Israeli Reservists: Why should we volunteer to be cannon fodder?

By Amir Zohar
Haaretz
Aug. 14, 2006

SOUTH LEBANON - In the poultry yard at one of the moshavim along the northern road a reserve company from an engineering battalion gathered Thursday evening beneath camouflage nets. In another two hours the soldiers will enter Lebanon on security detail for a D-9 bulldozer and two Merkava tanks.

For four nights these soldiers have been opening up a secret route for Givati soldiers to race through to the town of Bint Jbail - subject, naturally, to the political zigzagging of Olmert and Peretz. In any case the mission will start at nightfall and must end before sunrise.

Briefings are accompanied by army-issue dinner - lasagna or Thai stir-fry on plastic trays. To the side, three reservists from a back-up force present Haaretz with monologues that have come to symbolize the second Lebanon war: about the hesitancy of the government, which has implications at the command level, which reflects on the operational level, which reflects on them, and justifies, from their standpoint, getting out of the trek into enemy land.

"It's not that I'm against the war, but our commanders can't say what the missions are and what they want from us," says Moshe from Petah Tikva, married and father of two. "It's clear to us that this is a war for our home," says his comrade, "but if the government is n't certain, why should we volunteer to be cannon fodder for their experiments."

After dinner, soldiers convene for a mass prayer service, then disperse to their companies and platoons. There, in a final pep talk, the company commander tells his troops: "We're good and we're fighting for our home... Hezbollah are also good, but they're not as dangerous as they say."

The D-9, nicknamed Dubi, growls in the background, and the squeal of tank treads indicates we're setting out. Gilad's platoon lines up in two columns, equipment on their shoulders. In the back, Nissim the battalion commander from Ra'anana mingles with the soldiers, recounting how the route was opened up at the start of the week under fire.

"I had to land a chopper in the field to evacuate casualties," he says, his listeners getting fired up with every word. "Wanna see an SMS from my wife? 'Pride conquers all fears,' that's what she wrote."

Dubi, the tanks and soldiers glide down the path leading to the perimeter fence. In five minutes they're across the border, advancing along a narrow route cleared in a mine field. Some admit they're out of shape, and some admit they're not really made for this sort of thing anymore. And yet they're here, aged 25 to 40 and even more, from all over the country, with a Jerusalemite majority. In the dark, in a crevice bypassing a Lebanese village, it's hard to spot the differences.

An enormous broken chalk rock looms in the center, surrounded by three or four small structures, derelict and intimidating, and a rusty metal facility for processing the chalk into construction sand. This is ambush territory; the silence reminiscent of moonlit traps in Hollywood Westerns.

After about seven kilometers the D-9 operator reaches a dead end at a section that crosses the new route with an age-old route. The options are for a fast overpass or a slower underpass; the brigade commander rules for the overpass. "We finish everything possible tonight," he decrees, "we're not waiting any more time; we already have a reasonable path for walking comfortably."

Until Dubi finishes work on the final segment at the new Bint Jbail interchange, the soldiers spread out on the surrounding slope, some napping.

The commanders took off quickly for the unit's base, leaving at the end point only the soldiers who had dragged themselves there. At this stage they also confess to being in lousy physical shape. If at the outset they looked as if they could crush any enemy that crossed their path, the way they looked now they hardly seemed capable of responding. This was also the time for grumblings about the lack of night-vision equipment, but on the broken-down bus sent to collect them nobody had any strength left to complain.