Within the casbah we would often go into houses to carry out mappings or 'straw widows': enter a house that has a vantage point, tell the family to stay in one room, take over the room with a window that has the best view or something like that, and watch over behavior in the street below. Another task we would carry out within the homes were just searches of sorts. Sometimes we were directed to search some house, but we would often choose a random house, enter it, conduct a search. Look through the closets a bit, open things, a little poking around, we tried hard not to make a mess. I was very uncomfortable in this situation, to randomly enter a person's home because they determined that I need to randomly select a house to enter and poke around through things for no apparent reason. Not to mention when intelligence said - when intelligence said, sometimes it felt as if there was no content behind it, it's just some kind of a chain that they want to 'perforate,' like bingo. They want to 'perforate' homes in a certain order. But when we chose randomly it felt completely void of content. I remember that they (the soldiers) treat people relatively nicely as the situation is unpleasant as is. They say 'please' in sentences or things like that, and I remember that they briefed us explicitly not to be polite because they said we were too polite and that we need to create deterrence of sorts, and they briefed us to be less polite as it's problematic.

Who briefed you?Our sergeant or platoon commander, someone of the commanding ranks. He said that such niceness is problematic. He said that he really understands us but that we have a particular role, and that we're creating problems and endangering ourselves and our comrades with our niceness, and that as such we should stop. When we speak we say a clear statement, we don't ask, we say so and that's how things need to work. That's the situation in which we live.