The Young Men Sent to the Outpost Found No Meaning in the War — Only 'Ready With the Dawn'

Pumpkinflowers is a clear-eyed, arresting memoir that draws an unforgettable portrait of young soldiers, a literary achievement on par with Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. Its first-rate storytelling brings to life a war that few people were watching. The author makes a convincing case that this war foreshadowed a new kind of warfare in the Middle East, though no one knew it at the time. —The New York Times

About the Author:

Matti Friedman: an Israeli writer. He won the Sophie Brody Medal from the American Library Association in 2013 and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature in 2014. His work has been translated into more than 10 languages.

Book Excerpt:

Months had already passed in the desert.

A few kilometers from the base, Avi and his comrades had pitched camp in a cluster of small tents. By now each man had his assignment and the equipment had been handed out. A black tube was fitted under Avi's rifle for firing fist-sized grenades in gaudy yellow and green. The rifle was too long for him, and its weight was a nuisance. The fierce sun had burned the soldiers' faces, and the skin over their knuckles had rubbed away. On the training grounds of the Negev, pitiless little stones dug deep into their knees. Blackened gun oil stained their uniforms, along with the white rings left by dried sweat. A minute's walk from camp stood their makeshift latrine, strewn with toilet paper and sun-baked feces.

The recruits had grown used to hardship by now. Out in the real world beyond the army, civilians see soldiers at their most polished, which is easy to mistake for the truth. In the world outsiders never see, the conditions they lived in were wretched. You were often underfed, underdressed, short of sleep. You were always filthy and worn out. Your life did not belong to you. And sometimes you were pushed to the edge, pessimistic and despairing. You found that the men around you did not march with their heads held high, as you had imagined — they couldn't even give it everything in a sprint. Instead, to borrow Wilfred Owen's line, they were "bent double, like old beggars under sacks." To be an infantryman was to know poverty and want. That was one reason the experience meant something. Only at the time, we couldn't see it.

The companies of the Fighting Pioneer Youth brigade were all highly professional, and they had drawn an exceptional crop of recruits, men with sharper minds than the average conscripted infantryman. Even by that standard, this platoon's soldiers stood out. Take Avi's new friend Matan. Matan came from a collective farm, a place with little to stir his mind, and he said that since reading Where's Pluto? he had never found another book he liked. Where's Pluto? is a picture book about a dog that falls into a pond on a walk. But now he found that his comrades were a thoughtful, book-loving bunch. Even under the unbearable conditions of basic training, they found ways to keep the habit up. Once, Amos, who shared his tent, brought along a book of philosophy called Following the Footsteps of Thought. He and Matan actually finished it, and talked about it for weeks on end. In those days, after days of hard training, they would lie on the ground with aching backs, breathing in a mix of smells — their own unwashed bodies, the earth, dust-caked canvas. This was how they held on to free thought. At first Matan thought they would be mocked. The others sometimes told them to shut up and sleep, but no one ever laughed at them. Today Matan is a physicist, and Amos a psychiatrist living in Paris.

Avi had decided to be a blunt man, and he often spoke without regard for other people's feelings. A few soldiers felt the sting of his tongue. Ilya was one of them. Ilya remembered that Avi made it clear from the start that he thought Ilya was an idiot; only after he learned that Ilya had read One Hundred Years of Solitude did he change his mind. No one in the platoon ever took Avi for a leader, but he was impossible to ignore, and often unwelcome — at least at first. In photographs from this period, Avi wears the look of a child new to the world, unsure whether he will like it, and unsure whether it will like him.

Basic training is like a marriage: living that close together, you cannot hide your true self for long. Avi soon softened. It turned out he had been carrying a few books in his pack all along, and once he found he was not the only one who read, he began lending them out.

In one photograph from Avi's childhood, he lies fast asleep in his own bed, surrounded by piles of books and newspapers. In another, taken years later at his own birthday party, he sits reading in a corner of the room. In high school, the librarian made her rounds at the end of each day. She often found Avi sitting motionless on the footstool by the window, lost in a book. The books came down off the shelves: Brideshead Revisited, Murder on the Orient Express, Nevil Shute's Pied Piper, and others. Avi was rooted in the small country where he was born, raised on lullabies — like the famous song the Russian Emanuel wrote in the 1920s:

You will sprout here, you will grow here In the land of Israel For happiness, for labor You will become a tiller of the soil, like your fathers before you You will sow with diligence And reap with joy But for now, listen to Ima's song* And fall peacefully asleep

Avi's reading list shows that in high school he had begun to grow curious about the world outside. By the time he was drafted, his favorite among the literary guides who had opened that window was Romain Gary. Gary went from immigrant outsider to hero of the Free French Air Force; he was France's consul general in Hollywood; he was the husband of the actress Jean Seberg and had countless lovers besides — if his own account can be trusted, he lost his virginity at 13, to a maid; he was a hedonist on Majorca; he won the Prix Goncourt twice under two different names, a feat no one had managed before him and no one has managed since, and neither name was his own; he was a child of Jewish Europe, and out of that same war-torn Jewish Europe came Isaac Bashevis Singer, Vasily Grossman, Leonard Cohen, Avi's own grandparents, and the state of Israel itself.

Avi took a survey. Had anyone read Gary's masterpiece The Kites? It tells a love story set in Nazi-occupied Normandy; the heroine is the daughter of a Polish count, the hero the country nephew of an eccentric kite-maker. No one had? The paperback rode in ammunition pouches, or crammed into backpacks with dirty socks. Avi lent it out. You can picture Gary — who had drifted, ever changeable, from hard-scrabble Vilnius to sun-drenched Nice — joining their ranks this way. Into a small tent meant for two moved a third, invisible tenant, a Gauloise between his lips and a knowing smile on his face.

Preface to the English Edition

Nights on the hill were strangely long. Under the dark, shadows slipped between boulders; shapes like men appeared in the brush; a haze crept in without a sound and thickened until it blocked every sentry's view. Sometimes, on watch at one of the posts, you would think an hour had passed, check your watch, and find that five minutes had gone by.

Roadside bombs cunningly hidden, quick bursts of suppressing fire, rockets sent through the slits in an outpost wall — the enemy was skilled at all of it. Our specialty was waiting. An honest record of this history would fill thousands of pages with daydreams born of exhaustion and boredom, and with thoughts drifting every which way. Only every few hundred pages would a sudden tragedy interrupt. And then, more waiting.

At night four sentries stood ready at four posts (the posts were never left unmanned); in a tank a four-man crew waited, scanning the approaches to the fort; out in the low brush an ambush team whispered to one another and passed around biscuits, waiting for enemy guerrillas; in the room with the radio equipment two soldiers drank coffee from plastic cups, waiting for messages to come in.

Every day, before the first light, someone went around waking everyone who was not yet up. Bleary-eyed young men climbed down from three-tier bunks, struggled into their clothes and gear, and fastened their helmet straps under their chins. By then everyone was supposed to be ready. At first Lebanon was still pitch dark. But soon, through the holes in the camouflage netting, you would see the sky begin to brighten. Sometimes in that first light you would find the valley buried under cloud, with Pumpkin Hill rising like an island fortress adrift in a sea of fog — as if it were the only place of its kind in the world and, at the same time, entirely outside it. The moment carried a sense of mission, a tight bond among us, and a sound too faint to make out. Now I understand that the sound was the possibility of death. It was an exhilarating moment; part of me still misses that thrill, and the rest of me knows better.

This ritual was the day's overture. We could have stripped out every unnecessary syllable and called it "morning alert," or some other piece of military jargon no one remembers. We could have cut it down to an acronym, as the army did with so much of its language. But for whatever reason its name was always "Ready With the Dawn," and it never changed. It is a strange phrase, and the original Hebrew was just as strange. In the harsh, unforgiving place where we lived, it seemed to remind us that a thing can have colors beyond its use. The phrase carried a poetry that an attentive man could still catch, even in the army.

The moment of "Ready With the Dawn" was meant to wake our slackened senses, to jolt the guard force's scattered attention at the start of the day. Guerrillas were said to favor this hour for raiding outposts. While I was there, they never did. I remember standing in the trench as the morning curtain lifted around us, trying to remind myself that the enemy was hidden somewhere out of sight, only to find my thoughts drifting into the scenery. In that moment, past the coiled wire, everything came clear: sheer cliffs and grassy slopes; villages spread evenly around the hills; the river running below us toward the Mediterranean. Everything was so still that I felt I could hear the hill speaking to me. What it was saying I did not know at the time. But now I believe it was saying, "What are you doing here?" and "Why don't you go home?"

Years later, that hill still speaks to me. What surprises me is that time has not carried its voice away — the voice has grown louder, and clearer.

This book is about the fate of a group of young men. They went from high school straight into a war — a forgotten war in a forgotten corner of the world. And yet, after it ended on a night in the early spring of the 21st century, it has gone on echoing quietly through our lives, through the life of our country and of the world at large. Anyone who wants to trace the roots of today's Middle East would gain a great deal from looking closely at these events.

The first part of the book recounts a series of events beginning in 1994 at an Israeli military outpost we called "Pumpkin Hill." The soldier Avi got there before I did, and we come to know these events through his eyes. The second part introduces two civilians, two mothers, whose campaign of resistance disrupted military strategy. The third part covers my own time on the hill, and what several of my friends went through in the outpost's last days. The final part tells of my return to Lebanon after it was all over, to understand better what we had lived through.

"Ready With the Dawn" later became my time for reflection. Look around: Where are you? Why are you there? Who else is there? Are you ready? Ready for what? It was so important a ritual, formed in so formative a period of my life, that the habit of mind became instinct, the way an infant knows to hold its breath underwater. I still fall into it often. This is one of those times.

Cover image from: pixabay