Pumpkinflowers (3 page)

7

I
SRAELI COMBAT TROOPS
in those days were divided into those who had been in Lebanon and those who had not. Among those who had, the question was how far inside you had been and what perils you had faced. If you fell behind in a training march as a recruit, the sergeants would say: Who'll push you forward in Lebanon? If you struggled to operate the radio on your back while lying prostrate on the ground, they rocketed stones off your helmet and asked: Who'll help you in Lebanon? The answer was no one. The point was that you couldn't fail. If you did, you would be one of those guys who smiled at newspaper readers every few weeks.

My intention here is not to get bogged down in historical explanation. I would rather suggest the title of a comprehensive history of these years of the Lebanon “security zone” in the 1990s, for those interested in background, and continue Avi's story uninterrupted; unfortunately no such history has been written. These events were important when they were going on, and left intense personal memories. But they left barely any collective memory at all. What remain are a few dramatic incidents vaguely recalled, related to each other in ways no longer entirely clear. The period doesn't even have a name. Though hardly distant, it is already sinking into the depths behind us, soon to be unrecoverable. So a few words are necessary about the series of events into which the rebel A. is about to be inserted.

Southern Lebanon in the nineties evoked something of Spain in the thirties, the scene of violent jostling between the local proxies of greater forces and ideologies preparing for greater conflict—our enemies with their Iranian trainers and Russian rockets, their veneration of martyrs and vision of a resurgent Islam; us with bourgeois aspirations and rifles stamped
HARTFORD, CONN., USA
. Suicide car bombs, roadside explosives, booby-trapped boulders, videotaped attacks, isolated outposts, hit-and-run, a modern military on hostile territory fighting a long, hopeless war against a weaker but more determined enemy for unclear and ultimately unattainable goals—before Iraq, before Afghanistan, there was this protracted affair in Lebanon. It is hardly possible to understand current events without understanding these ones, and yet they have been overlooked. Many thousands of Israeli men of Avi's generation, my generation, people whose awareness of the world blinked on around the interval between
Appetite for Destruction
and
Nevermind
, share the sense of owing an important part of our personalities to a time and place of no concern to anyone else, and to a war that never officially happened.

It will be clear to those familiar with the literature coming out of Israel in the past few thousand years that hilltops are considered places where the human and the divine might touch, and where great or terrible events might occur. There is Sinai, where God delivered his law to Moses. At Masada, a flat-topped hill in the desert along the Dead Sea, zealots who wouldn't surrender to Rome killed themselves before legionnaires breached the walls. There is Mount Moriah, where Abraham was said to have nearly sacrificed his heir Isaac in an incident whose legacy has ensured, according to one of the modern Hebrew poets, that their descendants are all “born with a knife in their heart.” Tradition held that this hill was where God's spirit dwelled, so Solomon built a temple there, and Herod did too, before the Romans replaced it with a temple dedicated to Jupiter. The followers of Muhammad came to believe that this was the place where the Arabian prophet ascended to heaven in a mystic night journey, and thirteen hundred years ago they built an exquisite golden-domed shrine that stands today. There are a lot of stories about that hill, but this isn't one of them.

Traveling north, into Galilee, you pass Mount Gilboa, where Saul fell on his sword, and the hill north of the Sea of Galilee where a preacher addressed an audience in the early rumblings of a new religion and which adherents named the Mount of Beatitudes. To the west, along the coast, is Mount Carmel, where the prophet Elijah once challenged 450 priests of a rival god to a contest—each side would build an altar, and they would see whose deity could set it alight. This is where today the neighborhoods of Haifa spread above port cranes and industrial smokestacks. Moving farther north you cross a ridge that meets the sea in a warren of chalk grottoes, and then you're out of the modern state of Israel and in the mountainous south of Lebanon.

Inside Lebanon, three miles north of Israel's northernmost extremity, is a castle built by crusaders eight hundred years ago atop a sheer rock face. It's still known as Beaufort Castle, the name the crusaders chose. This story isn't about that hill either, but now we're close.

In the late 1960s border raids by Palestinian guerrillas from Lebanese territory started Israel's long Lebanon war in earnest—a war not with the state of Lebanon but with armed groups exploiting the weakness of the Lebanese government to their own ends. Over the years this conflict has changed in nature, and some of the participants have changed. It has more often been at the periphery of outside attention than at the center, but a wise observer keeps an eye on it always. It pauses on occasion but has never ended, and it is punctuated every so often by the tidal movements of our military back and forth across the frontier. It gained intensity in the mid- and late 1970s, when Avi and most of the other characters in this book were born, and has run parallel to our lives since then.

In June 1982 convoys of Israeli troops pushed into Lebanon, embarked on a misguided intervention with one of Lebanon's Christian factions. Soldiers captured Beaufort Castle from Palestinian fighters and turned it into a permanent military position. Israeli divisions rolled north toward Beirut and toward a morass that summer and fall that has been described by others. My interest here is in events that came later and have never been recorded, so I'll skip the earlier details: the attacks by Palestinian squads on civilian buses and schools inside Israel before the invasion; the army's devastating bombardment of Beirut in the summer of 1982 and the successful expulsion of the Palestine Liberation Organization; the way Israel decided this wasn't enough and attempted to force the installation of a friendly government in Lebanon, was foiled, saw its Christian allies massacre residents in two Palestinian refugee camps, and became embroiled in the Lebanese civil war. Israelis call this “sinking into the Lebanese mud.”

In 1985, after protests at home and with dissent in the ranks, the army pulled back to the “security zone,” a narrow strip of Lebanese land along the border. At this point the writing peters out, more or less, even though Israel remained there for fifteen more years.

After the invasion Israel found itself facing an enemy other than the one it thought it was fighting. These were not Palestinians but local Shiites calling themselves the Party of God, Hezbollah, funded and trained by the regime of the ayatollahs in Iran. These fighters appeared with new energies and a tactic, the suicide bomber, which turned out to be the signal innovation of the modern Middle East—the region's most notable contribution to our times, the perfect illustration of what it has done to itself. The men of Hezbollah grew in sophistication and strength, driven by the expertise, ideology, and cash of their Iranian patrons, feeding off the resentment caused by Israel's presence in Lebanon and riding the wave of religious war that had begun to crest in those years in this part of the world and which has now conclusively ravaged it. By the early 1990s the other armed groups had faded, Hezbollah had come into its own, the outline of the security zone war had been set, and the conditions had been created for our story.

The year 1994, when Avi was drafted, found the Israelis dug in at positions across the south of Lebanon: a perilous little world of hilltops peering at each other through binoculars and sending radio messages flitting back and forth over the canyons, like the bonfires relaying word of the new moon from Jerusalem over the summits in the rabbinic writings, “from the Mount of Olives to Sartaba, from Sartaba to Grofina, from Grofina to Hoveran, from Hoveran to Beit Baltin,” and on to Babylon.

This was the security zone, from Mount Hermon in the east to the Mediterranean in the west. It was meant to keep guerrillas away from the border and protect the people of Israel's north: the frontier turkey farmers, the canners of corn and peas in urban factories, the Hebrew-speaking Arab plumbers, the beauties of Jewish Leningrad circa 1958, newly arrived in Israel with the great Soviet immigration and now lying on beaches near the Lebanon border, exposing their pale bodies to the unfamiliar ferocity of our sun.

The army gave the outposts pretty names like Basil, Crocus, Cypress, and Red Pepper. This reflects a floral preoccupation in our military, which in naming things generally avoids names like Hellfire or Apache in favor of ones like Artichoke, a night-vision apparatus for tank gunners, or Buttercup, an early-warning system for incoming mortar shells. In the jargon of army radiomen, wounded soldiers are “flowers.” Dead soldiers are “oleanders.” It isn't a code, because it isn't secret. Instead the names seem intended to bestow beauty on ugliness and to allow soldiers distance from the things they might have to describe. If you listened to the language of the Lebanon troops, you might have thought they occupied a kind of garden.

The Pumpkin was set up three miles due north of Beaufort Castle on a hilltop where nothing significant is known to have happened before the events recounted here or since. The military archives contain no record of the outpost's construction, or at least none I could find.

In Hebrew the outpost was called Dla'at—just Pumpkin, not
the
Pumpkin. But I have always thought of it as a place that deserves the definite article in English. As the Pumpkin's first historian in any language, and almost certainly its last, I grant myself license to call it in translation whatever I want. The name now seems to hint at the kind of magic at work in the transformation of a bare hilltop into the scene of emotion and drama and its sudden transformation back into a place of no importance at all.

8

A
VI SAW THE
green hills and valleys beyond the border and felt the first bite of the cold that came with altitude. The new arrivals thought about being in a foreign country, about what it meant to be surrounded by hostile territory. And then they were put to work.

Whatever heroic exploits existed in their imaginations, they discovered as all newcomers did that life at the Pumpkin was a matter of the grueling tasks necessary to maintain dozens of men on an isolated hill: washing pots, chopping vegetables, cleaning and greasing the machine guns, filling sandbags, an endless schedule of chores interrupted by turns in the guard posts and a few hours of sleep at night that were themselves interrupted by turns in the guard posts. Then Readiness with Dawn, and then it would all begin again.

What was the Pumpkin? A hilltop rectangle of earthen embankments the size of a basketball court. It was accessed by Israeli soldiers from the east on a road mined with some regularity and by the enemy from the west through several riverbeds that ran hidden from their towns up to the ridge.

The outpost was threatened by a guerrilla haunt in a nearby copse of terebinths and pines known as the Forest—a name that bore genuine menace in the soldiers' minds, although the vegetation was to a real forest as the placid puddle known as the “Sea” of Galilee is to a real sea or as the trickle of the “river” Jordan is to the Mississippi.

To the north the hilltops of the Ali Taher range continued through Outpost Red Pepper before terminating in a triangular peak capped with Outpost Cypress. Beaufort Castle was visible to the south, and in between was Outpost Citrus. These were the positions of the Red Line, the farthest extremity of the area under Israel's control.

Just to the west, outside the security zone and inside Lebanon proper, spread a plateau occupied by the Shiite town of Nabatieh. One day eleven years before, in 1983, an Israeli force had blundered through the town during the Shiites' most important religious festival, and the soldiers became surrounded by an angry crowd. They opened fire and killed two people, helping ensure the enmity of the Shiites and aiding the rise of their new military force, Hezbollah. Nabatieh was a guerrilla stronghold and the outpost's nemesis.

Peeking over a ridge to the south, past six miles of treacherous territory, representing home, were white houses in Metullah, the northernmost town in Israel.

The mood on the hill wasn't usually one of fear, though anyone might be forgiven for remembering it that way now. You can't be afraid all the time. The air at the Pumpkin was instead one of exhaustion and homesickness. It was not that the soldiers missed their cities or their friends, though of course that was part of it—they missed their real home, their parents' home, where everyone still lived. Army service here is the end of childhood, and going home meant that your father hugged you and your mother cooked you dinner, and the washing machine whirled green as you fell asleep in the room where you grew up.

At the outpost were several dozen young men isolated to a degree exceptional in the modern world. Mail arrived the same way the soldiers did, on convoys rendered unpredictable by the threat of bombs. There were no women. There was nothing feminine, nothing unnecessary to the purposes of allowing you to kill, preventing you from being killed, and keeping you from losing your mind in the meantime. Nothing was soft or smelled sweet.

Around the time of Avi's arrival in the fall of 1994 the outpost had one small bunker where soldiers were safe from shells and a few refurbished shipping containers in the yard, where they were not. Inside the containers were metal beds and filthy green mattresses.

There were a few Bedouin trackers, noncommissioned officers, who watched Hezbollah TV and Arabic movies in their little room between excursions to spot bombs along the road. A cook or two, with better-than-average food supplies that allowed the development of security zone delicacies like cornflakes doused in melted chocolate. A few infantry squads, two tank crews, a handful of field intelligence lookouts. The median age was no more than twenty, and the outpost commander was himself just a few years older.

Looking back on events we impose order, turning them into a story that makes sense to us. This is natural, and it's what I'm doing now. It becomes hard to remember what things felt like at the time, and not many people can. When Avi's platoon met recently, Ilya (he of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
) came up with an accurate description of what all of this was like when it was going on. It's worth quoting here in full; unfortunately his deadpan, Slavic-inflected Hebrew must be left to the imagination.

“We were like sheep led to the slaughter,” he said, and his friends laughed. They seemed to have heard this from him before, probably more than once.

You do all kinds of nonsense, you don't know what you're doing—“Go there, go here, go there again tomorrow.” I didn't know what I was doing. I washed dishes. [Laughter] They made me listen to all kinds of nonsense that they used to say there, all kinds of empty bullshit about this, about that, about whatever, and I didn't understand what they wanted from me. Sometimes we'd go to lay an ambush and lie there in the snow, the cold, I remember that. And that was it. That's what it was. It's all faded now. Now we're talking about who shot what, he shot, the other guy shot, I don't remember who shot who. It was all chaos. I just remember these big green tables in the dining room that we had to scrub. [Laughter] That's all I remember.