11

In the Desert

Sinai after a week of war was field hospitals, sandy airstrips, tents flapping in the blast of rotors. The closer you got to the canal the more burned vehicles you saw, the soldiers’ vacant stares more pronounced. The Israeli public still hadn’t been informed of the scope of the army’s failure, but down here it was clear. This was around the time that the outpost called the Pier, which had been holding out somehow along the canal since the surprise attack, finally surrendered to the Egyptians. I know someone who was there, went off to a prison camp with the other survivors, and came back whole in body only.

Some of the soldiers in Sinai remember the little groups of musicians who could be seen moving around the front—bell-bottomed figures silhouetted in the dust clouds, gripping guitars in the back of speeding army trucks, hitching helicopter rides. One navigator on a Hercules transport remembered a scene from the Refidim air base, a snapshot that came to him as we spoke: He’s just landed to ferry out casualties. A surgeon he’s met before, Dr. Haruzi, comes out of the operating theatre with his white coat covered in blood, waving his hands with a grim expression. He’s lost a patient. Nearby a few artists—long hair, civilian clothes, one with a guitar—wait for someone to get them out of here.

After landing near the front, Cohen and the band were issued sleeping bags. They had a small amp which they’d have to hook up to the batteries of tanks or trucks. They set off, sometimes as a group and sometimes alone. Nowhere in his pocket notebooks or typed manuscript does Cohen give any indication that he knows where he is. Other than Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, there are no place names at all. Part of this was being a foreigner, but the experience of his Israeli companions doesn’t seem to have been much different. They weren’t combat soldiers. They were far from their cafés. Once they were at the front, it was all “the desert.”

There was no organized tour. “Any idiot can come and take you,” Oshik said, explaining how it worked. The “idiots” were the young Education Corps officers whose job it was to bring singers to units in the field. “We have no idea where we are, and no idea who these guys are. Every day a different education officer comes, or some other idiot, and says, ‘Eight of our guys just got killed, you have to come.’ Hey, where are we going? Why? But what can I say to them? They put you in the truck and you go.”

I spent a long time trying to track down a record of dates and locations, or someone who’d coordinated the concerts, but when I said the word coordinated, Oshik cracked up. “These kids would come and argue with each other about who’d get us,” he said. “Who had more fatalities, more woes.”

And who would decide?

“They’d argue.”

And you’d go with the winner?

“You can’t say no to them. Can you say no?”

The audience wasn’t always interested. It was one thing to round up bored soldiers in the rear, mechanics and cooks, but many combat troops weren’t in the mood for civilians with guitars, smelling of girls and Tel Aviv, or for “education officers” who weren’t dying. They preferred not to be reminded of a normal life from which they were locked out and which they might not see again. “Raising morale” is a civilian idea. The soldiers had seen something true and awful about the world, and they weren’t going to be cheered up.

Sometimes soldiers were forced to listen or were too worn down to object. There’s documentary footage of an entertainment troupe in 1973 where a few teenage musicians are frantically clapping and singing for an audience of filthy soldiers sitting on the ground, staring into space with hollow eyes. If you research the Yom Kippur War you’ll see a lot of corpses, but this image is worse. It’s one of the most awful of the war.

They moved deeper into the netherworld of the front. If they were playing during the day, Pupik, the comic, made sure the soldiers sat on a slope with the sun behind them—better for the performers to have the sun in their eyes than the audience. When they played in a bunker with a lightbulb dangling from the ceiling, he rigged an egg carton on one side of the bulb so the stage would be lit and the audience in the dark. Pupik also brought along a suitcase, not just to keep his clothes in, but as a prop: He’d step up to the microphone, then seem to notice that he was too short to reach it. He’d rush off stage, bring out his suitcase, and hop up. That usually got a laugh.

A typical concert, in Oshik’s memory: An officer takes them out in the desert at night in a truck. The front is close but he doesn’t know how close. They stop by a few big artillery guns clustered in the sand. Everything is completely black. Does anyone want to hear some music? Some dirty soldiers gather around. Pupik builds a stage of ammunition crates and arranges the truck’s headlights for illumination. They start singing. Suddenly an artillery officer says politely, “Can you stop for a moment,” and shouts: “GUN THREE!” The ground shakes and the air ripples with the force of the projectile. Everyone is deafened for a few seconds. They begin singing again.

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