NEWS: SG Community Diary: Shiva for Two Brothers

CULTURE: SG Community Diary: Shiva for Two Brothers

Below is the second installment of an SG Community Diary column written by SG member Joual who details - with wonderfully intermingling precision, poeticism, humor, and heart-wrenching emotion - life as part of the Israeli Defense Force. You may read his previous article here. Once again, thank you, Joual, for your honesty and courage and for sharing your story with all of us.





The caption in an Israeli daily read "One last dishonour." The accompanying picture portrayed two black coffins being dumped unceremoniously to the ground, a seeming final show of disrespect to the bodies of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, the two reservists kidnapped and killed in a Hezbollah ambush in 2006. After two years of uncertainty and a flurry of conflicting statements by intelligence officials and Hezbollah, the families of Goldwasser and Regev could finally close this tragic chapter in their lives, say the Jewish prayer of kaddish, and consecrate their loved ones to the earth.



Simultaneously and in a causally related event, a middle-aged, mustachioed man was quietly being transported across the Lebanon-Israeli border to Beirut. Emerging in a clean set of clothes and sporting a noticeable paunch, Samir Kuntar was greeted by massive crowd support in a hero's parade orchestrated and financed by Hezbollah. Nearly 20 years prior, this man, whom I quipped looked like the owner of a bad food court-grade Shwarma stand, came in from Lebanon via boat, killed a policeman, Eliyahu Shahar, burst into the house of Naharya resident Danny Haran and kidnapped him and his 4 year old daughter, Einat. Taking them to the beach, he shot Danny to death and began to beat the young girl around the head with rocks, finally crushing her head with his rifle's stock. The man's wife was forced to cower in her home as the heavily armed Kuntar stalked through her house, smothering her own baby daughter in an attempt to keep her quiet.



It was a hot, summer evening on a base not far from Gaza when my unit heard the news. We had just completed a solid day of urban warfare training and were ready to hit the sack hard. It had been a rough day of training, with the temperatures in the high-90s/low-100s, and our ceramic armour and gear, in addition to making us look like Satan's Own Pillsbury Doughboys , didn't really do a whole lot to improve the situation. In fact, the extreme dust and heat combined with the ever-present and proliferating infestation of scarab beetles caused even my cheery and normally resilient Fruit of the Looms to, well, wilt.



I had just dropped to my cot in an cloud of sand, dust, and sweat and was looking and feeling very much the spitting image of a militaristic Pig Pen, when the Platoon Sergeant from our mortars section, Drori, burst into the tent throwing down an Israeli newspaper from that morning.



"Goddamn cowardly sons of bitches dity slut motherfucking cunts!"



Drori, even when he's a good mood, is what I like to call temperamentally psychotic. A short, aggressive, loud, chain-smoking, Mizrac hi (Arabic/Jewish), music loving Yemenite with a dim view of "soldiers rights", Drori is a throwback to the IDF of the 1970s. In fact, the first time I met him I was participating in a combined sharpshooters/Squad automatic weapon (SAW- the Negev machine gun) exercise. At that time, he had gotten the posting of the logistics-and-supply-sergeant for the Negevists and had a penchant for smacking people around with wooden posts and threatening to insert the rather heavy SAW into anatomically improbable areas. That said, the man loves and drives his platoon to excellence, and his men adore him.



On this occasion, the vein on Drori's head was an angry red and he was in full Drori mode, pacing and cursing. People gathered around the paper, pushing and shoving each other to see the picture of those coffins lying on the ground. The anger, sadness and frustration in these young men was visible in their eyes.



We sat in a semi-circle as Drori read the article to an almost disbelieving audience.



"Those sons of bitches! How can they just give in and free that monster for…for…bodies?!"



"We should give bodies for bodies, if they give us live people we can give them live people!"



"Look at those sluts, no respect! Fucking coffin on the ground!"



"Look at that fat fuck we released, clean and well kept and our guys? Their parents didn't know they were dead until now!"



"Oh my god, think of what their parents went through…my mom would die!"



And that was the key sentence, we all fell quiet. In all of us we saw a glimpse of a possible future, where in some fubar mission in Gaza city or Rafa we get injured and kidnapped and die in some god-forsaken hellhole with nobody knowing where we are and our parents and loved ones scared and grieving. Where our bodies end up lying in an anonymous coffin, dropped into the dirt like garbage in front of the eyes of our parents and the world. Or, worse than that, to be like Ron Arad, likely tortured to death far from home and whose family has been kept in the dark for 22 years.



To many of us this prisoner exchange brought about a lot of conflicting emotions. On the one hand, it brought closure to what has been a dark chapter in IDF history and allowed these men's mothers and wives to finally begin to grieve. On the other hand, we felt that all we fought for, to protect our families by putting our lives on the line every goddamn day to bring in or kill men like Kuntar was wasted if a few years down the line they would be let go alive and in perfect health in exchange for one or two corpses, even if they had smashed open the skull of a 4 year old child and remain remorseless to this day.



Drori turned the page and we all saw the picture of Ehud Olmert holding Ehud Goldwasser's widow just as she was about to burst into tears. Quietly, probably one of the only times I've heard him speak without cursing or shouting, he spoke.



"I was in the war. I felt that maybe we could bring these guys home, or at the very least stop the missiles from hitting my family up north. That was what we wanted, to kill the men who took him and bring him home alive, to his family. We went for days without re-supply, no fresh water, eating canned meat and tuna. They kept telling us that Olmert was going to send in reinforcements any day now, that he would authorize a ground attack. We waited, and he hesitated. And now, now we give Hezbollah what they wanted all along and they're celebrating while we grieve."



Silence.



Drori looked around at the angry, disappointed faces of his men.



"Well, I dunno. I heard maybe they injected some kind of radioactive material into Kuntar and the rest. It'll take a few years but he'll get his! That's possible, right?"



They all looked at me, they knew I had studied neuroscience and knew a little medical science. I didn't think that they did such injections or even would for a number of strategic reasons (nobody would ever trade prisoners with us again), but as I looked around at my buddies, who felt so betrayed by their government for looking so vulnerable, and saw the pain in their eyes I couldn't speak. Finally, I said it was possible, but that maybe he was infected with some kind of disease, so that he would die and maybe even spread it to other terrorists and we could maintain that he was infected in prison through some kind of shower room backdoor shenanigans.



"Yeah, that's gotta be it. AIDS or something!"



"I've heard the Mossad did stuff like that before, that must be it!"



"Bet he doesn't even know, the sucker!"



Of course I knew that nobody injected Kuntar with anything, and I'm sure my battle brothers knew that just as well, but when you're a soldier who is expected to fight and die for your country, for a government that can sometimes be run by a bunch of shmucks in cheap suits, sometimes you want to believe that justice will prevail in the end.



Sometimes you want to believe that providence or fate or Karma or whatever you want to call it will make things right.



Sometimes you want to believe that what you work and slave for, what you bleed for, won't be thrown away in one fell swoop.



Sometimes you just need to believe.



For my fallen brothers Sgt. Major Ehud Goldwasser and Sgt. First Class Eldad Regev, I recite the kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the remembrance of the dead.



Magnified and sanctified be Gods great name in the world which He created according to His will.

May he establish His kingdom during our lifetime and the lifetime of Israel, let us say Amen.

May Gods great name be blessed forever and ever

Blessed, glorified, honoured and extolled, adored and acclaimed be the name of the Holy One, though God is beyond all praises and songs of adoration which can be uttered. Let us say, Amen.

May there be peace and life for all of us and for all Israel. Let us say Amen.

Let He who makes peace in the heavens grant peace to all of us and to all Israel.

Let us say, Amen.



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SG Community Diary is a newswire feature intended to highlight some of the wonderful, interesting, and amazing stories of this website's models and members.



Please contact Fatality or Anarchie with any other potential stories!

What an amazing article.
Thank you so much for sharing this with us.

What a world we live in.

Incredible article. Nothing like a first hand perspective.

This is an excellent article. I hope to see more from you soon.

I absolutely can't wait for your next article. Amazing read.

Beautifully written. Thank you for sharing this.