Pumpkinflowers (11 page)

33

T
WO MEN I
never met, Thomas Dodd and Archibald Affleck, both happened to arrive in the British line in France the same year, 1916, the former with a battery of the Royal Field Artillery and the latter with one of the Canadian divisions. Thomas was from Chester, England, and Archie from the Ottawa Valley. Both survived.

A series of grand and modest events ended up linking them to me: the profound impact of their war on Europe and the Middle East, the upending in those years of the well-ordered world of their parents and grandparents and the brutalizing of the collective human mind, the collapse of the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires, Lord Balfour's famous declaration of 1917 in favor of a “national home” for the Jews. And historical developments of a lesser order: the marriage during the next war of Archibald's son, a Canadian lieutenant who had survived the sinking of his Royal Navy corvette by a German mine, to Thomas's daughter, who followed her husband across the ocean from England to Toronto in 1945 and gave birth to a daughter of her own. And then the marriage of this daughter, my mother, to the son of two Jewish escapees from Eastern Europe—a milliner whose family was consumed by the Germans along the Bug River in Poland in 1940 and a tailor who had fled the Russian advance at Lemberg in 1914 as a child. These events and others conspired to place me, the great-grandson of Thomas and Archie, in circumstances whose politics would have baffled them both but whose physical trappings would have been familiar. Members of our family watched the twentieth century begin and end from a sandbagged trench.

Even the language we spoke in Lebanon wouldn't have seemed entirely foreign to them, though neither is likely ever to have heard a word of Hebrew. We described our journey into the security zone as “going up to the line,” for example, and our mission there as “holding” it. Some might recognize Readiness with Dawn as a descendant of the dawn stand-tos that made such an impression on the Great War poets, the same “highly ritualized distillation of the state of anxious stalemate,” as Paul Fussell described it in
Th
e Great War and Modern Memory
. I don't mean to suggest that our conflict was in a league with theirs, only to note the migration of words and genes and to point out what any student of middle-school chemistry knows, which is that things are made of odd pieces of older things.

Within a few years elements of the security zone war would, in turn, appear elsewhere and become familiar to everyone in the West: Muslim guerrillas operating in a failed and chaotic state; small clashes in which the key actor is not the general but the lieutenant or private; the use of a democracy's sensitivities, public opinion, and free press as weapons against it. In this kind of war events are so prolonged that no single soldier can see them the whole way through and so fragmentary it is hard to assemble a coherent history afterward. The old staff-history lingo of “flanking movements” and “divisional feints” becomes useless, and the relative rarity of death leaves time to focus on individuals in a way that sometimes makes death harder to bear. If my ancestors' great war was the first of the twentieth century, I believe our little one was the first of the twenty-first.

It was a week or two after our arrival that I finally heard a hiss in the air above my guard post. I didn't react because I always thought shells whistled. This was just a soft whisper in the sky, as if the universe was imparting a secret. In a way this was true: the secret, one familiar to Thomas and Archie, was that my continued existence on earth was now a matter of parabolas. The whisper built in volume before ending in a concussion that shook the hill, and then I understood and crouched under the parapet. “Launch, launch,” said our loudspeaker, and the sky leaned toward me again and whispered something into my ear.

34

T
H
AT SPRING A
squad of religious soldiers appeared at the Pumpkin armed with blowtorches. They had been sent by the military rabbinate to prepare the outpost for the festival of Passover, when the consumption of bread is forbidden. The visitors worked furiously outside the outpost gate, in ill-fitting helmets and flak jackets issued for this rare trip into a combat zone, scouring all of our pots and cutlery against the backdrop of the Lebanese hills. They left behind crates of army matzah. The festive meal, the seder, is one of the most important events for Jewish families in Israel, and not being home for it was considered a great misfortune.

When the night of the festival arrived we sat on the triple-decker bunks, forty or fifty of us, the Bedouin trackers, everyone. One of the officers led us through the course of the seder, interrupted by messages coming from the war room and by the hourly rotation of the sentries. We followed along in army-issue copies of the
haggadah
, which contains the order of the meal and the texts read aloud by participants; I still have mine, hurriedly inscribed in ballpoint pen,
Outpost Pumpkin, Passover 1998.
One of the holiday foods is a paste made of apples, dates, and nuts called
haroset
, meant to evoke the mortar of the Israelite slaves in Egypt. It turned out the army had manufactured little silver vacuum packets with balls of the stuff, like astronaut food.

That was the best illustration I've experienced of how ritual can remind us who we are and keep us moving through the year no matter how extreme the circumstances. We were stranded on a hilltop beyond our borders. Not many of the soldiers observed religious law. It would have been entirely logical to skip the seder. And yet this wasn't even considered. It was obvious to us that we would have a seder, that matzah and
haroset
would appear, that soldiers would risk their lives on the convoy roads to clean the dishes. No one thought twice about it.

My sense of our place in the landscape was primitive in those days. I still thought of us as Israelis, as something new and foreign in the world I saw beyond the trench. I prayed sometimes with some others on the Sabbath and read lines like “The voice of the Lord breaks cedars, the Lord shatters the cedars of Lebanon,” which is from Psalms. And from the Song of Songs we have

With me from Lebanon, my bride

Come with me from Lebanon

Descend from Amana's peak

From the peaks of Senir and Hermon

From the dens of lions, from the hills of leopards

Once you begin looking for Lebanon in the Hebrew texts it's everywhere. So part of me must have understood the depth of the geographic connection even before I learned about the synagogues in Lebanese towns not far away, like Hamdoun and Tyre, abandoned with the exodus of the one million Jews of the Islamic world in my parents' lifetime. We weren't far from Aleppo, Syria, where just a few years before, in the early 1990s, the last Jews had shuttered a synagogue in use since Byzantine times. Most of these people remained in the Middle East, in Israel, and their children and grandchildren were with me in the trench. This was one of the things that made our situation different from that of an American soldier in Iraq.

I wouldn't want to give the impression that the Pumpkin was the scene of much thinking, though Israeli teenagers are more thoughtful than most, growing up as they do in a complicated place that demands their attention and forces them to assess their attitude toward it sooner or later, and faced early on with the awareness of grieving people and high stakes. On the hill at this time there was still no indication of the debate beginning to spread in Israel about whether we should be in Lebanon at all. There was a sign in the Pumpkin's mess hall that read
THE MISSION: DEFENDING THE NORTHERN COMMUNITIES
, and we believed this.

There was no ideology at all at the outpost, as far as I could see, no militarism and certainly no overt patriotism. For this generation Ben-Gurion and Herzl were streets. Were you inclined to speak seriously about such things you would be ridiculed, and no one was so inclined. The lives of the soldiers weren't governed by ideas. Neither was there any real hatred of the enemy, which seems so odd to me now that I asked a few of my friends if my memory was accurate. They agreed that although this might not be true of every unit in the army, it was true of ours. We were not averse to the idea of killing the enemy if we had to and would have been proud to have succeeded. But none of us remembered much animosity.

What kept things going on the hill was instead the usual dynamic in a small combat unit, as present in my unit as it had been in Avi's: the desire on the part of young men to be accepted and appreciated by their comrades and a fear of disappointing them. So successfully were these ties created in our platoon that they persist years later, when most of us have little in common. I would do any favor for any of them if asked at any time—not out of love, because we don't all love each other, but out of a residual loyalty that you would expect to go away but hasn't. We still meet at weddings, and for a barbecue every year on Independence Day. Shai, former sniper and current distributor of gourmet pasta; Dani the academic and Yoni the pension consultant; Ofir the shiatsu masseur; Adam the lawyer; Nadav the kindergarten teacher; Shachar, who does something for the Defense Ministry, no one knows exactly what. Ziv the carpenter doesn't make it much anymore, because it's hard to get around with eight sons.

Harel comes with his wife, Hila, a social worker, and their four boys. Wissam, one of our sergeants from basic training, who is still in the army and lives in a Druze town on Mount Carmel, usually shows up with his wife, Sabrin, an English teacher, and their kids Adham and Ward. (Wissam showed me one night in the desert that the stars of Orion's belt form the shaft of an arrow pointing north, and since then the great hunter and the Druze sergeant have been conflated in my mind.) Sometimes, after spending weeks together in the forced intimacy of the outpost during that first tour, we went home on leave, and only a day or two later arranged to meet of our own volition on the beach at Tel Aviv. No one understood us but us, so we needed to be together. In this country if you identify someone as a friend from the army, it is recognized as something different than saying friend. It's a different category.

35

T
H
E PUMPKIN FINALLY
introduced itself to me on the night Natalie was going to get undressed. I remember the anticipation with clarity because of the events of that evening but also because of Natalie's unusual beauty—she was like an exquisite Sephardic elf, bewitching even clothed.

The old TV set that struggled from one of the top bunks to pick up the transmissions from Israel was advertising the upcoming episode of a dramatic series of no memorable merit. It starred Natalie, an actress hardly older than us. In the advertisement, or at least in the version replayed in my memory, you saw Natalie engaged in conversation before her right hand went toward her left hip and her left hand toward her right, and she lifted the bottom of her shirt toward her head, and there was nothing underneath—but at the crucial moment the camera cut away. The idea was that the viewer would have to watch the episode to see the rest.

Amid our menial lives the importance of this moment of televised nudity can't be overstated, however pathetic it seems now. I believe that at this time most of us had yet to encounter the real thing. After rotating out of the line and boarding a civilian bus home a girl soldier would sometimes slip in next to me—a clerk or instructor coming from one of the safe bases inside Israel where such olive-drab unicorns roamed free, their uniforms concealing wild pinks and reds—and nothing more than the scent of synthetic flowers from her hair would render me senseless, sending my head falling forward, forcing my eyelids shut and the air from my lungs, my fingers clutching the grip of my rifle until my faculties returned. So potent was the effect of women's shampoo on my nervous system in those days that I am still vulnerable to it now.

When darkness arrived on the night of the television show the sergeants inspected the sandbags and machine guns around the perimeter, as they did each evening. I checked the battery on my night goggles, pressing my eyes against the rubber sockets and seeing the world in green. Things became more focused. We had been in the army for ten months and on the line for two. Less had happened so far than we had expected or might have hinted to friends at home. The hour of the TV broadcast was approaching when a lookout on another hill spotted three guerrillas moving up our ridge toward the Forest.

The message reached the Pumpkin on the radio. Harel summoned us, and I raced with him and seven others from the bunker to a vehicle that lurked like an enormous porcupine outside the gate, its back bristling with antennae and guns. There were two such vehicles on the hill, old Centurion tanks that the army had refitted to carry infantry in Lebanon, removing the turret and cannon and adding layers of armor to protect us from rockets and roadside bombs. I'm grateful for those efforts, which enabled the writing of this book.

One was equipped in front with a contraption of metal wheels that spun to detonate mines, and one was not. The choice was a matter of life and death, though this was not immediately clear. We took the latter, and the vehicle with the wheels was left behind. The driver slipped through his hatch, and when he turned the ignition the porcupine roared and belched a vile black cloud.

Four men were inside and the remaining four manned machine guns on the roof, legs in the vehicle, body exposed from the chest up: in front were Harel and our platoon sergeant, and in the rear I stood facing right, with my back to another soldier whose barrel pointed left. At my feet sat Yoni. Yoni was a medic, though this was purely a matter of accreditation, not experience, and he had never seen a wounded human being in his life. Yoni and I spent a lot of time during that tour singing some of the hits of the Backstreet Boys. I didn't know any of the good war poetry back then, in English or Hebrew, and wouldn't have appreciated it if I had. I was the radioman but wouldn't have known, for example, what to make of this radioman's prayer, part of which I translate here from the Hebrew:

Lord of the Universe

Please, increase your transmission strength

here I

can't hear, don't know

if once again you've stuck a metal flower in the antenna's lapel.

You're so gentle. Why

are you so soft, why are you always

civilian

Can you hear me clearly, over.

Roger, you too sound cut off, you

sound amputated, you

Are in a valley, deployed three-sixty. Hills

and a different Sea of Galilee. Please

apprise me of your transmission strength, with radar

we can't see your face, why

are you not on treads, why

are you not fighting, should we

send you a mechanized patrol, I

am full of faith

that it won't arrive and won't come back . . .

A new father and student of economics wrote that before he was called up by his reserve unit in the fall of 1973. He died along the Suez Canal; his name was Be'eri Hazak. And then there were the Backstreet Boys and “You are my fire / The one desire.” Whether we knew it or not, as Israeli soldiers in the last years of the last century these were the poetic poles of our existence. It was the latter that Yoni and I had been singing. There was something comforting about it, and we weren't looking for insight.

Our vehicle rumbled southward on its treads down a low rise and then began working up a trail toward the unknown confines of the Forest, where we were to intercept the three guerrillas. By this time the Forest was assumed to be a lethal warren of trip wires and mines. Several stashes of Hezbollah explosives had been discovered there, and a plan to defoliate it with chemicals had even been considered. We had never been inside. Our maps were practical affairs with elevation numbers, artillery targets, and code names, but here they might have read
Th
ere be monsters.

The vehicle strained to pull the weight of its armor up the hill, and when we finally made it I caught a last glimpse of the Pumpkin behind us. What had been the most dangerous place I could imagine now represented all that was familiar and safe. Then we tilted downward into the Forest with a shriek of springs and were alone.

I lifted my goggles and saw a green hand, mine, on the grip of the green machine gun mounted in front of me, a shiny green band of bullets running into the chamber from a box. Past the barrel was impenetrable vegetation and—an invisible fist slammed into my face and there was a red flash around the edges of the goggles and a low thump that I felt in my stomach but don't remember hearing and a hot breath of sulfur in my nostrils, perhaps not in that order, and I dropped inside the vehicle and must have blacked out for a moment.

The next thing I remember is Harel speaking into the receiver:
“Mit'an, mit'an
.
”
Later we learned that a Hezbollah team had buried a mortar shell under the trail and wired it to a large bomb buried a few yards back and to a claymore concealed in the bushes. The shell blew off our tread, the second bomb made a hole the size of a basketball in the belly armor, and the claymore sprayed my corner with pellets.

Eventually the term
improvised explosive device
would enter everyday English, but that was still a few years away, and all I had was the Hebrew military euphemism
mit'an
, which meant “payload.” Prototypes of growing efficiency were being perfected on us by masters of the art. They calibrated the distance between the trigger, which was the first mortar shell, and the other bombs based on a calculation of the length of our vehicles with the mine-exploding wheels mounted on the front. We took the vehicle that didn't have that device and which was thus shorter by a yard. So instead of exploding directly under and beside the men in the center of the vehicle, in which case several of us would have been dead, the bomb and the claymore went off in the rear. The bomb penetrated the engine and not the cabin, and the claymore pellets pocked the side and flew harmlessly through the air by my head. A lighter vehicle would have been destroyed with many or all of its passengers.

I felt wetness on my face and thought it might be blood, but when Yoni checked, our faces so close our helmets touched, he saw nothing but soot and sweat. Harel called each of us softly by name. Everyone was alive.

I forced my head back out into the air. The explosives had crippled our vehicle and the engine, directly behind me, was on fire. This needed to be dealt with quickly because of the ammunition we carried in crates and strapped to our bodies, and I was closest. I climbed onto the roof, aware of my exposure to whoever was lurking in the undergrowth. I assumed they were there. My chest and stomach were tight. I hoisted out one of the twenty-liter water jugs and poured it into the engine, which steamed and hissed and stopped burning, and then scrambled back into the safety of the vehicle and pressed my index finger to the cool curve of the machine gun trigger. I remember being conscious of the wholeness of my body. I tried to get my breathing in order and waited for them to attack from the bushes. There were three of them out there.

They didn't attack. But the guerrillas had a mortar squad ready elsewhere in the vicinity, and soon came the whisper and the ground shook. We ducked inside, closed the hatches, and huddled together by the glowing green light of the radio as the shells drew closer. They seemed not to know exactly where we were and so were shelling along the length of the trail. They passed us, then hit the Pumpkin a few times before ceasing on schedule; they knew how much time they needed to get away before our batteries got their coordinates and started shooting back. The alien whirring of the first Israeli shell was audible as it arced over our heads into Lebanon a few minutes later, but by then our opponents were probably sipping tea in someone's living room with their weapons stashed under a bed. Around this time, on a flickering screen not three hundred yards away, Natalie peeled off her shirt in front of the rest of the Pumpkin garrison.

While we waited to be towed there were a few weak attempts at humor. “What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. What does makes your mother stronger”—standard jokes for the time. They weren't as funny as the joke underlying the whole enterprise, the punch line of which was delivered by trackers sent out the next morning to investigate. A Hezbollah team, they found, had set the explosives sometime in the recent past. But there were no guerrilla tracks at all from the night before, just the hoof prints of three wild boars.