat soldier instead. I understand where the instinct comes from. I have felt it myself. It is also wrong, and I have stopped being diplomatic about saying so.
The rifle on her shoulder weighs what any rifle weighs. She carries it more hours in a day than plenty of men who spend most of their shift in a vehicle. The padded sling does the same work on her shoulder that it does on anybody's. The multitool opens the same boxes, tightens the same screws and cuts the same zip ties, and she opens more boxes in a week than most of this base opens in a month.
Then there is the second part, which gets missed entirely. She is the reason the combat soldiers in her plugah have uniforms that fit, food on Shabbos and a shower that works. Every hour she saves goes straight back into them. A tool that makes her day faster is a direct deposit into the readiness of the men she supplies.
She has been in uniform since May like the rest of us. In all that time nothing had arrived in her tent with her name on it. She has signed for thousands of shekels of donated gear and handed every piece of it to somebody else.
That pattern runs through the whole army. The cooks, the drivers, the mechanics, the storeroom staff, the medics, the people who go out to fix the generator at two in the morning. They watch the packages come in and go past them. Donations move toward the sharp end of a base, and the people who keep the sharp end running get whatever is left over, which is usually nothing.
We buy gear and basics for all of them. Uniforms, chest rigs, slings, tools, boots, coffee, food for Shabbos. When there are straps and multitools in the car, some of them go to the tent.
Every soldier on this base is valuable, whatever is written on the form. The man at the front and the woman who makes sure he is dressed and fed are fighting the same war.
Two small items. Fourteen hours of walking made easier. A smile from a soldier who had not been given anything all round.
That is worth the money every time.
To help us get gear and basics to soldiers:
US (501c3 tax deductible): https://givebutter.com/smiles-for-chayalim