10
After the missing verse of “Lover Lover Lover” in Cohen’s orange notebook, eight lines appear under the title “Air Base.” They were never published.
AIR BASE
I went down to the desert
to help my brothers fight
I knew that they weren’t wrong
I knew that they weren’t right
but bones must stand up straight and walk
and blood must move around
and men go making ugly lines
across the holy ground
This is the lost verse of “Lover Lover Lover.” Soldiers heard Cohen sing it, and it appeared in an article written during the war by an Israeli reporter who was so moved by the message that he quoted this verse and none of the others. But the notebook draft shows Cohen beginning to distance himself almost immediately: in the second line, he crossed out the words “my brothers” and instead wrote, “the children.” Then he discarded the verse altogether, and it surfaced only when I found it in the notebook. The lines might have been an authentic expression of a feeling Cohen had in the moment, but not of the way he felt when the war was over and he was back in the world. Or it’s possible that the lines fit Leonard Cohen the private man, but not the artist.
Cohen always wrestled with the idea of commitment, but these thoughts seemed particularly intense around the time of the Yom Kippur War. He was nearly forty and a father. He’d just been on a long, strange trip through the sixties, a decade that cast off old strictures and identifications, but at thirty-nine you sometimes find yourself wondering if there’s actually something to strictures and identifications. What if the answer wasn’t in the Village or on a Greek island, but at the Gate of Heaven after all? Was marriage an archaic prison—or was it in fact “the hottest furnace of the spirit today,” as Cohen once said, the only situation in which “any kind of work can be done”? What if the Jewish solution wasn’t embracing the universal after all, but living in a small tribal state and speaking a language that no one else knew? What if these strange soldiers he’d never met were somehow his brothers? We know that Cohen was suspicious of people who made that kind of claim on him. “And if you call me Brother now,” he wrote in “Story of Isaac” a few years before, “forgive me if I enquire: Just according to whose plan?”
The Israeli musicians who travelled with Cohen say he asked them to use his Hebrew name, Eliezer. “Leonard” is hard for Israelis to pronounce: leh-oh-narrrd. Eliezer Cohen is a name so ordinary it’s almost generic, and there were lots of them in the army. There was a famously reckless helicopter pilot named Eliezer Cohen who now commanded an air base in Sinai, and a Pvt. Eliezer Cohen who was killed at nineteen by a mine near the Gulf of Suez four years earlier, and another Pvt. Eliezer Cohen who was killed by a mine two years before that. The first Israeli across the Suez Canal when the counterattack came in 1973 was a Lt. Eli Cohen. “Leonard” was a foreigner. “Eliezer” was a sibling.
Cohen felt the pull of this group of people. He wouldn’t surrender to it completely, but it was why he came. Most artists who identified with the left weren’t going to play in wars, because it might seem they approved. You needed to be sophisticated enough to see through the politics to the humanity of the soldiers, which wasn’t easy in those years, when people called the veterans coming back from Vietnam “baby-killers.” Johnny Cash and his wife, June Carter, went to Vietnam in 1969 and spent a few weeks at an air base called Long Binh, singing for soldiers heading into the bush and for the ones coming back on the medevac helicopters. “I almost couldn’t stand it,” Cash wrote. And in 1968 James Brown went out with a few bandmates, despite the unpopularity of the war and despite the racial hatred that threatened Brown and America itself; the tour began just after the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. Brown first played the airfield at Tan Son Nhut, near Saigon, and then toured for sixteen days, performing two shows at every stop, rehydrating between gigs with an IV drip. “We didn’t do like Bob Hope,” Brown told an interviewer. “We went back there where the lizards wore guns! We went back there where the ‘Apocalypse Now’ stuff was going on.” Lots of people didn’t like the war. “Well, I don’t like the war, either,” he said, “but we have soul brothers over there.”
In his manuscript, Cohen presents what he says is a letter from Asher, the American he met on the plane to Tel Aviv with his Israeli wife. In Cohen’s description, Asher comes across like a hippy rabbi, a type of Jew that you met in the seventies—acolytes of the singing rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, people who’d come to the Torah via the Bhagavad Gita or acid. If Cohen’s manuscript presents the character of Anthony, the British painter who tried to talk Cohen out of going to Israel, as the universalist voice of the bohemians on Hydra, then Asher and his wife, Margolit, are the counterweight. They represent commitment to Judaism, Israel, and marriage. Those three entanglements seem to have been linked in Cohen’s mind, which is why at one point in his manuscript he swears a vow of chastity as he heads to Israel, “unless she is my True Wife.”
The letter from Asher, which reached Cohen on Hydra after the war, is the continuation of a conversation they had in Israel. There was something in Cohen, Asher wrote, “that is beginning to cry out to be real and realized.” Asher meant the poet’s priestly lineage. Cohen’s ancestral calling, he wrote, was buried under the false image of a despairing artist in bondage to the seductions of the world. “We know you are a Cohen—and that God’s purposes are working fantastically here for the purification of the Sons of Levi—so what,” Asher wanted to know, “are you doing out there?”
Cohen should get married, Asher thought. Jewish law governing the priests in the ancient Jerusalem Temple decreed that each had to offer a sacrifice on behalf of himself “and his house,” which meant not a physical house but a wife. Asher too had been faced with a choice between the physical and the spiritual. “The battle in me was and is waging over which voice to listen to—but I have chosen Him who has chosen me, and there is no other choice—for all flesh is as grass.”
It was time for Cohen to come back to the tribe and accept his role. “We believe that if you will receive the cape of the prophet Elijah, the Spirit of God will be on you to make you a real Cohen. But you have to be as determined to receive God’s blessing as Elijah,” he wrote.
We urge you to return in His time to physical Jerusalem and the spiritual Jerusalem to be built in us together as He reigns in His holy city—us.
Come back to me lover, lover, come back to me lover, lover*—
With a real sense of missing a close brother who is like the wind,
Love, Asher
The asterisk is in the original and leads to an explanation from Cohen at the bottom of the page: “This is a paraphrase of a line from a song that I said to him when we met on the beach at Herzlia for the for the second time.”
Unlike some of the other acts that were playing for troops, Cohen wasn’t going to make do with concerts at bases a safe distance from the fighting. He was going where the lizards wore guns. After the “Air Base” poem in Cohen’s orange notebook, in capital letters, he copies out an old aviation saying, the kind of thing you might overhear at an air base:
THE ONLY REPLACEMENT FOR THE DC3 IS ANOTHER DC3
The DC-3 Dakota was a transport plane flying troops and gear to the front in Sinai. The manuscript describes what happened next: “We flew in a Dakota to the desert.”