Pumpkinflowers (8 page)

Part Two

22

T
H
E DAY AFTER
the two helicopters crashed, while the country was trying to get used to the number seventy-three, no survivors, they took someone from Avi's company to a room in Tel Aviv where the army had the coffins laid out in rows. They asked him to identify the guys inside, his friends. When they opened the lids he saw—well, he saw Israel's secret weapon, because it has never been in a Mossad basement or in the vaults at Dimona, it was right there, in rows.

Dead young men are an important group in Israel, maybe the most important group. Their funerals are rites of passage: a sunny graveyard, a military cantor and an honor guard, parents who look like yours, girls crying behind sunglasses as they learn something they will spend years as wives and mothers trying to forget.

There is a culture that surrounds the dead: memorial books with photographs and letters, memorial evenings with songs and poems, a solemn tone of speech, short biographical movies with piano sound tracks that are shown every year on TV on Remembrance Day. That's the day when a siren sounds across the country and everything stops in honor of the dead soldiers—cars pull over on the highway, shoppers stand at attention in malls, clerks in their offices, five-year-olds in their kindergartens. Across the country there are hiking trails, groves of trees, lookout points and picnic areas named for the dead; you can be anywhere and suddenly come upon a stone marker engraved with the name of some young person. The stone is the common local limestone, which itself is made of bodies—microscopic creatures who died in the light zone at the surface of a prehistoric ocean and floated down through the darkness to the sea floor which is now our country, becoming the material that people here have always used to build their temples and homes.

In a field in northern Israel are seventy-three pieces of rough limestone arrayed around a circular pool. They are approximately human in size. If you visit at night you see that each is lit faintly from below, giving the stone a kind of illusory life. The impression is overpowering and unsettling, as if the men from those helicopters are standing silently around you, including you in their number, looking at the pool where their names are inscribed—Tom, Vadim, Alter, Abukassis, the rest. Among the names is Avi Ofner.

There are many layers of dead in this country. Take, for example, a day spent writing this book in my Jerusalem neighborhood. I sometimes stop working and run along a promenade that looks north over the city. At one end of the promenade is a marker informing passersby that fourteen men of the Jerusalem Brigade died here fighting the Egyptians in 1948 and another twenty fighting the Jordanians in 1967. If you read the lists you find that a man named Yosef Levi died both times. From that spot you can see across to the Mount of Olives, covered with the graves of 150,000 Jews buried over the millennia to be closest to the Temple Mount and the resurrection at the end of days.

Each time I walk to the neighborhood cafe where I write sometimes, I pass a neat plot of grass and rosemary bushes with two stone markers inscribed “1914–1918.” This is the mass grave of Indian soldiers who died fighting for the British against the Turks a century ago. The markers bear the defunct ranks and units of Britain's Indian Army and the names of men whose lives ended far from home: Afzal Hussein Shah, a sepoy in the 124th Duchess of Connaught's Own Baluchistan Infantry; Chulam Muhammad, a lance naik of the 1/151st Sikh Infantry; Gunner Bur Singh of the Hong Kong Singapore Mountain Battery. There are others who had safer jobs at camp but died here anyway: Shoeing Smith Alam Idin of the Mule Corps; Kneader Mansub Ali; a menial Bearer with just one name, Kolova. Their faces and motivations lost to time, they now spend eternity among apartments faced with limestone on a quiet street traveled by Jewish schoolchildren with oversized backpacks, by parents with strollers, and every fifteen minutes or so, by our local bus, the Number 7. Sometimes it feels as if the unusually spirited life of this country is playing out in a cemetery.

There is a special language used to describe our dead soldiers, a language that makes them all sound the same, not just because you can't say anything bad but because most were so young that there isn't much to say at all. What they really were was potential. So in this language they are always serious students, or mischievous ones, and loving siblings, and good at basketball, and there was a funny thing they did once on a class trip, and in the army they always helped their friends. And they are, forever, “soldiers,” though most thought they were just doing that for a while before their real life resumed. It is said in their honor that they were prepared to sacrifice themselves for the rest of us, but of course they weren't, not most—they just thought it wouldn't happen to them, and the lucky ones weren't given time to realize they were wrong.

In all the years of the security zone no unit in the army was hit as hard as the engineering company of the Fighting Pioneer Youth. The soldiers who were left after the Falcon Incident and the helicopter crash had seen a third of their number vanish in nine months. Everyone knew Lebanon wasn't a real war, but those were real war losses.

Avi (right) at the Pumpkin

23

N
OW IT'S CLEAR
that February 4, 1997, the date of the helicopter accident in the Finger of Galilee, was the beginning of the end.
Th
is was when the security zone began to collapse under the weight of its contradictions.
Th
e way this happened had a lot to do with a small group of angry mothers.

I mentioned a soldier on Avi's helicopter known by his last name, Alter, a basketball player from Kibbutz Ashdot Yaakov.
Th
at kibbutz was one of the country's most successful communal farms before a feud in the 1950s between Stalinists and moderate socialists tore it into two separate communes right next to each other, both called Kibbutz Ashdot Yaakov, a fence between them. By the time Alter was growing up no one could really remember what it all had been about. One of Alter's favorite songs was the Hebrew ballad “Children of Winter '73,” which has kids born after the Yom Kippur War chastising their parents for promising them peace and failing to deliver. Actually no one promised anyone anything, but it's still a popular song, and a line from it is engraved on Alter's tombstone. When you see it there what stands out isn't the text but that number, 73.

On the night of February 4 news of the crash reached one of the kibbutz members, a woman named Bruria, in the middle of a movie. Bruria's father was once the kibbutz librarian, and today she is the librarian. She has hair dyed eggplant purple and gets around on an old bike, both of these in keeping with the kibbutz style—style being one of the few things left of the kibbutz, the ideas having lived a remarkable life before dying a natural death, that beautiful experiment in radical egalitarianism played out, its presence at the heart of our society sorely missed and irreplaceable.

No one knew exactly what happened at first, but they were saying one of the Alter kids was en route to the Pumpkin and hadn't called. Bruria had been through a few wars. Her husband was wounded fighting the Syrians in 1973. She knew what it meant when officers in dress uniform arrived at the kibbutz gate, which happened five times in the 1973 war alone. But she trusted the country's leaders and accepted, as everyone did, that in Lebanon every year two dozen soldiers or so would be “sacrificed to the Molech,” in her words, to protect the border. She had never questioned any of it.
Th
is time was different. She couldn't move on as she always had.

Th
e grief from the Lebanon fighting was individual, usually not more than one or two soldiers at a time. Here an ambush, there a roadside bomb. One or two families would drop through the thin crust dividing our everyday lives here from the lava beneath the surface and climb back out disfigured by scars no one else could see, and things would go on. But seventy-three at once was different.
Th
is is a small country where people know each other. Everyone seemed to have someone on the helicopters.
Th
e crash was described at the time as an atom bomb, the release of a destructive force compared to which the insignificance of the cause—a series of arbitrary mishaps one evening in northern Israel—seems absurd.

For anyone looking at the war in the security zone, the
helicopter crash is the
hijrah
, the point from which time is measured.
Th
ings happened either before or after.
Th
at the crash turned out to be the hinge around which the whole period revolved is an irony worth noting, because though later everyone came to accept Hezbollah's claim to be responsible for breaking our will and pushing us from Lebanon, if we are all being honest more credit is due to our air force. People have chosen to accept the enemy's narrative because that is easier than remembering that the worst wound in all the years of the Lebanon fighting, the decisive blow, was self-inflicted—a self-inflicted wound to end a self-inflicted war.

24

A
FEW WEEKS
after the crash Bruria saw an article in one of the kibbutz newspapers with the headline “Mothers in the Service of the Military.” Israeli mothers, the writer charged, were sending their sons to die in the army for no reason. “How can we explain why maternal instincts work at full force only until the gate of the army induction center?” he wrote. “And how can we explain why for decades Israeli mothers have been crying afterwards and not lifting a finger beforehand?”

What moved Bruria even more than the text was the illustration: a drawing of a mother pushing a baby stroller that had tank treads for wheels. Mothers were preparing their boys for war from the cradle.
Th
ey were creating wars by raising soldiers. If they stopped the wars would stop. It was the 1990s, and this is the way a lot of people were thinking. We didn't need to fight. Instead we could reason and withdraw our way out of our predicament. To a rational and optimistic person it made sense, and you can see the appeal even now: it meant not only that war was temporary, but that we were in control.

Th
e reason for outposts like the Pumpkin was to keep the guerrillas from the border. But after the crash a few people started thinking in earnest that the security zone might be killing more people than it was saving, that the war there was unwinnable, and that we would solve the problem by leaving.
Th
ey started thinking the army might be wrong.

Today that writer's call for mothers to stop the war reads like a crude appeal to sentiment, but in that hopeful decade of the new Middle East, and especially in the shock of the helicopter crash, it had power. To Bruria it seemed urgent.
Th
is was not just because one of the Alter kids was dead and other kibbutz kids were on the line, but because her own youngest son, Ofer, had just been drafted and was headed for Lebanon too. Later Ofer became one of the symbols of that time, and I'll mention him again.

25

T
H
REE WEEKS AFTER
the crash, when the Lebanon enterprise began to disintegrate—this was when
the hill sought me out and began to insinuate itself into my life until my arrival there became inevitable. So it seems to me now. I was nineteen.
I had been in the country since finishing high school in Toronto a year and a half before. I was in possession of a draft notice telling me to report that summer, so I knew it was
my last
civilian winter, though I didn't yet know what the military planned for me. I had the vague idea that I might spend a few quiet years in Israel's small navy, sailing back and forth in the Mediterranean.

I was on a bus in a Jerusalem of low skies and wet sidewalks.
T
he radio was on, the announcer saying something about a battle in Lebanon. It involved a tank and a place with a funny name. I knew about the helicopters, of course, but the names of the outposts where they were headed hadn't made an impression, if I heard them at all. The radio broadcast on the bus was the first time I remember hearing of a hill called the Pumpkin.

What held my attention at that moment wasn't that name, or the name of the soldier who was dead, according to the announcer, but the name of an officer who was badly wounded, maybe dying—it was my friend Mordechai, whose unusually vigorous energies and curiosities I had encountered at the kibbutz where I worked as a hand in the dairy barn. This was a religious kibbutz atop Mount Gilboa in northern Israel, home to a small seminary that attracted unconventional high-school graduates not in a hurry to be drafted. Mordechai was enrolled there but often found his way out of the study hall to help with the cows. He disappeared into the Armored Corps soon after, and I had only the faintest idea what he was doing.

After the announcer said his name I looked around the bus, wondering if this could possibly be true. Much of me was still in the orderly Canadian city where I was born and grew up and where such things didn't happen. The other passengers looked straight ahead or out the window. Everything seemed normal.

A week later I traveled north with a friend, Jonah, who knew Mordechai too. We went to the hospital in Haifa and were in the corridor when a nurse passed going the other way, pushing a skeletal old man hunched in a wheelchair. I paid the man no mind until he lifted his right hand from the armrest, barely, and said my name, and it was him—bloodied, crippled, twenty-one years old, with the grin of a corpse.

In those dark days on the hill in February 1997, the weeks after the crash, it sometimes seemed to the men as if Avi and the others were just home on leave and would show up soon. Sometimes they couldn't remember who was still alive. They wrote the names of the dead on one of the walls. They thought fate must be done with them, but one night three weeks after the accident they spotted figures moving in the grass north of the outpost, and more moving under the ridge to the west—the guerrillas were coming up the riverbeds. Mordechai commanded one of the tanks. He and the three members of his crew pulled on their helmets and thundered down the hill.

Mordechai had his torso out of one of the hatches atop the turret, but he couldn't see anyone. The radio in his helmet crackled and a voice said, “They're on top of you.”

He saw a flash from his left and ducked as a rocket mangled one of his machine guns. Three figures moved behind a clump of boulders, and the gunner swiveled the cannon and fired. Looking in the tank's thermal sight, which is designed to see tanks at night from afar, the gunner saw a human shape that filled the screen. He fired again. A person is not substantial enough to cause a tank shell to explode, so the shell went right through, but that was enough.

Lior, the loader-radioman, handed Mordechai grenades, and Mordechai ripped out the pins and threw them from the turret. The driver shouted that there was someone in front of the tank, and he forced the gas pedal down—in the video filmed from the lookout post that night, all in shades of green, you see seventy tons of steel pounce and a small figure disappear under the treads.

Mordechai wore olive drab coveralls, a flak jacket, fireproof gloves, and black boots. Underneath he had on long underwear, a white undershirt, and two pairs of gray socks. He wore dog tags. In his pocket was a knitted skullcap. In a box behind him were wafers, pretzels, chips, chocolate, and black coffee. His rifle was on the turret along with four clips and two canteens. In another pocket of his coveralls, inside a plastic pouch, he had a mystical book the size of a matchbox written in minuscule Hebrew letters. It was called
Th
e Book of the Angel Raziel
. Mordechai's mother had given it to him because she thought it might protect him from harm.

Th
e army found four bodies afterward.
Th
ey were around Mordechai's age.
Th
ey had rifles, ammunition clips, grenades, food, candy, and gum.
Th
ey had a Russian missile launcher. One had a photograph of the ayatollah Khomeini. Another had a video camera.
Th
ey wore red-and-green headbands, camouflage coats, and dog tags, and in their packs were worry beads. Each had a small Qur'an.

When everything was quiet again Mordechai brought his tank back to the outpost.
Th
e crew replenished the ammunition and made sure the tank was ready for more, just in case. Inside the cramped interior the four of them tried to figure out exactly what happened.
Th
ey were giddy. Mordechai explained to Lior that there was a prayer of thanksgiving recited upon surviving danger: “Blessed are you, Lord, our God, King of the Universe, who bestows kindness upon the undeserving, who has bestowed kindness upon me.” It did seem for a while that they had survived.

Just before dawn the radio crackled again.
Th
e lookouts at the Pumpkin spotted someone crawling where the bodies of the guerrillas lay in the grass.
Th
e tank raced over.
Th
e sky was gray by this time, and Mordechai saw the lights in Nabatieh going off. Lior emerged from the belly through one of the hatches to look out for missiles. It was 5:57 a.m.
Th
e tank stood still for a moment, dull green metal on the deep green slope, two torsos and helmeted heads jutting from the circular openings on the turret—Mordechai and Lior.

A missile hit the tank; Mordechai heard himself screaming from afar and saw the scene as if from above; he dropped inside, passed out, and came to when the gunner stepped on him; Mordechai's face was wet with blood and he couldn't see with his left eye; his left arm seemed to be gone at first, but turned out to be attached by a strand of muscle. He kept his wits. He got the tank back to the outpost.
Th
e crew received a medal for all of this later.

Mordechai even got himself out and stood on his feet as the medics ran up. One of them was Gal, the Angel. When they grabbed Mordechai, taking care with his arm, he was asking about Lior—what about Lior? Someone said not to worry because Lior was fine.
Th
at wasn't true, he was dead at nineteen inside the tank, but you can't blame anyone for lying.

In the hospital Jonah and I couldn't quite picture what happened, or the place where it happened. Mordechai appeared to us like an explorer returned from a world unreachable from our own.

In Mordechai's dreams about the battle afterward, he was always an infantryman for some reason, always running among the boulders, never a tank officer. He doesn't know why. He was sure at first that if he had been a better officer Lior would still be alive—if he had positioned the tank differently, if, if. Once his body healed everything else began to crack, the course of his life derailed, and he found himself in a black hole for which the psychiatrists have many names and medications. It has taken him years to climb out. A different man would not have climbed out. Today he treats people who have suffered head injuries. The proximity of the edge is still very much on his mind.

I visited him one night not long ago in Jerusalem. His wife was out. We talked quietly by the door to his dark kitchen, his four children asleep in the next room, a tiny fragment of his tank still embedded in his left eye.