15
I know a psychologist named Joel who was a twenty-five-year-old medic at the time. He reached the war a week in, on October 13, when things were grim, before the counterattack across the canal changed the picture two days later. On the day he arrived, General Albert Mendler, commander of all Israeli armoured forces in Sinai, was killed in his half-track.
When the siren went off during the Yom Kippur prayers, Joel was supposed to have been with a reserve unit at one of the Suez outposts, part of a routine call-up a few weeks before. But he’d been held up at the university, missed a bus, and by the time he reached the base the unit was gone. The army clerks sent him home. If he’d been on time, he would have been caught in the surprise attack and would now be dead or a prisoner. But instead he was at a synagogue in Jerusalem.
Even though it was Yom Kippur, when the use of electricity is forbidden, the rabbi said it was permissible to turn on the radio, because the call-up codes of different units were being read out on air. Driving to the induction centres was also permissible, because Judaism places the principle of saving human life above other religious strictures, even the laws of Yom Kippur.
In the bedlam of the induction centres Joel met someone he knew who was studying medicine in Italy. The army clerks assigned this medical student to an armoured battalion and Joel to the paratroops, even though, unlike the medical student, Joel had been in a tank unit and had never jumped out of a plane. It was army logic. The two of them tried to switch assignments, but the clerks had already made carbon copies of the lists. It was too much trouble to change them. The medical student was killed by a mine.
His company of paratroops got to Sinai a few days later and ended up somewhere south of the Mitleh Pass, he isn’t sure where. They were in trucks in the desert when they heard that General Mendler was dead. That’s how he dates his arrival in the war. Otherwise he’d have no idea.
They were carrying heavy gear over the dunes. He was out of shape and had trouble keeping up. He doesn’t remember the order of things, just snapshots: Four Israeli tanks on a rise in front of him, facing the enemy, then four explosions, one after the other. The desert floor covered with fine filaments like a spider’s web, you’d trip over them, you’d see them gleaming in the sun, they were beautiful—the guiding wires of Egyptian rockets. The Israeli tanks were a few hundred yards away. Joel reminded his lieutenant that he was a medic and asked if he should go over to help. Only if you have a spatula, the lieutenant said. Every once in a while you’d see a blackened figure in tank coveralls coming at you from the sand, asking where you’re from, looking for somewhere to go. No one at home knew who was dead or alive or a prisoner. Joel’s parents were in Boston and he knew they were worried, so he wrote them a letter on the back of a label he peeled off a can of army peas. The unit got a crate of new shoulder-launched rockets from an American shipment. A soldier standing near Joel fired one by mistake, and it just missed him. Joel’s war story was about near misses.
The famous singer Yehoram Gaon came to perform for them. He was being driven all over the front, stopping for groups of soldiers, and by the time he reached Joel and his friends he had no voice left and couldn’t sing. He apologized.
There was a barrage and someone shouted something that sounded like esh ness! Joel didn’t understand what that meant. He’d come from America only a few years earlier, fresh from Boston University in 1969, with not much beyond a tape recorder and some Dylan, Rabbi Carlebach, and Leonard Cohen. His Hebrew still wasn’t great, but he knew esh was fire and ness was a miracle, and thought maybe they were talking about a kind of miracle firebomb or something, but actually the word ness here meant something different, it was a Hebrew acronym for a massive anti-battery barrage. It meant this was the kind of barrage you should run away from. They all ran to the half-tracks to escape, but there was one guy named Bar-On who just stood there petrified in the barrage, not running anywhere. He wouldn’t listen to reason and just stood there. Joel was looking back on this event as a psychologist in his seventies. They had to use “psychology” on this soldier, he remembered, which meant that one of the others ran up to him and punched him in the face, and then they threw him in the half-track.
He was up all night and finally, in the middle of the day, came to a place where they were allowed to rest for a few hours. It wasn’t a base, just a temporary camp in the sand. He fell into a deep sleep with his boots on. He passed out as you do when you’re a soldier—partly from exhaustion, partly because alcohol and drugs are unavailable and sleep is the only way to block out what’s going on. No civilian slumber is as deep. He was asleep when he heard the voice. He knew who it was.
“I heard the singing and thought, well, obviously I’m dreaming,” he remembered. “I tried to get up, but I couldn’t. I fell back. I heard it again, and I said no—I have to get up and see what’s going on.” This happened three, maybe four times. But he couldn’t wake up. In the end he fell into an even deeper sleep. “I thought, it can’t be true, but it’s a beautiful dream so I’m going to keep on dreaming.”
After a while some other soldiers shook him awake and he came to in the sand. There was an ambush that night and they had to get ready. They said a singer had come, an American Jew with a guitar, no one they knew. He played a few songs and drove off. No, Joel said—it couldn’t be. But it was. It really was Cohen in Sinai. He missed that too.