An Ordinary Hero

...The Israeli soldier is envisioned in contextual nuances, above discontent and fear, and is categorized as a member of new breed of Jews, tough and resilient in the best Leon Uris-Paul Newman tradition...

...You boys going to make any coffee...

...Of these, 155 were about the military...

...We were supposed to be home today...

...I hold my hands over it for a few minutes, thinking how nice it is having this stove and wondering if anybody will put on some coffee...

...Every place I'd ever been stationed had been full of rats and flies...

...Eight?—that's all...

...I must get some sleep...

...I want to sleep...

...What about dinner...

...The transition is too quick, too radical...

...Nerves are frayed...

...We were supposed to go home today," he mumbles to himself...

...He lights a cigarette...

...They are generated by more immediate and practical factors—chiefly the diminutive size of the country and its population...

...We may move again tomorrow morning...

...The trauma of the Holocaust has made the image of the fighting Jew significant to Jews around the world— and to the Israelis as well...

...and the batallion commander is on the phone...

...Sometimes I can't assimilate her words...

...I toss my flak-vest onto my dirty blankets and hang the Uzi over the sidepost while catching a glimpse of my grimy face in a tiny mirror fragment pegged to the wall...

...I slouch sideways, my helmeted head resting on the rim of the hatch, staring dumbly at the somber red glow of the "twenty-four" knob lighting up the claustrophobic assortment of rods and wires within the whitewashed, mud-crusted interior...

...Are the sticks still jamming...

...Well, I hope I can get you boys out tomorrow morning...

...He is trying to cheer us up...

...We'll talk about it tomorrow...

...He'll be OK...

...Because the population is so small, professional soldiers comprise only a modest nucleus of the army...

...During the heavy snowfall we huddled together in little tents, and once were cut off from supplies for several days...

...Then the conversation fades away...

...forward...

...AN ORDINARY HERO KENNETH JONES NOTES OF A TANK DRIVER ON THE GOLAN HEIGHTS A recent pictorial book about Israel, published for the consumption of American Jews, included a total of 371 photographs...

...The attempt to realign with normalcy fails...

...At least there wasn't any shooting during the big snows...

...The necessary rapport and in-the-field procedure bars many of the hierarchical formalities common to armies...

...The candles are being snuffed...

...I can't sleep...

...OK, but make the coffee now...

...move...

...The firing begins and your body screams, yet you hear your own voice on the intercom, so calm and detached, and your limbs function briskly, automatically...

...It is located just off the Kuneitra-Damas-cus Road, one kilometer southwest of the Matz junction, in the hub of the "enclave"—the small area Israel captured from Syria during the Yom Kippur War and later relinquished under the withdrawal agreement of March 1974...

...Avi, our lieutenant, enters...

...I hear the rest of the crew crawling into their bunks...

...But it must have been an accident—he shot on automatic...

...No one does," retorted my tank commander...

...Is it worth making something...

...Yet through the use of synthetic images, the army and its people emerge without true substance...

...So then what's the difference...

...Before the "ceasefire" there had been worse days, but at that time the adrenalin was still pumping and one existed in a dream state...

...For ten days, we would travel incessantly, day and night, catching maybe a daily three hour sleep within the tank, moving all the time, oil-grime covered...

...There is always a lot of chatter, joking, and jostling...

...It is a good room and we were happy when we moved into it several days ago...

...He has, in short, become a caricature of Zionism opposing the caricature of the ghetto Jew...

...Today was too close and too much...

...These qualities include the army's total lack of the kind of bureaucratization that so aggravates Israeli society as a whole, its comparative egalitarianism, and its suppression of the humanistic-denying expressions common to most armies...

...From here I get home in about two hours, hitching over bad roads...

...I extract my Uzi from behind the instrument panel and lift my flak-vest from behind the seat, shoving them up through the hatch as my body struggles out after them...

...Danny reclines on his bunk, staring at the ceiling...

...We all lie there, turning, tossing, dozing, groaning, snapping completely awake, sitting up, lighting cigarettes, trying again to sleep____ The mystique of the Israeli army is not perpetuated merely by its unorthodox characteristics and methods, but also by its function as a "descriptive model," or myth, of national aspirations...

...Small, often ill-equipped, the Israeli army cannot depend upon a polished, methodical strategy on a grand scale during times of war...

...Feeling very weak, I ease myself down the slick front of the tank...

...Afterwards your body becomes wadded again, and you suffer the long, tortuous process of unwinding...

...Prior to that time, we were positioned a few kilometers off the other side of the Damascus Road in an open field...

...The new Zionist mystique: the army, strength...

...I had once thought of slamming the hatch cover on my fingers...

...night driving here, unlike those recurrent maneuvers we suffered through in the Negev desert...

...Well, when the ammo truck gets here, pick up what you need----Clean the barrel...

...Danny soon passes around cups of coffee...

...Yair Markov from aleph unit just shot off his knee with an Uzi...

...He doesn't have to be here...

...I must get some sleep before they call me for guard duty...

...If it's raining hard in the morning, we'll get home for sure," someone says...

...Instead I sit on the rag "mattress" and light up a cigarette...

...My eyes continue watering from the stinging dust impacted in them...

...the endless running, the walk-run forward marches causing some to collapse only to be hauled on the backs of others...

...I cannot envision the end...

...Sorry you didn't get your leaves today____How many you fire, Moshe...

...Someone enters the room and speaks to Avi...

...Avi sighs and stands...

...We'll get it in the morning, "says Moshe...

...El visia is the name of an abandoned Syrian village constructed of basalt and a brown mixture of mud, straw, and dung...

...These qualities are often publicized by sympathetic observers, who are given to depicting Israel's army as a romantic fraternity of brave and skilled soldiers...

...Tonight everyone slouches in silence, smoking...

...I cannot envision the end...

...worst of all, the notorious "stretcher-carries" wherein groups of trainees in full battle gear haul a man on a wooden-framed canvas stretcher over miles of rugged terrain at a savage tempo, the excruciating pain nearly suffocating...

...A little, but it's OK," I answer dully...

...I think of my baby...

...I think of my wife...

...When will it end...

...One did not have the interstitial deliberations and reviews, so erosive to both body and mind...

...Usually, even on shooting days, there is much activity in the room...

...Probably some guard hit a jackal," whispers Amos...

...From the viewpoint of most armies, such presentations would seem to frustrate the necessary leveling, the depersonalization of basic training, but in Israel they are viewed as weapons against the spartani-zation of the continually besieged state, against the erosion of Zionist ideals...

...They pulled off some nice hits...

...lucky they were just 122's...

...Someone approaches...

...Although the necessity for military strength may be unfortunate by classic Zionist standards, the unique qualities of the Israeli army are often seen as affirmations of Zionist ideals, converting necessity into virtue...

...He thought some of us would be dead...

...I crawl under my blankets, still fully clothed except for my boots which I've removed in spite of the continuing alert (army joke: sure will be nice to get home and sleep in civilian shoes...

...What's the word on Birn...

...Instead we imbibe banal representations such as one which recently graced the cover of a book about Israel: a comely girl dressed in tightly-bloused khaki, machine-gun in hand, a dauntless yet erotic gaze towards the horizon...

...Also, due to the country's size, the active soldier comes into constant contact with the rest of society, and is usually stationed not more than a few hours traveling distance from his home...

...He was in an automobile accident just before the war, and his arm keeps popping out of the socket causing great pain...

...The myth is not necessarily false...

...When will it end...

...My insides are tight-wrung, acrid juices dripping...

...He gets used to me again after I've played with him, rocked him to sleep, given him all the love I can pack into a few hours—and then I leave again...

...The comparative humanism of the Israeli army is real enough...

...The roaring Cummins engine chuggles into silence...

...Chests are contracted and brains slug against skulls, tense, unable to unwind...

...As we disperse, the dark sky begins sprinkling large, cold drops...

...the first time, I shouted over the intercom, "I can't drive without lights—I can't see anything...

...Attrition" is an excellent label for this type of war...

...It must depend instead upon operational initiatives within a loosely framed strategy to accomplish quick penetration of the enemy's weakest points and to confound any stabilization on the front...

...He worries about us...

...At least there is not much Kenneth Jones, a citizen of America and Israel, is studying Near Eastern languages at the University of the Pacific...

...But the mind is determined to relive the terrible moments, to calculate my future chances of survival, to examine why I feel such suffocating confusion...

...In a little while...

...He is therefore able to visit family and friends in civilian life frequently...

...Great effort and concentration go into the preparation of meals and coffee...

...They took the fragment out of his chest right at the command post...

...When the shooting is imminent, you submerge into your taut body...

...the transition is too quick...

...Avi sips at his, says it tastes terrible, and smiles, "I want to transfer far away from you boys—you attract fire like crazy...

...He speaks tonelessly...

...The sudden cessation of noise leaves my body slack...

...He is the type of officer that wins Israel's wars...

...It was not an accident...

...He is worried about Birn...

...they left the fragment in his leg for the hospital to work on...

...Just as ancient Greek tragedies were siphoned from mythical models and applied as concrete forms of compensation and sublimation, so do the images patterned after the myth of Jewish military prowess function in relation to the Nazi Holocaust and the supposed weakness of exilic Jewry...

...We'll get it in the morning, Avi...

...He cries when I come home...

...This in turn demands a strong rapport between these men...

...I try to erase all the monsters in my mind, haunted by the today that will repeat itself tomorrow...

...Eight...

...asks David, my mechanic...

...I should wash my face...

...Sabon: soap...

...In the fetid tents at Shomron, wrapped up in blankets after a filthy day's training, still fully clothed with boots on, the rats would scamper over us constantly...

...Just keep moving...

...It encourages individual initiative, discourages robot-like discipline...

...I listen to the squeaks and shufflings, a few moans, the sound of matches being lit...

...Good night...

...Amos, still sitting in his flak-vest, shivers even though the room is well heated now...

...it is a technique for resolving basic antinomies in Jewish thought and life...

...Now we have a room with a stove, but everybody wishes he was back in the snow with no shooting...

...I think of the baby...

...those tortuous hours of night driving, unable to see the route or the other tanks, worrying about the wadis, the tank feeling as if it were floating as the terrain snatched it before I could react...

...I close my eyes...

...everyone not guarding, go back to sleep...

...His face is haggard...

...most are draftees and reservists...

...Some men play poker or chess while others read or study for exams they hope to take after their discharge...

...A few candles have been lit...

...Reaching El visia in the evening, I gear down into second and yank the right-hand control stick, sliding into position with the other Sherman tanks...

...OK, turn off the 'twenty-four.'" Moshe, my tank commander, jolts me with his voice...

...that's the major weapon in the Israeli arsenal—nervous energy, moving frenetically until total exhaustion and then continuing on nervous energy alone...

...No, he meant to do it...

...We were running away most of the time...

...Someone has already ignited the old Syrian stove in the middle of the whitewashed room...

...But positive things, aside from the toughening aspects, accrue from such conditions—the idiocies of "spit and shine" discipline are minimized...

...I would have showered, eaten a good meal, and drank coffee while Devorah told me about her week...

...The other crew members are also sitting sullenly on their bunks, smoking...

...Even in basic training, soldiers are emphatically and repeatedly told that they are human beings first, soldiers second—that they possess certain rights and responsibilities as moral, thinking human beings which no command can rescind...

...In sabra slang sabon means anyone who allows himself to be ordered about or taken advantage of...

...Most of the characteristics of the Israeli army do not stem from Zionist ideals...

...At Shomron, during basic training, we lived ankle-deep in mud, our tents leaking pathetically, no heating, no electricity, no hot water, no toilets, poor equipment and rotten food...

...The red glow is snuffed out as I turn the knob, leaving myself in darkness...

...This contributes heavily to the dilution of distinctions between the citizen's military and civilian experience...

...Putting the tank into neutral, I pull back both control sticks to ninety degrees, locking them into place with a foot lever, and flick the OFF switch...

...Amos still wears his flak-vest...

...they weren't allowed past Keneitra because of the shooting...

...I tramp over the stones towards our room feeling vaguely jealous of Birn, now snugly encased in the Safed hospital...

...In the afternoon I am shot at, a few hours later I am sitting in the warmth of our kitchen, drinking coffee and listening to my wife talk about bills to be paid, the baby, the rising food prices____The war is difficult for her, but I cannot properly comfort her...

...I can't sleep, my mind in fierce rebellion...

...The Israeli attitude towards the Holocaust is most complex, but it may be summed up in one word: sabon...

...In the density before the "ceasefire" one did not have the extended intervals between the contacts with fear and death which we have now...

...kadimah...

...Suddenly we hear a machine-gun burst...

...Slipping quickly into our boots, we grab our weapons and rush out to our positions...

...Just keep moving—Arabs don't drive at night without lights...

...Crew two just got back from leave...

...Less than two hours from this hell are my wife and child...

...But we were prepared for hard living conditions...

...The army encourages this contact with civilian life, both as a safeguard to morale and as a way of recuperating from the typically miserable living conditions in the army...

...Just pray that nothing starts up too early...

...Half an hour later we are summoned over to Avi, who is standing in the center of the courtyard...

...I want to touch her and tell her I'm safe...

...Danny murmurs, "We should call ourselves 'Sponge Unit' for all the enemy fire we soak up____" Moshe gazes at the floor...

...There is a stunned silence, broken finally by Moshe...

...This type of warfare depends strongly on the immediate calculations and decisions of officers of all ranks during the fluid transitions of battle, and places special emphasis on the energetic combat capabilities of individual lower-echelon officers and men...

...far beyond the limits of exhaustion...

...Direct hits—the feeling entirely ineffable in its intensity...

...Nobody replies and I light another cigarette...

...Avi is a good officer...

...Tonight...

...I try to describe a shelling to her, but my heart starts beating rapidly, the inside of my mouth feels full of cotton, I quiver and almost cry----She cannot understand and I cease the attempt...

...I began learning it in basic training at that dismal little camp in the mountains exem-plifiied by brutal physical training...

...The room is congested with bunks and gear...