Pumpkinflowers (6 page)

16

O
NE DAY IN
the early summer of 1996 a reporter arrived at the Pumpkin with a few senior officers. “Not many journalists come here,” the reporter wrote, “especially not this year. The outpost's soldiers hold one of the most dangerous parts of the ‘red line,' the random, winding, gap-ridden border of the security zone.

I am reminded of the Suez Canal outposts in the early '70s. Then, as now, the fighters are brave, the construction is of reinforced concrete, and the military and political concept is a matter of debate. . . .

Go speak to the soldiers, an officer of high rank encourages me, as we stand under a concrete roof in the center of the outpost. They're tough—combat soldiers. But with a bit of prodding they open up and will pour their hearts out.

Pour their hearts out? The soldiers laugh. They are thin—skin, bone and muscle. What are you waiting for, they say. Insert your ammunition clip, the one with all of the usual questions reporters ask. We know them by heart. We already have the answers. You probably want to hear, “We're afraid but doing the job as best we can,” or “We're here so Galilee can sleep quietly,” and that we “miss home but want to make Hezbollah hurt.” There, we said it. Take a picture, write something down, and go home, Dad.

That summer it seemed that Avi's soul had not only left the Pumpkin but had departed the Middle East entirely. He was thinking about his travels after his discharge the following spring. He was interested in India and the Far East, which was where most Israeli kids headed after the army was done with them. But the destination he really had in mind was Europe: first to Scandinavia, where he thought he would feel like a dwarf surrounded by giants and where the politeness of the locals would do him good, and after that to Ireland, a green country full of legends and fanatic Christianity, “a country of contradictions, just like me.” He liked how Ireland was placed a little to the side, “next to Britain but not contaminated with her ills.” He had never been to Ireland; except for time spent abroad with his family when he was in kindergarten, Avi had never left Israel. But he could picture it clearly. Smadar, to whom he confided this plan, could already envision him in a pub in that country, puffing a pipe over the manuscript of a novel full of cynical humor and philosophy.

And from there to the most distant place he could imagine: Alaska. You could see him there too, a glass of whisky on a rough desk, somewhere in the interior accessible by snowmobile or Piper, surrounded by that precious resource our country lacks, emptiness. He would take the concrete and officers and guerrillas who once jailed him on a hilltop in a land far away, citizens of a conflict impossible for him to imagine now, the people who tried every day to find and destroy that last reserve of his innocence, and he would turn them all into a story.

Avi put this plan into a letter once. But when he was still on the Alaska part Bono came on the radio: “Is it getting better, or do you feel the same?” Avi was under the spell of that song as much as anyone. He put down his pen, lit a cigarette, and allowed his thoughts to drift.

17

I
N THOSE DAYS
the Lebanese underbrush was full of Israelis, soldiers waiting for guerrillas on hillsides and in riverbeds. This was the ambush, the army's main offensive tactic in the security zone. Sometimes the soldiers stayed for days or even a week, camouflaging themselves in bushes, taking turns sleeping, eating chocolate and shitting in plastic bags spread over upside-down helmets and pissing in bottles that they had to carry out with them afterward. Sometimes there were guerrillas waiting in the same bushes, and they killed the soldiers. Sometimes the soldiers killed one another. In one incident a platoon leader moving at night at the front of a line doubled back, the men at the rear thought he was a guerrilla and opened fire, the platoon leader thought they were guerrillas and returned fire, and one soldier was dead and a few wounded by the time they figured out what happened.

In the middle of June a squad of thirteen at the Pumpkin began preparing for an ambush in the Forest, where they were to spend the night overlooking one of the riverbeds leading up from the Shiite town. The riverbed, invisible to the Israeli lookouts, was used by the guerrillas to move up the ridge, where they could attack the outpost or mine the convoy road.

Avi wasn't among the soldiers to depart with the ambush team that night. He was assigned to man the radios in the war room, so he experienced what ensued through the shouting on the frequencies, the gunfire audible from a few hundred yards away, the panic as rescue teams sprinted out, and of course the disbelief the next morning when only one of the original thirteen walked back in. It was then that the Fighting Pioneer Youth's engineering company truly understood their luck had changed. A slight soldier named Yaacov, who now lives in a Toronto suburb, was there and remembers it in sharp detail, and there are also a few scraps in the military archives. Avi was a veteran by this time, but Yaacov was inexperienced. It was his first tour.

Yaacov was given a new nightscope that could be attached to his helmet and swiveled onto one eye. When he turned it on he saw the other soldiers in green. He was also given a pack of medical equipment that felt like a refrigerator on his back. They followed the dirt road that left the Pumpkin heading south, skirting the Forest at first. After a few hundred yards they came to a curve in the road that was known as the Falcon Bend. This is why the night's events were referred to afterward as the Falcon Incident.

They left the road at the Falcon Bend and headed west into the underbrush, picking their way up toward the ridgeline. There was a small Israeli minefield here left over from years ago, a safe route through it marked with white stones.

The officer went ahead to check the ambush spot, then motioned the others into position. It was a cold night, and Yaacov put on a jacket and stuffed a heat bag between his legs. They sat quietly, leaning back on their helmets. Every so often the sergeant kicked Yaacov hard, thinking he was asleep. He wasn't, but he was so new he wasn't allowed to complain. Wisps of fog blew in, and it became harder to see. He considered the stones by his feet, the dark vegetation around them. At 4:30 a.m. the officer signaled that it was time to return to the outpost.

Yaacov rolled onto his side and emptied his bladder, but the ground was uneven and his heavy pack nearly flipped him over. He only narrowly avoided a hygienic accident. By the time he buttoned up, the front of the squad was moving. Yaacov, at the back of the line with the sergeant, felt relief at the renewed movement of his limbs. Three guerrillas who had been waiting for them in one of the bushes raised their rifles.

The officer at the front saw something and shouted an order, but Yaacov never knew what he said. Yaacov dropped, the pack bringing him down hard. His kneecap cracked. He heard automatic thumping and explosions and yelling, and also groaning coming from the ground nearby. He threw off his pack and got up, heard bullets hit around him, and sprinted toward an outcropping where some of the others were shooting from cover to help him make it. Red tracers flew by his head and just as he arrived something hit him like a hammer moving at the speed of sound. There was smoke coming from a hole in the sleeve of his coat. His fingers were weak and the butt of his rifle had disappeared.

A machine gun lay on the ground nearby. Next to it was its owner, who called out to Yaacov: Put a tourniquet on me, my hand's gone. But bullets were still hissing through the vegetation and pinging off the rocks, and Yaacov was too scared to move, so he pulled a rubber tourniquet from his pocket and threw it at the wounded man. An explosion illuminated the scene for a moment. By now Yaacov's nightscope was useless because there was too much light in the eastern sky, which was going from black to gray as if nothing were out of the ordinary.

Tourniquet, the gunner was crying, and Yaacov saw he had no choice. He put down a grenade he had been gripping in his fist and crawled over. The soldier's forearm was pumping blood onto the ground. Yaacov had never seen anything like it. He managed to get the tourniquet on, and then he saw a figure running from the battle heading west toward the Shiite town. The figure was only a few dozen yards away when Yaacov aimed. But then he hesitated. He had been taught that soldiers wore helmets and guerrillas did not, so anyone without a helmet was a guerrilla and you were supposed to shoot. The figure had no helmet. But what if, Yaacov thought, one of the soldiers lost his helmet, became confused, and started running in the wrong direction? He couldn't pull the trigger, and the sergeant next to him fired instead. The running man dropped. He turned out to be the guerrillas' machine gunner. He had charged the Israelis, shooting until his gun jammed or his ammunition was gone, and then threw his weapon aside and tried to make it home. His name was Bilal. He died, but I would encounter his smiling face later on. Back at the Pumpkin mortars were falling, and Avi had left the war room to organize men around the perimeter in case the skirmish was a diversion for an attack on the base itself.

Yaacov headed back in the direction the squad had come the evening before, walking backward and shooting at bushes. He stepped on something soft and jumped—it was one of the radiomen, who had been a cook and then volunteered for combat. His mouth was open and emitting red foam. A rescue team seemed to have arrived from the outpost, and one of the new soldiers was staring at someone else lying on the ground. Of course everyone knew each other very well, maybe better than they had ever known anyone outside their family. Yaacov crouched next to the prone figure, lifted an arm, and felt for a pulse. He's dead, Yaacov said. Help someone else.

Shut up, shut up, said the staring soldier, and Yaacov moved on. He found another soldier carrying someone who had had not a drop of blood visible on him but who was also dead; the soldier walked a few more paces and put him down. The officer was nearby. He was dead too. Yaacov got close to the road and passed the squad's second radioman writhing on the ground, his webbing emitting smoke. The sergeant had also been hit, and someone was dressing his shoulder.

Soldiers coming from the Pumpkin were rushing into the underbrush with stretchers, including one of Avi's friends, a medic, who remembers kneeling and pressing his fingers under jawbones looking for a pulse—nothing, nothing, nothing—and his medical supplies running out, and then jeeps arriving with more medics. But he doesn't remember any sound. In his memory this all happened in perfect silence.

Besides Yaacov, only one other soldier was still walking. It became clear that this soldier's mind had been scratched, as they say in the army, and he thought his friends were trying to kill him. He was helped into a jeep, and now only Yaacov was left. He was aware of the ache in his arm, but it wasn't too bad. It was light enough now for him to see that the rest of the squad was scattered horizontal at the Falcon Bend.

At the outpost Avi heard news of flowers and oleanders come over the radio. The faces of the men at the Pumpkin were drained of color. He got a turn on the phone and dialed, and his father answered. “Everything's okay,” Avi said.

18

I have the feeling that everything is disintegrating, everything is falling, everything I know is changing inexorably and all of the principles of life are collapsing. I need to find some kind of definition for how to proceed, otherwise I don't think I'll be able to find any kind of way forward at all.

That is Avi writing to Smadar the next day. His thoughts are in disarray, and his descriptive touch has deserted him. He needs her to listen but can't bring himself to write something he wants to say to her. He seems young. This was just after the men from the ambush squad were sent south to Israel—eight for treatment, including Yaacov, and five for burial.

He knew them all, of course, though none were from his own platoon. Some of his friends tried to convince themselves that though the unit was clearly no longer favored by God or luck, the platoon still was. You had to believe something. Avi didn't believe it. “His discovery of danger does not come at once; often it does not come for a long time,” wrote one Great War veteran of a soldier's experience of fear. “At first he has a strange feeling of invulnerability—a form of egotism—then it is suddenly brought home to him that he is not a spectator but a bit of the target, that if there are casualties he may be one of them.” This was now apparent. Having other plans would not be enough to save him.

The guard posts were manned, the guns oiled, the pots washed. The life of that hill never paused. The outpost commander believed routine was the only thing that would save his men, and was planning to send a new squad to the very same spot that night to make a point. The men cursed him for it, though some of them appreciated him more later in their lives. In the background was Pink Floyd.

Do you remember when we talked about your way? It was kind of, “Let It Be,” so I tried. I really tried, but now I can't continue trying to think like that, it just doesn't fit. I'm almost 21 and I've seen so much violence, so much blind cruelty, dreams shattered, lives cut short suddenly and without warning or sign. . . .

Now the tape deck is playing “Wish You Were Here,” and how I wish you were here! One thing is hard for me and probably always will be—putting into action what I want. I never succeed in expressing that level of my personality, the same level, by the way, that is located near a few other things that I can't manage to reveal, and that's a shame. It's like a crystal—every time you move it you see a different beam of light, and it's almost impossible to find the precise spot from which you can see your beam.

That's it for now. My fuel has simply run out.

I already miss everything.

Avi

This was the Falcon Incident of June 1996, one of those “short, bloody, spasmodic silent fights which could be followed on no maps and are recorded nowhere, except in some mother's heart.” That description is from Romain Gary, who was talking about different battles, but it is apt.