Pumpkinflowers (4 page)

9

I
T WAS THE
Pumpkin Incident, also known as the Flag Incident, that began the hill's brief period of notoriety and brought Avi up earlier than planned. He arrived with the uproar at its height.

One of the men there that day in October 1994 was a nineteen-year-old named Eran, who served with the engineering company of a different infantry brigade. This company's men alternated on the hill with the engineering company of the Fighting Pioneer Youth—four months inside, then four months of training in the desert, then back in.

Eran was doing his best to be a good soldier. He was of a type quite different than Avi. Today he speaks softly and tears up easily and without embarrassment. He doesn't dwell on these events. When he spoke about this, sitting on the roof of his apartment building in a Tel Aviv suburb, he said it was the first time he had mentioned the Pumpkin in many years. He has five children and works as a therapist. His specialty is trauma.

Readiness with Dawn ended without incident that morning. No one expected an incident. It had been years since guerrillas tried to storm an Israeli outpost, having realized that soldiers were more vulnerable outside their forts, on patrols or moving on the roads. The Pumpkin's fortifications were meager in those days, and the rules lax. You were still allowed to walk around outside without a helmet or flak jacket. No one had seen the guerrillas sneak up the ridge in the darkness. When a barrage began just after 8:30 a.m. no one panicked, because shelling was common. But this time it seemed worse than usual, and there was a new kind of percussion added to the crump of mortars—the rapid chatter of automatic rifles. This meant the enemy was close. The hill was under attack.

On the western side of the Pumpkin, the most dangerous side because it faced the hostile town, was the surveillance post, just a shipping container with a window that opened like a chow truck at a construction site. This was where two lookouts from a field intelligence unit sat with maps and binoculars, watching the houses and streets of the Lebanese. There was a smokescreen that could be triggered to protect them from missiles, at least that was the theory, but when someone activated it now the wind blew the smoke inside the outpost, blinding the defenders and making it hard to breathe. Neither Eran nor anyone else knew where the attackers were.

There were four soldiers on the western side—the two lookouts and two sentries from the infantry. But when the shooting became fierce the lookouts fled. One of them was seen running into the bunker below, and though he was physically unharmed he never recovered. That left the two infantrymen. One happened to be a medic, and when he heard there were casualties he decided to leave his post to treat them. The other sentry also vanished, and that's why there was no one guarding the approaches when the guerrillas arrived with their cameraman.

The world has become so used to this kind of thing that it's hard to imagine how potent it was when Hezbollah broadcast the jumpy footage of guerrillas with rifles and rocket launchers, shouting in Arabic, a sound track of martial music. Hezbollah understood that the images of an attack could be more important than the attack itself—this seems obvious now but wasn't at the time. It was the very beginning of videotaped violence and the media war, which is a war not for territory but for “consciousness.”

In the video the Hezbollah cameraman starts out crouching in dry grass with a few of the fighters, his lens level with the spiky heads of dry milk thistles. The outpost is visible perhaps four hundred yards away, shell bursts blooming on the embankments. A voice off camera yells in Arabic, “Just a minute, just a minute,” and then, as a smoke plume rises from the Pumpkin, someone shouts, “Good, good!” In the next shot the fighters are closer, taking cover behind a stone outcropping. You can see the Pumpkin a hundred yards away. Someone rises onto one knee and fires a rocket. The army used to find Hezbollah bodies in jeans and civilian jackets, but times had changed. These fighters are in uniform, with webbing and helmets. They appear capable.

Four guerrillas leave cover and begin to close the distance, running up the incline until they tire and begin to walk. The cameraman is behind them. When they have nearly reached the top they abruptly kneel. Someone has shouted a warning. There is an explosion to their left. They rise again, and one throws a grenade over the embankment and into the Pumpkin. Another raises a Hezbollah flag with both hands and plants it in triumph: it's Iwo Jima, or the moon landing. That's where the video ends, so you don't see them turn around and run away.

The twenty-two-year-old lieutenant in charge of the Pumpkin got some of the soldiers organized and led them up to the trench that ran atop the embankments ringing the outpost. Another junior officer was moving in the trench when a shell fell behind him, and a soldier saw this officer sink to his knees, his expression that of a child in the moment between a scrape and the beginning of a wail. The officer's back was covered with blood, but when he realized he was alive and could move his limbs he composed himself. The soldier helped him down to the bunker, where they found medics treating someone who seemed to have lost his fingers.

By the time Eran made it up to the trench the flag was stuck in the embankment. The soldiers had mounted no effective response. Later they would be excoriated for their conduct in the press and in military tribunals, but in the confusion of the moment it's understandable that no one knew what to do.

The fire slackened and the worst seemed to be over. There was still shooting coming from the Forest, which was on the hilltop just to the south, and Eran raced through the trench until he faced the trees. Now that he could see the Forest, whoever was in the Forest could see him, and a few tracers zipped by his head. He crouched. Another soldier, a burly kid from one of the farming communities in the south of Israel, arrived at the same time and set himself up next to Eran just before a blast propelled Eran backward and filled the trench with smoke.

When he looked again the second soldier was on his back, a red pool spreading under his head. A third soldier ran up just then, and when he saw what had happened he fell to his knees and began hitting his head against the concrete wall of the trench. The dead soldier was his friend. Not long afterward the shelling stopped and the hill was quiet again.

According to an official Hezbollah account, the guerrillas captured the outpost, “purified it of Zionists,” killed five soldiers, and “trampled the bodies beneath their feet,” but this was nonsense. The outpost had lost a soldier, but it was still there, the garrison intact and functioning. The significance wasn't clear right away. That the TV images were the real weapons, that the Hezbollah fighters and Israeli soldiers had been turned into actors in an attack staged for the camera—these weren't things anyone understood yet.

The footage was broadcast across the Middle East and picked up by Israel's television stations. In the days that followed the Hezbollah man entered everyone's living room, raised his arms, and drove his flag in again and again. Israelis were horrified. Fear that we are no longer sufficiently tough is one of the key chemicals in our country's communal brain, and this explains the hysteria that followed the fixing of that little flag. The incident was taken to be not a small failure, the kind of thing that happens to garrisons whose senses are deadened by routine, but a sign of decay in the army and a frailty among Israel's youth. This became known as the Pumpkin Incident, the first time anyone in Israel had heard the outpost's name.

Another important thing to know about this country is that we tend to see either unadulterated victory or disaster. So this was a disaster. It assumed the dimensions of a major military defeat, and headline writers began calling it “the Disgrace.” The army kicked a few soldiers out of Eran's unit and declared the young officer in charge unfit for command.

Israeli society and its military were changing, the collective receding and the individual coming to the fore, and the flag became a focus for people's unease. Some thought part of the blame lay with the growing involvement of parents in their children's army service: it was becoming common in those days for mothers to call their sons' commanders to lodge complaints, a collision between one of the country's most important institutions, the army, and its most important institution, the family. Or perhaps, some suggested, it had to do with tolerance for soldiers crying at military funerals—there was a debate in those days about whether this was appropriate. “When fear and crying become respectable subjects that are discussed and encouraged, it's hard to get angry at soldiers in an isolated post,” wrote one journalist.

Back in Israel, two of Eran's comrades were hitchhiking at an intersection when a man pulled up, identified their uniform insignia, and said, “You're the cowards, right?” One of the soldiers leaned into the car window and punched him in the face.

10

I
N THE SAME
week of the Pumpkin Incident the newspapers were reporting a triumphant visit by our prime minister to the king of Morocco in Casablanca. A front-page article was headlined “A Bank, Not a Tank.” Reading the headlines from those days in late October and November 1994 is like reading the journal entries of a child you can barely recognize as yourself or one of those notebooks people keep beside their bed to record their dreams. The word
peace
was used without irony. Peace! Now it feels like the word
telegraph
or
wedlock
—a curio. This was, as I've mentioned, the heyday of the euphoria over the new Middle East.

Some decided that the Pumpkin Incident was linked to the anticipated arrival of peace. “The fighting spirit has been broken,” wrote one analyst of the soldiers who had abandoned their posts on the hill, “because no one wants to be a war's last fatality, and many feel that the 100 Years' War is about to be over.” Should we laugh at this line, or weep?

A new Middle East was being born just then, but not the one anyone imagined. It was happening in the scrub among boulders and concrete fortifications on a hill in the south of Lebanon. Only a few young people were present for the delivery.

11

A
FEW WEEKS
after the Pumpkin Incident and not long after Avi arrived on the hill, guerrillas ambushed an army convoy coming from Israel. They emerged from the houses of a village that cowered beneath Beaufort Castle, and then they disappeared back inside. This village, Arnoun, was directly on the line between the security zone and Lebanon proper, caught on a border not of its making and battered and half deserted as a result.

Avi's company commander was Yohai, one of those rare officers with an instinctive understanding of young soldiers and a clear idea of what to do always, the idea generally being to attack. Yohai had identified Avi as a soldier who did not automatically obey orders; the commander appreciated this quality. When news of the convoy came Yohai didn't wait for orders. He just rounded up Avi and a few others, took two armored vehicles, swung onto the dirt road that led south along the ridge, and headed for the fighting.

When they reached the village they went room by room through two abandoned houses near where the guerrillas had been seen. The soldiers went in shooting and throwing grenades. No one was there. Outside, Avi raised his rifle and fired his pretty grenades with their champagne-cork pop, followed a moment later by the thud of the explosion, narrowly missing an Israeli officer of high rank who had appeared from somewhere to join the action.

When the soldiers burst into the next house through a fresh shell hole in the wall it was clear that people lived there. There were couches, carpets, a fridge. You never trained on houses that looked like that and it felt strange, but there was nothing to do be done, so Avi and the others swept the rooms upstairs, throwing grenades and following their barrels through the doors as they had been taught.

Yohai headed down a staircase toward a small room that opened to his left, and inside he found a young man crouching in the corner, looking up at him and holding a grenade launcher, and Yohai squeezed his trigger but the gun jammed, and they just looked at each other. Yohai's number two was coming through the doorway after him, pushing him in, and Yohai had to shove him back out—the whole thing lasted a second, but it seemed much longer. When they got out Yohai threw grenades through the door and then had a tank fire a few shells through the wall, and when they went back in they found two dead guerrillas. The second was in another corner, and Yohai hadn't noticed.

Avi was sent to the vehicles for a stretcher, and as he sprinted off he made a discovery. He always thought that when engaged in combat you wouldn't get tired, that supernatural forces would kick in and the regular rules wouldn't apply. But it was downhill to the vehicles and uphill coming back, and he slowed and was winded and walking by the time he returned. This was the kind of detail he noticed.

12

A
VI WASN'T SURE
he could handle this sort of thing, no one is until it happens, but it turned out he was fine. He told Yossi so the next time he made it home. Yossi was Avi's father. He had once been in the Fighting Pioneer Youth himself and had helped capture the Old City of Jerusalem from the Jordanians in 1967. He withstood Egyptian bombardments in the Suez Canal outposts after that war—the worst were the 60 mm shells, he remembers, which were inaudible until just before they hit. Then he fought across the canal after the reversals of 1973. There is nothing military about Yossi. He's a smiling man despite everything, compact like Avi. One day he was back from Suez in his kitchen with Avi's mother, Raya, and older brother, an infant at the time. The baby's bottle thumped to the floor, and the young family contemplated Yossi flat on his stomach with his hands covering his head.

Yossi knew about such matters and was worried about his son. Avi said he didn't mind the shelling. What he did mind was going out in front on patrol with the metal probe that engineers use to poke the ground and spot mines and booby traps. Yossi wasn't sure if this was for the obvious reason or because when they had been taught to use the probe in engineers' training Avi might have been elsewhere with a cigarette and a novel.

Avi arrived at an agreement with Raya. If something happened on the hill, he would use the single phone line at the outpost to call home. He would say only, “Everything's okay.” That would mean that everything was not okay but Avi was, and the family would know he was alive by the time anything was reported on the radio a few hours later. In those years the radio announcers in Israel would report “heavy exchanges of fire” in Lebanon, and that was a code—it meant soldiers were dead but this couldn't be reported yet because their families hadn't been informed. Everyone understood, and if you had a son in Lebanon you had a few difficult hours before things became clear, after which either things went back to normal or life as you knew it ended.

Avi smoked cigarettes and toasted sandwiches on the little spiral heaters with bread and processed cheese pilfered from the kitchen. There were occasional interruptions of the drudgery. The platoon was supposed to set off on an ambush one frigid evening, for example, lying in wait for guerrillas in bushes near the outpost from nightfall to dawn; these excursions were one of the garrison's regular missions. But the infantry gods decided the platoon had suffered enough and sent white flakes to bury the hill. The operation was canceled. For kids from the Middle East snow is a novelty, and there is a photograph showing Avi and the others grinning in the flurry, their surroundings forgotten.

But mostly it was cleaning dishes and guns, waiting out shelling and standing on guard duty, crawling into his sleeping bag with his boots on and closing his eyes—and then it was Readiness with Dawn and he was on his feet again. They were more exhausted than they had ever been. They wanted to go home. They were tired of everything. Their
dicks were broken
, to use one of the crucial terms in the parlance of our military—one which, despite its importance in describing a key stage and mood in our lives, does not appear in the great dictionary of modern Hebrew compiled by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and does not originate, as much of our language does, in any of the books of the Bible.

Occasionally their platoon leader would round them up and deliver inane speeches to them in the rain, or so they remembered, perhaps unkindly. He wasn't much older than they were, and was no match for them. They called him the Peacock and tried to make his life as difficult as possible. Avi thought bitterly of himself and his friends as “hewers of wood and drawers of water”—Joshua 9:27.