Pumpkinflowers by Matti Friedman Read Free Book Online Page B

the lower end of one of the riverbeds that led up toward the Pumpkin. Once they were in the riverbed they would be hidden from view, so he decided to ask permission from headquarters in Israel to open fire quickly with one of the outpost’s tanks. Permission was necessary in such cases because the guerrillas were still outside the security zone and the army was worried about killing civilians by mistake, which was not uncommon. The lookout got on the radio:
    Hoshen, this is Ataf 4.
    (“Ataf 4” was the lookout, whose name was Amir. “Hoshen” was the soldier at headquarters in Israel, a young woman Amir’s age; as it happened, the two knew each other from civilian life, and she never forgot the conversation. “Dirties” are guerrillas.)
    Ataf 4, this is Hoshen, over.
    Receive: A confirmed ID of seven dirties in the southern outskirts of Nabatieh.
    Roger. Do you have the coordinates?
    I’m giving it to you on the [telephone]. . . . Requesting permission to open fire.
    Roger, hold on. . . . Ataf 4, this is Hoshen.
    This is Ataf 4. Do we have permission to fire?
    Negative.
    What do you mean, negative? We have a certain ID of seven dirties. They’re going into the riverbed. Soon we’re not going to be able to hit them. I request permission to fire now.
    This is Hoshen. Negative. No permission to fire.
    Hoshen, this is Ataf 4. Then what the hell am I doing here?
    The guerrillas disappeared.
    When shells began falling at 5:59 a.m. Eran thought he saw a few heads peeking from behind boulders downhill. He fired at them and saw puffs of dust nearby. Then he was on his knees. He couldn’t breathe. Something had flashed and something was burning. He looked down and saw that his right arm was no longer attached to his body but remained in the sleeve of his coat. He dragged himself out of the guard post and into the trench, where he found himself looking at someone’s boots. Help me, Eran said.
    Two soldiers found him charred and delirious. They put a tourniquet on the stump and carried him down to one of the bunkers, which by some magic appeared to have assumed the size of an auditorium, so he remembers. They laid him on the floor between the beds. A medic named Davidoff gave him a shot in the thigh—morphine. Eran felt he had to scream, he just needed to get it out of him, so he screamed and screamed, and then he said, I’m sorry.
    The garrison radioed down to Israel that they had flowers and needed a thistle quickly to evacuate them, but the shelling made it too risky for helicopters, so the soldiers loaded Eran onto an armored vehicle and drove him down the hill and out of mortar range. When he was finally placed on a helicopter someone arranged his severed arm atop his chest. Next to him was the lookout, Amir, who had been running along the trench and must have passed behind Eran’s emplacement just as the rocket hit. The lookout was now a motionless human shape under a gray blanket. He was twenty years old. A few months earlier, before heading to the Pumpkin for the first time, Amir had written in a neat hand on a yellow pad, “In a few days I’ll be on my way to another outpost. It is a road that might be one-way, or might not be.” His mother found the note afterward.
    When the helicopter landed in Israel men in white smocks rushed Eran through sliding doors into an emergency room, and a TV cameraman filmed him going past. In the footage you see the altruist’s face blackened and unrecognizable, and hear him screaming something as he passes. If you pay attention you can make out the words: “For the country.”

15
    A VI WROTE A letter to Smadar one night from the war room, a tiny space with a few chairs, radios, and blue cups sticky with the residue of tea. The army had recently completed one of its periodic offensives in Lebanon, a few weeks of shelling and air strikes and belligerent rhetoric after which everything remained as it had been