Inside the steel beasts of the Israeli desert

The author commanding a tank in a war exercise

I peered through the green-tinted thermal scope, with crosshairs over the black target. My right hand was sweating through my combat glove as I grasped the joystick. “A little down, a little left,” I mumbled to myself as I tilted the control stick and slid the crosshairs down to the middle of the tank I was firing at.

“Eeesh – fire!” I yelled through my mic, as I flipped the trigger cover up with my shooting finger and pulled back. Boom! The tank rocked back like a horse on its hind legs and a heat wave blew me back as the 120 mm shell exploded, hurtling downrange to the charred, tank-turned-target we had placed a few kilometres away from us. As my loader quickly prepared another shell, my gunner started firing the 7.62 mm machine gun, keeping a constant stream of fire flying downrange.

“Driver, back fast,” I yelled on the intercom, commanding my driver to reverse, take cover, load another shell and drive up to fire again. The engine spewed smoke and an unbearable heat hit my face as I manoeuvred the tank, tilting the joystick smoothly to the left to get a better angle of attack.

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“Fire!” I yelled again. This time, my gunner took the shot, sending another shell downrange many times the speed of sound into a gas-filled target, sending it up in flames. “Hit,” I said in the intercom as I watched the awesome explosion a kilometre or so away from me.

I was 19 and in the middle of my grand performance at the end of the Israel Defence Forces’ tank commanders school. The other tank commanders fighting with me in the mock war were between 18 and 20. We were all soloing in our Merkava 4 battle tanks, multi-million dollar machines that represent Israel’s military edge, commanding soldiers under us and firing tens of thousands of dollars worth of state-of-the-art weapons. It seemed amazing that anyone would let kids our age be responsible for these killing machines, and that the conductor of this orchestra was only a year or two older than us.

I wiped the sweat and sand out of my eyes. I was drenched. I took a minute gasping for air, as we repositioned for the second round of fighting.

We arranged the tanks in a long line and started to manoeuvre quickly across the long desert plane to a mock Arab town called the Lashab’eeyah, a massive expanse built to resemble Gaza City. As the tank sped across the desert, I held a handle in front of me to prevent my face from smashing into the turret (the commander stands in the tank with the upper third of his body outside of the vehicle).

As we approached the village, the tanks split into short columns of two or three. We each had a pre-selected entry point into the city. I entered town and sought cover behind a house, where I rendezvoused with the infantry division that was attached to me.

And that is when the real insanity of war set in.

All of a sudden, the mock infantry started firing at us. Our radio was blaring non-stop with reports of troop positions and orders from up high: “2AHeavy (my call sign), this is Eagle (the field intelligence), two dirties (terrorists), armed, 400 mikes north, between 31 and 32, confirm!”

The stress and pressure of the situation was paralysing. The Hebrew coming out of the radio was too fast to understand and the whistling of the bullets was hypnotizing. Even though it was fake, it felt like it was real. I wanted to curl up in a ball and pretend I didn’t exist, hoping that a stray bullet might hit me somewhere that wouldn’t do too much damage and give me a way out.

I finished commanders school shortly after that exercise. My graduating class held a ceremony in the fortress of Latrun, where we were given our Tank Commanders’ pin and the sergeant rank was pinned on our sleeves. We danced, sang and went home to our beds to hibernate for a week before we came back to receive the team we would be commanding for the next four months.

I flew home to Canada. I needed to breathe. It had been the hardest four months I had ever gone through – physically and mentally. I was worn out and tired from sleeping three or four hours a night. I had a broken finger, two dislocated shoulders and a banged up knee on the mend.

I came back two weeks later and took command of eight guys. I’d wake them up in the middle of the night and make them do push-ups on their knuckles, till they bled. Sometimes, I would even take away their rare weekend furloughs. But they loved me, and I loved them. They knew that no matter how tough I was, I had their backs. And I knew that no mater how mean I was and how much pain I caused them, they had mine.

I finished my army service a few years ago and now serve as a commander in a reserve battalion – the same battalion  my closest friend, Gilad Stuckelman, was killed in during the 2006 Lebanon War. Every few months, we take a week off from university and work to don our tank suits and guns, in preparation for the next war.

My friends may be well into their careers, but I don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, nothing they’ve done comes even close to my experience in the army. Moving away, and learning to survive on my own in a foreign country, commanding and being responsible for soldiers, making friends who would do anything for me, and me for them – nothing is comparable. If I could do it again, I would. 


Mike Domb is currently studying at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he is a Heseg Scholar.