Pumpkinflowers (14 page)

42

O
NE NIGHT A
dozen of us laid an ambush not far from the militia position at Red Pepper. The army informed our friends from the South Lebanon Army that we were there, so they wouldn't shoot at us. It seems clear this is how Hezbollah found out. It's hard to blame the militiamen; by this time they understood that we were leaving and that they were on the wrong side. The air started to whisper soon after we arrived, and I lay down on the ground with my hands over my head. The first impact was a hundred yards away. We scattered, and I found myself crouching behind a boulder with a blond medic from a religious kibbutz in southern Israel.

There was another hiss. We both made ourselves as small as possible and stuck fingers in our ears, which I think was mainly something to do with our hands. A few yards away I saw three others behind a different boulder and heard the platoon's clown saying, We're going to die, we're going to die! But he was joking, and the other two were cracking up.

Hear, O Israel! cried the soldier, that being the prayer Jews say before death, and the other two laughed harder. There was another hiss and another impact. I knew there would be three or four more before the Hezbollah gunners stopped. The medic looked at me. He was pale, but he didn't say, I'm scared. He said, This isn't funny. As the sergeant I was one of the people in charge, and the implication was that I was responsible for this not being funny.

I told him everything would be fine, that it would be over in a second. This isn't funny, he said again, his tone rising. He was right. He had once treated two tank crewmen on a table in the mess, one in a coma and one without legs, so he knew this better than I. But admitting it wasn't funny was like the moment when a cartoon animal, having run off a cliff, renders itself vulnerable to gravity by realizing it is in midair. Laughter was our only cover out here. I was impatient with him.

One of our favorite jokes in those days was that we would come back to Lebanon one day as tourists. We would float down the Litani River on inner tubes and hike along the ridge. We would eat at the little restaurant on the riverbank, the one we passed on the convoys. We would return to the hilltop. We would sip coffee in Nabatieh. Maybe we would knock on the door of the Red Villa—maybe we would be invited inside and point to a hole in the roof and say, “I made that,” and everyone would laugh. We would find the Babe.

We cast longing glances at the restaurant on the riverbank when we passed in our convoys and nudged each other and said, One day. Mainly these were just jokes about the absurdity of our lives. It's not that we actually expected this to happen, though in those years it didn't seem impossible. I believed peace was the default and conflict the anomaly, and so expected peace to arrive as a matter of course. In 1999 it still seemed the Middle East was changing for the better, and Lebanon still looked like the end of something bad, not the beginning of something worse.

43

U
NLIKE AVI, I
lacked the inclination or fortitude to write much. The only record I created while at the Pumpkin was a long letter, or maybe two, to a cellist in the Annex, the Toronto neighborhood where I was born. It must have seemed to her a barely decipherable interplanetary transmission. I would love to see these letters but have no idea where they, or the cellist, are now.

We went up and down the hill checking the side of the road for bombs, first the sniffer dog and its handler, then the tracker, then the platoon stretched out in the underbrush. We learned to recognize every rock in case a new one had appeared since our last sweep, the kind made of polyurethane and concealing a bomb. We eyed gum wrappers with suspicion as possible guerrilla traces. I tore my pants on thorns and sweated through my shirts and wiped my right hand on my webbing when it became too slick on the rifle grip. I set my feet down with care. Once, as we descended, I told a soldier in an armored personnel carrier to load the mounted machine gun, and he did, but it was already loaded. I was standing on the road in front of him. There were three or four bangs, the asphalt jumped, and little puffs of dust rose next to my feet. It was so close that we couldn't laugh about this right away but had to wait a few minutes.

Anyone with knowledge of other militaries would probably be surprised at how wholesome life was on the hill. Drinking, for example, was strictly forbidden, and if the rule was violated to any serious extent I never knew of it. I never encountered drugs, either, though years later I was informed of the ingenious double bottom of a Pringles can in the possession of one of the medics. There were no fistfights, few tattoos, and no pinups on the walls. The only picture I remember was of the curly hair and beatific visage of Meir Ariel, our poet, the prophet of an ordinary day at the beach, the “king anointed with salt, crowned in wreaths of seaweed”—this was before his music achieved the fame it deserved, and just after he died from the bite of a diseased tick.

There was a guitar, and a few books that were passed around. But the main form of relaxation during that tour involved a collection of videocassettes sent by one soldier's mother and played until they disintegrated. The most popular was
Starship Troopers
, about a war between futuristic soldiers and giant bugs. The men didn't seem to need much for life to be bearable inside the concrete bubble. But I spent little time in front of the television and instead found jobs to do up in the trench, watching the landscape, making sure the guns were greased and the ammunition crates full. The Pumpkin's new fortifications made our existence at the outpost easier, and I worried that they were making us soft. I didn't think the Hezbollah fighters were watching
Starship Troopers
, though now I wonder why I was so sure.

The soldiers seemed jumpier. There were more instances of guards opening fire at shapes in the night, and each time this happened I would awake to the thump of bullets from guns overhead and to the loudspeaker repeating, “Outpost attack,” roll from my bunk, land on someone else, throw on my gear and run up to the trench to see tracers rebounding crazily off rocks around the hill. It was often the fault of a fox who skulked around the embankments and liked to startle the sentries. To the best of my knowledge the fox was never harmed.

Our company commander was Makov, a broad-shouldered officer with dark hair sprouting around the circumference of his collar, and a crooked gait that nearly kept him out of the infantry. Makov had arrived at the scene of the helicopter crash two years before and helped remove the bodies—but was careful, he said, not to look at the faces—and then went back to his sector in the security zone. A week or so after the crash he was hiding in a bush with an ambush squad when guerrillas discovered them and opened fire, and the guy next to Makov rolled onto him, bleeding, and others just slumped over, and what Makov did was charge out of the bush screaming
Forward
and shooting like a madman, and the guerrillas turned and ran.

I recently read Vasily Grossman's story about the pregnant Red Army commissar in Berdichev, and when he described the commissar's beloved—a gruff commander lost while charging with his men across a bridge—in my mind it was Makov. Like nearly all the officers to whom I answered as a soldier at the very bottom of Israel's infantry forces, he was competent and morally sound. His strengths were less in tactical finesse than in an instinctive understanding of the important things: he wanted to engage the enemy and destroy them, and he loved his men and wanted to protect them. After the tour he invited all of his officers and sergeants to his wedding, and it was a surprise to find that someone like that had parents and normal clothes.

Another memorable character around the outpost at this time was Amstel, a lithe and friendly sniffer dog—a German shepherd, maybe, or a similar breed. She was good company and good at her job. When we set out to check the access road for bombs she streaked ahead like a brown torpedo upon being released by her handler, then bounded back for a treat. She was around the outpost when off duty, and I became attached to her. She nuzzled me and wagged her tail, cheer and affection being qualities otherwise absent on the hill. A few months later, near another outpost, she triggered a bomb. Her handler was wounded and Amstel disappeared, never to be seen again. Perhaps she was spooked and ran away into the brush, changing from a trained Israeli army dog into a Lebanese stray. Or, as seems more likely, she had simply been blown to pieces, which is what she was for.

44

N
OW BLUTREICH IS
the best rock climber in Israel, but then he was just a young lieutenant with his soldiers, the Pumpkin's greenest platoon. It was the spring of 2000 and it was almost over, that was clear. Almost but not quite. My own time in the army had just ended, so for me it was over anyway. I believe that by this time, like many Israelis, I had replaced one simple idea—“The Mission: Protecting the Northern Communities”—with another, that ceding the security zone to our enemies would placate them. The government's deadline for a withdrawal was close, and few seemed to believe in the zone anymore. But the outposts were still there. It was that arbitrary window at the end of a war, a time we might name for Pvt. Henry Gunther, twenty-three, of Baltimore, Maryland, killed after the final German surrender of 1918 but one minute before the armistice technically came into effect.

The entire position was now covered in a new kind of black camouflage net that was supposed to make movement behind it invisible. The soldiers almost never went outside anymore, because the army was worried about losing men so close to the end. The guard posts were empty. Instead soldiers sat in the trench looking at screens attached to cameras that they moved with joysticks. The cameras had been installed after the guerrillas turned out to be adept at hitting guard posts with antitank missiles. That January they killed a soldier at one base, and a week later they killed three more somewhere else. Not long after he arrived at the Pumpkin, Blutreich went inside one of the posts and found it still charred. When he bent down to look at a dark patch on the floor he saw it was a piece of someone's scalp.

Journalists had begun reporting that soldiers were scared to serve in the security zone. “No one wants to be the last person killed in Lebanon,” one reporter wrote, in what became one of the themes of those months. This was true. At Beaufort Castle was a kid named Tzahi who didn't want to be the last person killed in Lebanon either, but he was.

“The soldiers entering Lebanon project a sense of dejection,” read a subheadline in the daily
Yediot Ahronot
. “They feel that they're going to die, and they don't know why.” The words accompanied a photograph of a helmeted soldier looking at the camera from behind sandbags. As it happened, the soldier was me. A news photographer had arrived once during an earlier tour, and an editor must have pulled it from a file.

According to the accepted story, the fear and uncertainty of the final months in Lebanon caused the soldiers to fall apart. A movie made about this time,
Beaufort
, gives that impression. This works as a dramatic flourish and makes it feel like the Vietnam movies we've all seen: soldiers battling their own demons and each other, struggling to remain sane while pursued by a faceless enemy in a conflict shorn of politics and context. It makes for a better plot, and were this a work of fiction I would be tempted. But it didn't happen that way. Whatever the soldiers hanging around the border liked to tell reporters, the soldiers I knew, the ones in the dangerous bases inside Lebanon, didn't fall apart. The companies on the line functioned until the very end. I feel both entitled and obligated to say this as the soldier who served for a moment as the poster boy for our demoralization.

Being imprisoned behind the fortifications didn't make the soldiers feel safer. It's easier to imagine things when you're passive. One of the militia posts nearby was hit one day by something big, no one knew what it was, and the soldiers at the Pumpkin were told that Hezbollah now had a weapon that could penetrate the concrete roof. The soldiers thought it might be some kind of drone, but the army wasn't telling them anything, only that the next target was the Pumpkin. In retrospect we know it was a substantial rocket manufactured in Iran, which was bad enough, but the secrecy made it seem even worse, a “Judgment Day weapon,” as one of them remembered later on. There was a rumor that rescue teams with cranes and jackhammers were standing by in Israel to come and dig the garrison's remnants from the ruins.

On the day it was supposed to happen the last Pumpkin commander was up in the trench during Readiness with Dawn, waiting. He was a wry twenty-eight-year-old named Kahana. A few shells whizzed into the embankments and wounded one of the surveillance guys, but that wasn't it yet. It wasn't big enough. Kahana crouched, folding his long limbs into the trench, and something hissed in from the west. This time he felt the concussion in the pit of his stomach and the whole hill shuddered. When he peeked out he saw a dust cloud rising just to the north. The thing had missed. A few Israeli jets were in the air waiting to destroy the launcher once it fired, and they swooped down, and the soldiers never heard more about it. If nothing else, the incident shows that if you're facing men dug in and immobile on hostile ground, you don't need to do much but leave them to their imaginations.

45

T
RUCKS ARRIVED CARRYING
hundreds of olive discs, twenty-five-kilogram mines, which would blow up the Pumpkin when the pullout order was given. There were so many that the garrison had nowhere to put them all, so they stacked them under beds and inside unused ovens. The pair of army engineers who appeared with the explosives told the soldiers not to worry, because the mines weren't live until they inserted detonators. But that wasn't as reassuring as the engineers seemed to think, and no one was sure that if the Hezbollah gunners scored a direct hit now the whole place wouldn't explode.

The soldiers packed all unnecessary gear and sent it down to Israel. The telephone line was cut. Most of the soldiers were sent down themselves, and by the end it was just Kahana, the commander, and Blutreich and his new platoon, not even a year in the army, and a few tank crewmen—maybe two dozen in all. When they walked around the trench at night the very dimensions of the outpost seemed to have changed. The distance between the guard posts felt longer. The hill became darker, more desolate, as the landscape closed in and the outpost slipped from Israeli hands.

Things were pretty ragged by the end. One day a few South Lebanon Army militiamen on their way past the Pumpkin in an armored vehicle were hit by a mine or a rocket, and one of their officers stumbled up to the Pumpkin's gate without one of his hands. The engineers began distributing the mines around the outpost, but there were still no detonators, they said, so there was no reason for concern.

The end came ahead of schedule, on a Sunday in late May. A civilian parade organized by Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon proper into the security zone and approached a South Lebanon Army outpost. The Lebanese militiamen fled, and their commander cannily joined the marchers. There were more processions toward militia outposts the next day. When our aircraft fired at the road in front of the marchers to hold them back they just walked off the asphalt and continued in the brush, daring the pilots to shoot them. The pilots didn't shoot. After that the militiamen near the Pumpkin abandoned Red Pepper, Cypress, and Citrus. And just like that, the security zone disintegrated.

That evening the order was given to arm the mines and prepare to abandon the Pumpkin at 11 p.m. There was no one friendly anymore for miles around, and if the soldiers waited too long they might have to fight their way home. The engineers went around priming the mines, but then a different order arrived, everything was postponed again, and the soldiers prepared for one more day.

The guerrillas knew it was the end and wanted the Israelis to leave under fire. I suppose they figured there was no point in conserving their ammunition if there wouldn't be anyone to shoot at tomorrow. The barrage started early the next morning and hardly let up after that. At nightfall Kahana, the company commander, said again: We're leaving at eleven. Before the appointed time Kahana pulled the sentries from the guard posts. It was quite possibly the first time the Pumpkin had been unguarded in nearly the entire lifetime of some of the soldiers who were there that last day.

The men ran down to the tanks and armored porcupines. Inside the outpost they left a metal tray of uneaten chicken schnitzels, which were destined to remain forever under the rubble. Perhaps an archaeologist would find the tray someday and ponder it as a relic from the conflicts of antiquity, a modest sacrifice to the war gods.

The little procession of vehicles waited two hundred yards from the outpost, not even close to the distance the safety manuals mandated from an explosion the size of the one coming. The engineers ran a white fuse down from the hilltop to a small hand trigger with two plastic handles, like one of those devices squeezed to relieve stress. Kahana had the trigger. Just then the barrage lifted, for some reason, and things were quiet.

There was a flash to the northeast and then a boom—Outpost Basil was gone. It was eleven o'clock.

Something flared a few miles to the south and Blutreich, the lieutenant, saw the outpost at Beaufort Castle blow up—white, red, and orange, explosion after explosion, the sky illuminated as if the sun were rising behind the crusader fort an hour before midnight. That's when Hezbollah opened up again, heavier than before, but it wasn't too bad because they were hitting the Pumpkin, which was empty now. There were jets roaring around, bombing guerrilla positions in the hills to the north, helicopters overhead, drones too, as if the whole air force had come out for this final act. The two dozen men clustered on the hill felt small.

Nearly all the outposts were gone, the last soldiers on the roads moving south toward Israel. Every officer in the army seemed to be yelling on the radio. Someone was saying one of the tanks leaving Beaufort was hit. A drone operator saw it burning. Authoritative voices shouted instructions and ordered other authoritative voices to shut up and clear the frequency. It was like the apocalypse, Blutreich remembers, the night sky alive with aircraft and the hills of south Lebanon emitting fire as if they had been volcanoes all along, merely dormant for all of the years of our presence.

The young officer looked over at the company commander and saw him grip the trigger. Blutreich ducked and plugged his ears. The commander's fist clenched, pressing the handles together. Nothing happened.

Kahana pumped the trigger again, and then a few more times.

He took two soldiers and sprinted back up toward the empty outpost, running the fuse through his hand and finding it intact. When he reached the entrance a tank on another hill spotted figures moving around the Pumpkin and thought they were guerrillas, because it was after 11 p.m. and the soldiers were supposed to be gone. The tank commander said on the radio that he was about to fire, and Kahana heard it all but couldn't break through—the radio was so busy you couldn't get a word in, so no one heard him screaming, It's us, it's us. It was a bad moment, but someone else got to the tank just in time.

Kahana left the outpost again, dispirited, and rejoined his band of soldiers downhill. He had run out of ideas. He would be the only commander who failed to carry out the order to destroy his outpost. The Pumpkin would be the only base left standing.

He had the trigger in his fist and was still pumping, but he had given up, which was why his back was turned when the charge finally took.

Blutreich was standing in one of the vehicles looking up at the concrete structure atop the hill, and he thought he was dead, that's how bright the flash was, like a thousand cameras going off at once. For years he couldn't be photographed. He thought at first that he'd been hit by a missile. By the time he determined that he was alive the sky was raining ash and chips of concrete.