Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [106]
Schools organized a program to send a letter from each pupil enclosed with small gifts in a parcel from each family. After the war an armored-corps corporal confessed that on the third day in the desert under fire, with the heat and deaths and burning metal, he was finished, shattered, unable to move, not caring whether he lived. One of these parcels was dropped on his bunk. He thought, “Some silly crap,” but caught sight of the letter and read it: “Dear Soldier, I am sending you this chewing gum. I am not afraid of bombs because I know you are out there protecting me and will not let anyone kill me.” He rose at once, the corporal said; “I felt like a lion.”
These lions fought with tears. A recurrent mention in the post-war talk is of weeping. “I was fighting and crying,” a reserve officer of field rank told me, “because I was shooting and killing.” The wife of a commander in the battle for the Old City, whose troops suffered excessive casualties because use of artillery was eschewed, told how he came home unwashed, unharmed, and apparently unchanged, and only after picking up his sleeping child, broke down and silently wept. A soldier in the North, suddenly confronted by a Syrian emerging from a trench six feet away, shot and killed him and then noticed a wedding ring on the dead man’s hand. The thought flooded his mind, “He has a wife and children,” and he felt the tears rise. Not everyone reacted that way. One wife said that while her husband brooded speechless for days after he returned, his brother reported killing as many Arabs as he could and was perfectly pleased with himself. Another who saw his tank crew blown up, leaving him the only survivor, thereafter turned his guns on the Egyptians and blasted his way through with savage satisfaction.
Afterward the amazing victory brought no parades or cheers or the usual celebrations of triumph. The emphasis was on the dead. Jubilation was missing. The old grieved and the young were somber, conscious of contemporaries maimed or killed. Memorial services and black-bordered announcements in the newspapers were almost a daily occurrence. Israel’s concentration on grief would have seemed exaggerated in another country, but the Jews have known many killed over the centuries and the 700 lost in this war could ill be spared. On a per-capita basis, a comparable loss to the United States would have been 60,000. The race against the stopwatch of the impending U.N. cease-fire required taking military risks which added to the casualties. To Israel as a nation, desperately concerned over its future as a Jewish state in a sea of Arabs, a Jewish life is not expendable. Each loss is a tragedy. But the feeling goes deeper than the loss to the state. It comes from an old, inherited high value placed on human life.
No aspect of the IDF is more striking than its concern for casualties. Every man wounded or dead is brought back regardless of cost, even that of mounting an offensive to recover the missing. In most cases the wounded were in hospitals within an hour, transported directly from the place they fell by helicopter, and the knowledge of this was a strong morale factor. A commanding officer or civilian employer attends the funeral of anyone lost from his outfit and pays the family a visit of condolence. The value of one man was deliberately dramatized when General Hod went to occupied Syria to attend the exchange of 550 Syrian POWs for one Israeli flier and the bodies of two dead.
Yet it is not only for lives that Israel grieves; there is something more. Its people, so long and so often the victims of violence, have had to become, against their ethic, against the hope that brought them back to Zion, users of violence. They had to win the right to nationhood, like the United States,