This past Shabbos was day seventy of miluim. We are not halfway through this round.
The news came in on Thursday night at nine. Another reduction across the base, not only our ugdah. More reservists going home. Some of them with no job waiting and no plan for the next two months, because they had built their year around being on base until the end of October.
They stayed for Shabbos. Every one of them. A last day of service with the men they had been with since May, and then Sunday morning they handed in their guns.
Saturday night was the part nobody outside sees. Officers on the phone and in offices, fighting to keep one more guy on the list. Other officers working the other direction, trying to get men transferred to a different ugdah so they could keep serving with no break in their miluim. Not out of sentiment. These officers know exactly what a reservist's salary is doing for his family right now, and they know that for a lot of these men the call up is the paycheck. Sending a man home is sending him to a month of looking for work.
For the men who stayed, that news does something strange. You are relieved you were not cut. You watch friends drive out the gate. You go back to your shift.
Two and a half months in uniform wears a person down in a way that is hard to explain from the outside. It builds up. The same food, the same shifts, the same walls, the same guys. A body that stops bouncing back the way it did at thirty. Kids who are growing up in photographs. By day seventy nobody is running on motivation. They are running on habit.
Our plugah runs on two machlakot that alternate weeks. One is on, one is home, and they trade places. Most of the time half the plugah has no idea what the other half has been dealing with. The changeover is the only point in the week when everyone is standing in the same place at the same time.
So at the start of this week, at the changeover, I brought in a guy who makes fresh pizza and fries on site.
We set it up for the whole plugah, both machlakot together. Hot pizza coming out one tray after another, fries going as fast as he could salt them. We handed out hats with the unit on them. Men stood around eating, complaining about the food in the dining hall, catching each other up on a week they had missed, telling the same stories they have told since May.
For two hours the disappointment was on hold.
That is the part I want people to understand about morale in a reserve unit. It does not turn on speeches. Nobody is lifted by being told the mission matters, they already know the mission matters. Morale in month three turns on whether there is something in a soldier's hand that reminds him a person somewhere thought about him and spent money on him for no operational reason at all.
I have been doing this work since October 2023 and I have signed for a lot of equipment. The things that move the needle the most are almost never the expensive things. A homemade cake that shows up in a package. A jar of decent coffee that replaces the powder in the dining hall. A box of ice pops in August. A slice of pizza on the day a unit gets bad news.
A slice of pizza can be the difference between a week where men sit on their beds on their phones and a week where the plugah pulls together. It sounds small written out. It is not small at day seventy.
Here is what is in front of us. Eighty five more days from that Shabbos. Eleven Shabbatot away from home. Rosh Hashana is about five weeks out, then Yom Kippur, then Sukkot and Simchat Torah, all of it on base, all of it without our wives and our children. The end of summer, then the chagim, then whatever October brings.
It will be long and it will be hard and we will push through it, because that is the job and every man here signed for it.
What makes it survivable is the small stuff. That is where donors come in, and that is what your money actually buys. Not slogans. Pizza, cake, coffee, a decent Shabbos meal, a hat with the unit on it.
To help us get through the Shabbatot and the chagim ahead: