Pumpkinflowers (10 page)

30

T
H
E NEXT DAY
the whole kibbutz took the dirt road past the aqueduct built by members in 1938 to the little cemetery overlooking orchards along the Jordan. They buried her son near his namesake from the Yom Kippur War, and near his friend Alter.

It took Orna time to walk upright again. But when she could she joined forces with Bruria. She made the campaign to get the army out of Lebanon her reason for living. She turned out to have a knack for organization and for slogans. She was relentless.

Soon she was spending a month with a few other women outside the official residence of the president in Jerusalem, sitting on the sidewalk with a sign that read
WE ARE DYING AND YOU ARE SILENT.
She knew things were more complicated, but you needed to keep it simple. When she wrote
we
she meant her son and herself, because Orna wasn't sure she was still alive.

It was cold, and it rained. It was hard to sleep. For a while people were stopping to shout “Nasrallah's whores,” the usual things. But by this time journalists were paying attention to the Four Mothers, especially women journalists—there were a few important ones who liked what the mothers were saying and had begun giving them airtime.

Orna did a radio interview on her cell phone one rainy evening, and when she looked up she saw a traffic jam; she remembers this as the moment she knew things had turned in their favor. There weren't many radio stations in Israel, and most of the drivers seemed to be listening to the interview and looking at her at the same time. They understood what had happened to her and what she was trying to say, or so she thought. She might have been wrong. But the curses stopped and what came instead were pizzas, dozens of pizzas, which people ordered to the tent or brought themselves. When someone asked Orna what they could do to help, what she needed, she said pizza. That's what she ate for a month until she decided the point had been made and went home.

At the Pumpkin around this time a tank crewman lost his legs in a barrage of mortars and rockets, and two infantrymen were sent into shellfire to look for them in the mud. They found one—a leg with a black boot, severed at the thigh. It was heavier than they expected.

Part Three

3
1

T
H
E BIG TRUCKS
passed through fields lowing like cattle and moved north through the border gate, swift shepherd jeeps in the lead and rear. A few soldiers stood at the fence, no one we knew. They raised their hands as we left the country and swung the gate closed behind us.

Twenty riflemen sat on benches with weapons strapped diagonally across their torsos, barrels between their knees. Mine pointed down to a field radio, my radio, on the floor between two red boots, shifting and jumping with the movement of the truck. It was winter, early 1998, the rainy season, and Lebanon was lush and eerie—steep slopes, a lofty clump of cedars. The trucks descended into a valley in low gear, crossed a bridge, and then began to climb. There were bombs on the roads, we knew that. There were guerrillas in the bushes.

Harel was there in the truck—helmet, glasses, an impassive face, the “mountain of God,” child of the helicopter crash. He was our platoon leader and had been since the day of our arrival at the training base eight months before. We still addressed him with trepidation and only when necessary. We had learned not long before that he was the only survivor from his platoon, that the seventy-three included all of his friends: a surgeon's son from Jerusalem; some kibbutzniks; Alejandro, who was born in Argentina—the usual well-meaning kids who join units like ours, a whole team from the company to which we now belonged. Seventy-three. A year had passed, but the country hadn't recovered. We were going into Lebanon on a truck because the army was still afraid to fly us in.

Today Harel lives on Mount Gilboa, runs a cowshed in the valley, and has four black-haired boys as stubborn as he. I speak to him often, and he still doesn't say much.

Harel heard about the crash at the desert base where he was training to be an officer. He went to as many funerals as he could, finished the officers' course on schedule, and returned to the company in time to take charge of twenty recruits drafted out of high school that summer, us. We were his new platoon, and eventually I understood that we had been
in the shadow of the helicopter crash from the day we first lined up in the yard and heard our names called, as when an old secret is revealed to you in adulthood and many things about your family become clear.

Once, in a television interview, Harel was asked how he did it—how he went back to the army after what happened. He looked at the interviewer for a moment. Here was a chance for an expression of ideology or faith, a love of country, all of those generations of Jews looking at him, depending on him not to give up. In the fighting in Jerusalem in 1967 some of the soldiers claim they felt King David himself pushing them through the alleyways. How did Harel go back? There might have been a flicker of disdain in his eyes, but otherwise he betrayed no emotion. “On the bus,” he said. It is one of the great lines.

I arrived at the Pumpkin with a shouted command in the truck, a crush of packs and rifles, and a moment of air travel into mud. When I straightened my knees and lifted my head I saw a valley running toward a distant white-capped massif, the sky of a Levantine winter stretched like a great leaden tent over hills of emerald, olive, and jade. I'm not sure I had ever seen anything so beautiful. I was looking the wrong way.

Someone took my arm and spun me around, and under a helmet I recognized the company commander. He pointed uphill to a jumble of dun netting and concrete. The urgency of reaching the outpost before shells welcomed our convoy had been made clear to us, but I needed to be told again:
Run.

We ran from the trucks into a courtyard ringed by high embankments and then through a tunnel into the safety of a bunker. I dropped my radio but kept my helmet on and tried to appear unruffled, as if I came to places like this all the time. There were guys from our company's other platoons on beds stacked three high on each side of a long room. We were the greenest of the soldiers who would hold the hill for the next four months. The lowest rung of the company's ladder was ours. The bunker's inhabitants gave us the disdainful stare of the battle-weary, and I remember believing they had acquired some profound knowledge of war that we lacked. They had arrived at the outpost for the first time a week before, the week was quiet, and they had spent most of it washing pots.

On one bed were boxes of junk food from home. On another, a television showed
Life of Brian
with Hebrew subtitles. The rough cement floor between the bunks was clean, with no bloodstains or any other hint of the wounded soldiers who had been treated lying there before they were helicoptered away.

Down the hill was an intersection where the steep access road to the Pumpkin joined the main road. Harel took a few of us to secure this spot while the convoy got out. We found the trucks lined up and growling, their engine grilles facing south, eager to be out of danger. After we flattened ourselves around the intersection, barrels pointing out into the foreign countryside, the first jeep sped off toward Israel, the rest of the convoy followed, and soon we were alone.

Ofir lay peering through his rifle scope at a clump of trees not far away; he is now a thirty-five-year-old shiatsu therapist, but was then an eighteen-year-old marksman. Harel crouched on the shoulder and I lay on my stomach beside him, straining my neck muscles against the weight of the helmet, the bulk of the radio on my back pressing my rib cage into the ground. It was hard to breathe. Here we were. But where was that?

It is hard to recall how little you once knew, and harder to admit it. I understood that we were Israeli soldiers; that our enemies were Arab fighters, whom we called terrorists, and that we should kill them before they killed us; that the battlefield was this place, Lebanon. I knew I couldn't let my friends down. That was it. Matters seemed fairly clear to me that first day.

Across a valley to the east, inside the security zone, I made out a town spread along the top of another ridge by the antenna of a military emplacement. Harel said this was Marj Ayoun, a Christian town with an Israeli base. I was aware in some imprecise way that there were Christians here and that they were our allies, but in the spare lines of my mental map of the Middle East in those days the place of Christians, Arabic-speaking Christians, was uncertain. Everything seemed ominous—the trees, the bushes, the strange town with its strange name. Ofir was saying something in an urgent whisper and motioning toward the valley without removing his eye from the rifle's scope. He saw two armed men.

Harel ran over in a crouch, and just then came the crack and dull echo of a gunshot. Some of us exchanged glances, not having expected things to unfold like this: minutes after our arrival, in daylight. Harel motioned me over with the radio. In the valley, perhaps three hundred yards away, I saw the two figures. They made no effort to conceal themselves. They walked casually and carried rifles. One of them raised his, and we heard another shot. Everyone ducked, though they weren't aiming at us. They're in civilian clothes, Ofir said.

Harel told him to put them in his sights, but of course they were already there, they were close to dying; it required a slight increase in pressure from the index finger of a disoriented teenager.

Harel took the old-fashioned telephone receiver attached to my radio by a long rubber coil, pressed the button on the side, and asked the outpost what to do. The outpost said we shouldn't do anything, because the two were probably just hunters, Christians from one of the villages. Harel stood up.
Ruh
, he shouted, which means “go away”—this is one of the Arabic words known to every Israeli soldier. The two stopped and looked in our direction. They stood for a moment and then sauntered off, pausing every so often to shoot at something we couldn't see, maybe pheasants. Soon they were gone, having planted in our minds some doubt about what, exactly, was going on.

Back at the outpost an officer appeared in the bunker and summoned me and one or two other newcomers. We followed him up concrete steps, emerged into the soft light of early evening, and found ourselves in a trench running around the Pumpkin along the top of the embankments. The officer called this the “fighting level.” You entered the trench, we were told, wearing a helmet, flak jacket, and webbing, and with rifles loaded. The way was just wider than an infantryman in full gear, so to pass someone both of you had to turn sideways.

What followed after I stepped into the trench for the first time was a tour of a landscape that has not left me since: the sandbags stacked four or five high, and beyond them the Forest, and the hostile town below to the west, the hidden riverbeds rising toward us from its houses, the hilltops of our ridge rolling to the north, Beaufort Castle far to the south. We spent hours and days and months looking at the little world around the hill, doing nothing else, just looking. I have never known another place in the same way. Just as glare lingers after you close your eyes, so that view remains imprinted on my retinas years later.

The purpose of the tour was not to tell the outpost's stories or to explain the complexities of where we were and why. I was unaware of all that, and the officer guiding me certainly was too. I was barely twenty, and he not much older. There were no signs marking where bodies had lain the previous year or the one before—if you have read to this point, you know far more about the hill than any of us did then. The tour was meant only to introduce our new surroundings quickly, before we lost the light, so we could begin taking our turn in the guard posts.

32

T
H
E NEXT MORNING
someone came through the bunker and shook us awake for Readiness with Dawn. We emerged cursing from warm green cocoons into fluorescent light. Our uniforms and boots were never to come off, so we didn't have to put them on. Up in the trench, the first muezzin calls drifted up from Nabatieh and the sky grew light.

We had come anticipating “action,” but after our arrival nothing happened. We were urged not to let our guard down because something would soon. Nabatieh, we were told, was a “nest of terrorists.” Anyone moving within a few hundred yards of the outpost was to be shot, even someone who seemed harmless, like a shepherd with his flock; the shepherds were often Hezbollah scouts. The townspeople knew our rules and kept their distance. Even if you weren't sure what you saw was real, even if you were nearly certain it was just a bush or a shadow, you opened fire—those were the orders and had been since the guerrillas with their flag and video camera caught the Pumpkin unprepared three and a half years before. If any of the sentries began shooting, the entire garrison was to conclude that we were being attacked. Then everyone opened up with light machine guns, heavy machine guns, machine guns that fired grenades, whatever weapons were at hand; this made an impressive noise, if nothing else, and was known as a “crate of fire,” another of the army's poetic flourishes.

Still nothing happened. On more than one occasion, a night sentry looking at the town saw a red light arcing toward him and shouted “incoming” into the radio only to see more lights—green, blue, yellow—rising into the sky and bursting apart as people in the nest of terrorists celebrated a wedding with fireworks.

Sometimes tank gunners peered at night into their thermal sights, which could pick up heat miles away, and saw figures moving in groups of three or four. Terrorists! No, wild boars, unfortunate creatures common in these parts, who liked to travel at night in small groups like guerrillas, and who looked human when seen from afar on a thermal sight. They knew unhappy years while nervous Israelis ruled their countryside, and many had their brief, hairy lives curtailed by our shells.

Some of the buildings in Nabatieh had names. There was one called Dir Mar Antonius, which was a garble to me at the time but which I later understood meant the Monastery of Saint Anthony, indicating the presence of Christians among the Shiites of the town. There was a hospital (al-Ghandour), a gas station (Cal-Tex), and many mosques. On the outskirts stood a row of damaged villas, abandoned because of our gunfire; Avi described one of them in a letter. At the time I didn't pay much thought to the word
abandoned
, which seemed like a straightforward description of houses, like “brick” or “square.” I didn't consider what had led them to be abandoned or where their inhabitants were now.

The Red Villa was so called because it had red brick on its facade, and the White Villa had presumably been white, but now it was just a roof; after the guerrillas used it to fire rockets at the outpost some time before, an Israeli unit was sent over the Red Line to blow it up. The most memorable location was known to us as the House of Babes—I am cleaning up the Hebrew slightly, because the word is a dirtier one than
babe
. There is no English equivalent. The house was given its name because it was inhabited by a woman, just one, with dyed blonde hair. The field intelligence lookouts could see her with their binoculars and cameras. The Babe was not a guerrilla, obviously, just someone who used to leave in the morning and come back in the evening. Her appearances were celebrated; such was our deprivation. The lookouts had compiled a videotape of sightings.