The Volunteer

by Michael Ross

  The kibbutz’s leadership helped me stay in Israel. Through their auspices, I secured placement in an Orthodox conversion program that provided me with a year of intense study in Judaism and Hebrew. The application process said a lot about my new faith: while Christianity and Islam proselytize aggressively, Judaism almost seems eager to discourage new converts. During my interview with a representative of the ministry of religious affairs, which oversaw the program together with the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, the interviewer was downright confounded as to why I—or anyone else, for that matter—would want to join such an afflicted, downtrodden religion. He looked at me as if I were some sort of masochist.

  I would not be discouraged. I had fallen in love not only with an Israeli woman, but also with an entire culture and religion. They’d embraced me as one of their own during the past year, and the least I could do was demonstrate my sincerity by joining the tribe. Conversion wasn’t a decision I took lightly, and I realized that I was embarking on a journey that had a deeper meaning than what I had intended when I left Canada.

  My second year in Israel was very different from my first. As part of my conversion program, I moved to a different kibbutz. This one was run by Orthodox Jews, with nary a pub or merry New Zealander to be seen. I prayed three times a day, worked the fields in punishing one hundred four-degree heat, and spent the rest of my waking hours hitting the books. It was at least as tough as anything I’d endured in the army.

  But I survived—one of only three who completed the program out of an original twenty-eight. When the year was up, I had to write final exams, undergo an oral examination in front of three university professors, and sit before a quorum of rabbis from the Chief Rabbinate. Only when I’d demonstrated my learning to their satisfaction was I granted the privilege of entering the mikveh—a Jewish communal bath that symbolically washes away spiritual impurities. I’d officially become a Jew. (There is another step in the process, of course, but I was spared; mercifully, my parents had the good sense to circumcise me at birth.)

  Judaism blurs the line between religion and ethnicity, and so some Jews look askance on converts. But the scripture provides a rejoinder to such snobs: according to Jewish law, no person is permitted to remind others of a Jew’s convert status for seven generations (after which the whole issue is guaranteed to be moot). As for me, I had an easier way of dealing with the issue. I’d simply remind the very few doubters I encountered that King David’s Moabite grandmother, Ruth, was herself a convert.

  After my conversion, I was granted Israeli citizenship and got married to Dahlia, the raven-haired German shepherd owner. Not long thereafter, I was drafted into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). I was twenty-four when I received the letter from the government, the same age as my maternal great-grandfather when he was called up to fight in the Great War of 1914-18. Around this time, our first son was also born, and it was at that moment that I fully realized that my life had changed forever.

  2

  SOLDIERING ON

  People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

  GEORGE ORWELL

  It was three o’clock in the morning on a warm September day in 1984. I was standing in a small, cramped barracks building in the Israeli countryside while Sergeant Yaron, a young Kurdish Jew, surveyed the thirty-odd soldiers who made up our newly formed platoon. He was that stock figure from many war movies: the tough-as-nails sergeant who breaks down recruits with an unending stream of verbal abuse. Never before or since have I met a man who could describe his contempt for you in such a wide variety of novel and entertaining ways.

  This was my first day in an IDF combat engineer company, a unit tasked with assaulting and demolishing enemy positions. Having been up since five o’clock the previous morning, we were a tired lot. I would have preferred to be sleeping, and I guess it showed on my face.

  “Hey, look everybody, this guy seems really unhappy,” Yaron said. He bounded over, stood about an inch from my face, and asked in a booming voice, “Where you from, pretty boy?” I gave him the name of my kibbutz.

  “Not with that accent, you aren’t. What candy-ass, UN-hugging country do you call home? Please don’t be British, because Israel has its quota of homosexuals and we really can’t handle any more.” There were muffled chuckles in the background.

  “Canada,” I replied.

  “Canada!” he exclaimed excitedly. “And tell me, what does Canada produce besides snow, trees, maple syrup, and bears? Oh, I remember now,” he continued. “I’ve seen your peacekeeping countrymen in the Golan. Real fine fighting men—when they aren’t fucking our girls in Tiberias!”

  His words dripped with the derision that veteran IDF soldiers typically harbor toward “peacekeeping” forces and the foreign armies that staff them—troops whose idea of a casualty is a broken typewriter or flat tire punctured on a beer run.

  In fact, I wasn’t quite so green as Yaron thought.

  I joined the Canadian army after high school, my head full of adolescent notions of military glory. I served three years in an armored regiment of Canada’s Special Service Force, an elite airborne brigade designed for rapid overseas deployment. The unit was also tasked with defending NATO’s northern flank in case of a Soviet invasion, and so we found ourselves doing a lot of winter survival and combat exercises in the frozen hinterlands of Ontario and Quebec—alongside visiting NATO troops from Norway and the other “UN-hugging” Nordic nations Yaron excoriated so stridently. Our brigade was distinguished from the rest of the military by our camouflage jump smocks and shoulder flashes that bore the emblem of the winged dagger, made famous by the British Special Air Service. The rest of the military hated us for these elitist trappings, and shed nary a tear when the brigade was disbanded in 1995 following revelations that some members had tortured and killed young Somali civilians during a peacekeeping operation in 1993.

  When I was called up to serve in the Israel Defense Forces, I didn’t tell anyone except the recruiting officer about my former military service in Canada because I knew it would have only been a target of mockery. During my training, I pretended that I didn’t know what the business end of a weapon was.

  The difference between the Canadian and Israeli militaries was startling. Israel is an isolated nation the size of New Jersey, which had gone to war with at least one of its Arab neighbors every decade since its founding. And so the IDF, then as now, was a combat-oriented force full of veteran officers experienced in military operations. The Canadian Forces of my era, by contrast, was a well-meaning but ineffective peacetime army stuck in a Korean War-era time warp. The country didn’t invest in its military because everyone knew the United States would do the heavy lifting if things got hot.

  Another difference: in the Canadian Forces, I rarely saw my troop commander. He was a remote figure, not really one of the fighting men. But in the IDF, the officer corps’ motto is “Acherai,” which means “After me.” They lead from the front, and they don’t stand on ceremony. Once basic training is over, everyone is on a first-name basis.

  Lieutenant Tal, our twenty-two-year-old platoon commander, was the perfect embodiment of this IDF ethos. He was tough and taciturn, with dark piercing eyes, black curly hair, and a wiry, sinewy frame. Like Sergeant Yaron, he’d taken part in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, where our unit had gone up against elite Syrian commandos in the eastern Bekaa Valley. These men had commanded soldiers in the field and seen some of them fall. Over time, I came to admire and respect Lieutenant Tal as I have few others in my lifetime. Today he’s a full colonel in the reserves and a successful lawyer in Tel Aviv. He still looks the same as when I met him in 1984.

  When he eventually appeared on that warm September morning in 1984 to relieve Sergeant Yaron, we’d all been up for about twenty-four hours. He told us to get used to it: the IDF fights primarily at night. I remember him telling us he’d “turn our days into nights and our nights into days.” And he did.

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sp; My first days in the IDF were spent preparing my gear for combat and getting to know the other men in my platoon. Like me, a lot of my fellow soldiers were from abroad: the United States, Britain, Latin America, and a few guys from France (whom no one seemed to like because they complained a lot). Right from the start, I formed part of a tight-knit social group with three other transplanted Anglos: Peter, a funny Englishman from London who, like me, had gotten married and been in a kibbutz; Gary, a onetime New Yorker now living in Jerusalem; and Robert, a sardonic budding journalist from Minneapolis. I was lucky to fall in with these guys. You need friends in the army to get you through the miserable times, and to look out for you when the shooting starts.

  These ties endure once you’re out of the army. The IDF, and the three years most young people spend in it, are the social adhesive that binds Israeli society. Friendships and business contacts are made, jargon learned, patriotic values internalized. As I served, I came to understand why those Israelis who do not enlist—even for entirely valid reasons, such as medical problems—are sometimes treated as outsiders.

  Peter, Gary, Robert, and I would sit together for hours and prepare our webbing—vests containing pouches for bullet magazines, grenades, and whatnot. It was a mundane task, but one that had to be done so our gear wouldn’t jangle around once we were laden down with our kit and ammunition. We used fine wire to stitch it together and black electrician’s tape to cover any shiny bits (this applied right down to our dog tags. Instead of leaving the metal tags exposed, we’d use shoelaces to bind them in a green canvas pouch). Once we’d tested our formfitting webbing vests, we’d coat them with a special black matte paint. If you expected to be fighting at night, you had to be both quiet and invisible.

  During our first week, we were issued our personal weapons. At the time, the gun of choice was the Israeli-made Galil assault rifle—a rough hybrid of a Russian Kalashnikov AK-47 and a U.S. M16. The rear sight had settings for three hundred and five hundred metres, and additional folding night sights with luminous inserts could be raised into position, allowing the gun to be aimed in low light conditions. The barrel and the flash eliminator could also be used to launch rifle grenades. As well, the weapon featured a folding detachable bipod incorporating a wire cutter—very handy for getting through barbed-wire defenses.

  Though the Galil wasn’t as accurate as the M16, it did the job when “zeroed” properly—that is, calibrated by firing a succession of test shots at the same target. That’s one reason that people had their own personal weapon: no two rifles shoot the same.

  A female soldier, Avital, taught us how to shoot straight. This was not unusual: the IDF doesn’t put women on the battlefield in ground units, but they do serve a wide variety of combat roles as, for example, pilots and naval officers. And many others, like Avital, become instructors. Some Israelis argue the country should go further, fully integrating the forces right down to infantry platoons, tanks, and commandos. Based on my army experience, integrating women into combat ground units changes the traditional buddy-based social dynamic necessary for battlefield team-building. In Israel, there is another argument: any female soldier who becomes a POW in a Middle Eastern theatre cannot expect to be treated in a gentlemanly fashion.

  As well as teaching us how to shoot, Avital ran us up and down hills in full gear, and administered a course of gut-busting calisthenics. All this was conducted in the rough training grounds of Nachusha, an area in the West Bank selected because of its similarity to the rocky scrub terrain of southern Lebanon, where Israel was then fighting a counterinsurgency campaign.

  Having already received rifle training in the Canadian army, I excelled at the range, and my target groupings were often used as an example to my fellow soldiers, which resulted in my being the subject of some good-natured abuse. One day I had to shoot a bunch of balloons at long range while my whole platoon watched. Yaron, who’d made light of my Canadian roots just days before, dubbed me Tsayad Hatsvayim, or “Deer Hunter”—high praise, indeed.

  Lieutenant Tal didn’t witness that demonstration, but he must have heard about it, because he approached me a few days later and offered me a plum assignment: carrying the platoon’s “MAG,” a nearly six-footlong Belgian-made belt-fed machine gun that spits out 850 rounds of 7.62mm ammunition a minute. It’s highly effective at ripping up large concentrations of troops. In the right hands, it can also be used as an accurate long-range sniper rifle.

  Being offered the MAG was considered a great honor in IDF combat units. It meant you had not only the skill to fire it, but also the strength to carry it and the enormous amount of ammunition it tore through. With the MAG and about 450 rounds of ammo, I was hauling some eighty pounds of gear—or about half my own weight. My ankles, back, and joints all took a pounding. But the heavy load was necessary: without an abundance of ammunition to feed it, the weapon is just a hunk of metal. (The need to carry such large loads is another reason women are excluded from combat units. For all her extraordinary abilities, I doubt that even as fit a specimen as Avital could carry eighty pounds on a long march.) The weeks we spent on infantry training in Nachusha was one of the physically hardest periods in my life.

  I was one of three men issued MAGs in our 150-man company. We were instructed in their use by Lieutenant Doobie, who’d been a MAG operator during the war in Lebanon. When we started, I couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn, but after a few weeks I was shooting like a pro. I could even cock it with one finger on the run by using the tension of the carrying strap around my neck and shoulders.

  My teammates were issued other weapons. Peter was assigned to carry a rocket-propelled grenade along with his Galil, and Gary was issued a 53mm hand-held mortar. Robert, the budding correspondent, was given the radio. I remember telling him that his career as a broadcast journalist was getting off to a promising start. “Go fuck yourself, Rambo,” he promptly replied.

  Over time, we were taught how to camouflage and conceal, patrol, move, and fight as a squad, platoon, and company. We learned the fine art of combat in built-up urban areas, ambushes, first aid, helicopter use, fighting in armored vehicles, and demolitions. As combat engineers, we were also taught where the best places were to plant explosives on artillery pieces, defensive positions, buildings, tunnels, bridges, and even an old helicopter.

  Throughout all of this grueling activity, not one member of the platoon dropped out. But that wasn’t a surprise: in the Israeli army, you can’t be placed in a unit without first meeting the appropriate physical standards. The testing is done well in advance—the logic being that you should not be placed in a combat unit if you have bad asthma, a bum knee, or are otherwise unable to deal with the challenges associated with being a lochem, or warrior. Indeed, there is a plethora of private clinics run by former Israeli special forces soldiers that cater to young men preparing for their conscription. Walk through any city, and you will often see cadres of high school students led by an older and very fit civilian. They are preparing for their Gibush, or official selection to the IDF’s many special forces and regular combat units.

  We ran all kinds of assault-and-defend exercises, until they were second nature. Most of the training was under live fire. This not only prepares you for the sounds and smells of combat, it takes the shock and awe out of it, so that when you are in a real firefight, you’re not paralyzed by fear. That said, we usually had to make many dry runs on an exercise before going through with live ammunition.

  During our combined forces exercises, we also got the opportunity to participate in mixed-unit drills that required coordination with tanks, aircraft, and other infantry units. The sight of so many different cogs co-operating to achieve the same objective was impressive. I was equally awed by the sheer firepower of Israel’s military. To this day, I am somewhat irked when the IDF is accused of being “heavy-handed” in its response to some terror attack or another. If the IDF applied a significant fraction of its firepower to a Palestinian area, it would be reduced to ash in an instant. />
  The most impressive part of my experience in the IDF was the way our trainers made us understand our role. On Friday afternoons, before we would head home for weekend leave (if we got any), we’d congregate in an informal circle on the ochre ground in the shade of an olive tree and talk with our platoon commander and sergeants about the ethics of soldiering.

  These were open and frank discussions about when to kill and when not to kill. The format was essentially Socratic, with Lieutenant Tal presenting a moral dilemma and the rest of us discussing the best way to solve it. Examples: “Do you shoot someone who is unarmed but possibly carrying a bomb?” “How do you treat prisoners of war?” “What are the rules of engagement in such-and-such dangerous setting?” We were taught the IDF’s official doctrine, which stipulates that “servicemen and women will use their weapons and force only for the purpose of their mission, only to the necessary extent, and will maintain their humanity even during combat. IDF soldiers will not use their weapons and force to harm human beings who are not combatants or prisoners of war, and will do all in their power to avoid causing harm to their lives, bodies, dignity and property.”

  Everyone took these lessons to heart. This fact helped explain a paradox I’d noticed since joining the Israeli army. No other nation on earth is more dependent on its military for its survival, or has, in living memory, fought so many fierce wars on its own borders. Yet Israeli soldiers are, by my first-hand observation, less militaristic in that gung-ho Marine Corps “hoo-ha” way that often characterizes other Western armies. While service in the military—especially in combat units—is a source of pride, fighting is still considered a necessary evil. By teaching its soldiers such lessons, the IDF ensures that it has not only a more effective military than those of its Arab neighbors, but a more ethical one as well.

  Each phase of our advanced training was marked by a long night march in full gear. On the final march, we left Nachusha and covered forty-five miles before reaching our destination the next morning. When we arrived, we had a torch-lit ceremony on a hill. Going from soldier to soldier, Lieutenant Tal placed a ceremonial beret on each sweaty head, coupled with a hard, but good-natured punch on the chest. It was one of the proudest moments in my life.