I come from Buenos Aires Argentina. In the beginning of 1977, some months after the army coup in Argentina, I had to go into the army. Mine was the first group that had to go into the army when we were eighteen years old. Before that people went into the army at twenty one. So we were really really very young. And it was a very hard—situation—very young soldiers having to go kill innocent people, making them disappear. We had to get involved in very nasty things that we didn't want to get involved in. And me personally, I had another situation at that time. By the time I had to go to the army, my former girlfriend just had disappeared, my best friend had disappeared. So I really didn't know what to do. But this wasn't something I could just avoid. I really had to go. I didn't feel brave enough to do any kind of thing, to flee the country, or anything. So I went to the army.
The mother of a friend, who was a psychiatrist, told me once, "I can help you. Just they can believe you're crazy." But I wasn't brave enough to do that either. So first day, we had to be there I think it was something like six in the morning. It was summer. Summer in Buenos Aires can be very very hot. We spent about the whole day under the sun. We sitting on asphalt. Very very ugly. The sergeants and corporals they were just walking around us, kicking us. We were treated very very badly. In the evening they gave us army clothing. If you were tall they gave you short, small clothing. If you were small like me, they gave you very very large clothing. If your feet were big, you had small shoes—you know—every possible way to make you feel bad was good for them. And in the middle of the night, we hear some shooting. And then the officers came into the room. We were about three hundred some young soldiers, our very first night. They came into our room, shouting, screaming, hitting the metal bars of the bed frames with their sticks. We had to jump out of our beds in our underwear. Some of the kids were crying, shouting, pissing in their pants. It was complete madness. Meanwhile, the shooting kept on outside. Meanwhile they made us do squats for an hour, while the officers were walking behind us and kicking us in the balls.
That was the first night. Then, about four in the morning, we went to sleep for another hour, and then the day began. When we came outside, there was a very old car, full of holes. It seems that this car with a single person in it just broke in front of one of the walls of the army quarters. And at that point, everyone was so crazy that everybody just started shooting. They killed the man. But it was just a detail of the kind of ugly things that happened at the time. Right then I made the decision that there was no way I could stay a whole year in the army. I never liked the army, but I thought I had to do it, I was called to do it. There was no legal way I could avoid, but then I said. "No. This is not for me. It's not just that I don't agree. It's much more than that."
Then in the morning we had a medical exam—all the 300 of us were completely naked outside. There was an nurse officer who was walking one by one and asking, "Do you have anything to declare?" And I saw that of these 300 kids, only ten or twelve made one step forward. One gave one reason—asthma, and another had, well, all different things. And when it was my turn I just --- I was already comedian at the time. I started working when I was fourteen, fifteen years old in Argentina, and I said to myself, "Well, I have to do something."
I walked one step forward, and I said, "I have some nervous problems." And this guy looked at me, and I think he believed it could be true, so at that moment I became part of the probably sick people group. That means that we have to undergo a series of tests. It depended on what kind of disease you said you had. And doctors would decide if you were really sick or not. If they decided you were not, you were going to have a very very bad and very very long time in the army. If they thought you were sick, you were out.
For a whole month, thirty days, 24 hours a day, I was playing the fool. I walked very slowly. I spoke slowly. I was very slow in everything I did. Every time they were a bit rough, I started crying. I really pushed myself to the limit, but after a month they decided I had to go to the army hospital, two or three times a week, to make tests. We had to put on civilian clothing and form a walking line. We had one army officer in the back, in civilian clothing, and they said, "If I see any of you looking at someone, talking to someone in the street, I will kill you all."
That was our every day's bread. For one month we had that. After a month I had a speech by an army colonel saying, "You sure you're sick? Because if you're not sick, the shame of not having done your part for the country will follow you all your life." Of course at that moment I started to feel that things were really right, that I was about to get out of there. He gave me a letter. When I went back to army quarters that day I couldn't see what was in the letter, because it was closed, but that very same evening. An officer came to me and said, "Oh, shame on you. You can't go tonight because we can't let you go in the night, but tomorrow morning you are out of here. You piece of garbage." He insulted me in many ways. I couldn't really laugh at that moment, but the thing is that it worked.
Something I couldn't know at that time is that not only my fellow soldiers had to kill people, they had to participate in all kinds of ugly things they didn't want to do. And there was no way they could refuse without risking their lives—is that a few months later the Argentinean dictatorship started fighting with the Chilean dictatorship and they had a little war, for a few months, on the southern border of Patagonia. So many of my fellow soldiers found themselves in a real war. Not only in a civil war, a hidden war—but in also a real war against another army, just because two crazy Generals decided they wanted to fight for I don't know what piece of mountain.
But by that time, I was already in Israel. That was the first thing I did when I got out of the army.
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My great grandfather's name was Abis, and they lived in Russia, and this was, I believe during the time of the Russo-Japanese war. My great grandfather realized that there were a lot of Jews being drafted and very few of them coming back. And he himself was called up. There was another Jew in the village who came back as a corpse. His name was Garber. And my great grandfather took the toe tag basically off the corpse and took that as his name—and as a dead person emigrated to America. So my mother's family name ever since has been Garber.
My father's family is from Burma and India and his mother is born in India and his father in Burma, and they're Sephardic Jews. During the war they were in Burma and they got bombed out and had to go to London and got bombed out again and ended up in the United States. And his two brothers got drafted. They were in their twenties so it must have been the Korean War. My father's father got injured. He got a spinal injury and ended up in a wheelchair. My father ended up having to support his mother and the other three children from the age of 18, so they ended up not drafting him out of hardship. So he's the only one in the family who didn't get drafted. He ended up working and going to college part time and trying to make a living for everyone else.
