Yesterday I drove all over the Negev in a car with a ל on the back window. The learner's plate. The one you get at sixteen, when you are terrified and your mother is gripping the door handle beside you.
I am not sixteen. My license has been valid for two decades. I was not there to renew anything. I was there to earn something new, a military license to drive a Hummer for the IDF.
A logistics officer with a Hummer license does not make obvious sense, so I asked the same question everyone else would. Why me. I got three answers, and each one told me a little more about where this war actually is.
My commanding officer went first. As logistics officer, when we move to different bases for training or operations, my job is to get water, food and gear to the unit wherever it happens to be, and to keep it stocked as it runs down. Some bases have no vehicles except Hummers. Having the license makes me useful in places a regular car cannot reach.
The second answer came from higher up. We will not always sit at the base we are at now. At some point we may be up north, or closer to a danger zone, where you cannot drive your own car or an ordinary one. In that terrain, going out for equipment or anything else means a Hummer. The logistics officer becomes the man who can move people.
The third answer is the one that sits with me. We do not have enough drivers on base. My unit goes into Gaza daily for different missions, and every convoy of supply trucks needs a Hummer at the front and a Hummer at the back, combat soldiers inside each one. They want me to be one of the people who drives in. That is a strange thought to hold in your hands while you sign a form. It is also, right now, what is needed.
The day itself began with two hours in a classroom. How the Hummer works, how fast it goes, how much fuel it drinks, how wide it is, how tall, the angles it can climb and descend at different speeds, when to shift. It is automatic and not complicated once you understand it. At the end we took a test. Everyone who passed moved on to six hours behind the wheel.
Three of us and an instructor to each vehicle. He walked us under the hood, through the cabin, across the dials and buttons. There are not many. The Hummer is built to be a driving machine and nothing else. There is, sadly, no CarPlay.
Then we drove. Two hours on the highway first, rotating drivers every twenty or thirty minutes to get a feel for the size of the thing. The hardest part is watching slow trucks pass you, because the Hummer tops out around sixty five kilometers an hour. We ran through the desert as a convoy, stopping for water, for lunch, to swap drivers. Then we turned off the road and practiced what happens when the vehicle leaves the pavement, by choice or by accident, and how to stop it without rolling it over. Short stops. Slow stops. Taking control when the ground turns against you. After that we drove a dirt track alongside the highway, up and down hills, over rock and loose earth, learning the gears by feel. The Hummer is a beast. It handles everything, and from the inside you barely feel it. Ours had air conditioning, and for that I thanked God more than once.
I came out of the day with an army Hummer license and a set of skills I never expected to own. Now the base sends an instructor to run us through a night drive and through the specific terrain we will be operating in before we go out on real missions. It is a skill that does not open up often and is in high demand exactly when it does.
They say you cannot teach an old dog new tricks. Most of us in the Shlav Bet program are in our late thirties, forties and fifties. Men with careers and children and knees that complain. This week the army decided the old dogs would learn anyway, and we did.
I keep coming back to why the lesson was necessary at all. A middle-aged logistics officer does not get a Hummer license because the army has drivers to spare. He gets it because the trucks still have to reach the unit, the convoys still have to go in, and there are not enough younger hands to do it. The learner's plate on the back window is almost funny. What it points to is not.