On Friday morning we woke to a phone call. There was a lockdown across the Gaza area, intelligence that something might be about to happen. My unit has a job when that call comes. We secure the inside of the base, gate to gate, and we are meant to do it in seven minutes.
Our guys were up and moving. Within those minutes they were spread across the whole base, in position, ready to act. From the outside it looked like exactly what it should be, a unit that answers.
We could have done it in three.
I keep returning to those missing four minutes, and to the reason behind them. When we went room to room waking people, many of the soldiers had nothing to put on. On this base no one owns more than a single uniform, and some of the men own none at all. The ones who have one had it hanging up somewhere, still wet, washed overnight, because a man who spends a day in the heat of Gaza under a vest, ceramic plates and a helmet comes back with it soaked through. He cleans it or he wears it filthy the next day. So on Friday morning they borrowed. Grown men, some of them fathers, ran to their positions in uniforms three sizes too big, a few that would not close at the front.
It is worth saying who lives on this base, because it is not one kind of soldier. There are the mechanics who drive out to recover the cars and tanks that break down inside Gaza, behind enemy lines, and get them running again. There are the drivers who take supplies in and bring the empty trucks out, every single day. There is the combat unit that guards the base itself and rides at the front and the back of the convoys moving through Gaza. There is the military police that holds and secures the ground around us. And there are many more, each with a task the others depend on. Every one of them lives with the same problem. One uniform if they are lucky, and for some of them not even that.
Thank God nothing happened. There was no incident. But it was real, and it could be real again on any morning, and the next time the distance between three minutes and seven could be the thing that counts.
The shortage of gear in this army is not a secret. What still stops me is how basic the missing piece is. Some of these men do not have a single uniform to their name, and not one of them has a spare. The IDF cannot put two sets on every soldier so that one is clean and dry while the other is being washed, and in too many cases it has not put even one.
Sit with that for a moment. The readiness of a trained soldier, on a base beside Gaza, can come down to whether his laundry has dried. For some of them there is not even that, because there is no uniform to wash. The reason a civilian like me is buying uniforms at all is that the generosity of donors has quietly become part of how this army keeps its soldiers supplied. Every set of gear we bring in covers something the system did not.
That is why I have pushed so hard to secure tactical uniforms, the one kind we are actually able to buy and deliver. People tell me I am crazy. They ask why soldiers need tactical uniforms, why that specific item, why it matters. What I am really funding is a uniform on a soldier's back, so that when he is called to respond the only open question is the mission and never whether he owns something that fits. It means a soldier at home, off duty, out of the reserves for the moment, can answer an emergency call already dressed and ready to move. Alongside the uniforms I am raising for chest rigs and straps with attachment points, the gear they use every day, so that it is on them and working before any alarm sounds.
Our men responded quickly on Friday, and I am proud of them. We succeeded. What I want to close is the margin. We were ready and still four minutes slower than we should have been, for a reason no soldier should ever have to give. That margin is cheap to close, and closing it is the difference between a base defended well and a base defended completely.
So I am raising $10,000. The figure is not abstract. It puts a proper uniform on every soldier on our base, including the men who have none today, and a spare so that readiness never again depends on the wash. It turns a borrowed shirt that will not button into a soldier who is dressed and ready before the phone rings.
There is a promise built into this army, that it looks after the people who look after it. On Friday morning I watched that promise come up four minutes short, for the smallest and most fixable of reasons. I would like to make sure it never comes up short again.
To donate and help our unit:
US (501c3 tax deductible): https://givebutter.com/back-to-basics
Israel, UK, Canada, etc.. (tax deductible): https://my.israelgives.org/en/fundme/27633 (please mark "UNIFORMS")