This is still close to what I experienced as the Israeli military’s ideal approach to soldiering or command. Even after he became the country’s most famous general and the defense minister in the Six-Day War, Moshe Dayan used to say his profession was “farmer,” the point being that war was to be treated as something you were forced to do though you’d rather be plowing. What does this say about Israel’s military? Perhaps something about the agricultural preoccupations of the kibbutz and of the socialist militias that spawned the army in the early years of the state. Soldiers’ vernacular must provide words for things that civilians don’t need to describe. There is a unit of soldiers sent undercover after terrorists it’s called “Cherry.” Another elite outfit is “Pomegranate.” And the infantry is replacing the M-16, the American rifle with its cold scientific designation, with an Israeli one that has a typical Israeli name-“Tavor,” a pretty hill in Galilee. In the Israeli army you’ll occasionally find aggressive names like “Samson,” for an infantry battalion, but it’s not common. Near us were outposts Basil, Citrus, and Red Pepper. The artillery battery that helped us out when necessary was called Sycamore. Our base, a rectangle of trenches and machine guns, was called Outpost Pumpkin. There was very little in the spirit of “Hellfire” or “Predator,” names of a U.S. Not much in our verbal arsenal was warlike-not our call-signs, the names of our bases, or the names of our weapons. We need a helicopter.” At the army’s isolated outposts inside Lebanon in the ’90s you heard a lot about something called “Buttercup,” a radar that alerted us to incoming mortar shells, and also about the “Artichoke,” a night-vision system for tank gunners. The sentence with which I opened means, “We have two wounded and one dead. (I just spent a few years writing a book about it.) When I happened to land in this conflict after high school, I found a hazardous reality described not just with the usual acronyms and numbers-“ APC,” “ 81 mm”-and with the energetic obscenities one would expect, but with a language that seemed drawn from a horticultural handbook. It was thus a prologue of sorts to the kind of warfare Americans have seen in the 21st century. In those years Israel controlled a strip of Lebanese land along the Israeli border and fought a long war there with guerrillas from Hezbollah-a war which involved IEDs, videotaped hit-and-run attacks, and the wearing down of a modern military by Muslim guerrillas operating in a failed state. I was drafted into the Israeli army in 1997, when I was 19, having moved to Israel from Canada a few years before. The soldiers’ vernacular must provide words for things that civilians don’t need to describe, like grades of officers and kinds of weapons. The language isn’t nonsense-it means something to the soldiers, of course, but it also has something to say about the army and society to which they belong, and about the shared experience of military service anywhere. What does it all mean?Īnyone seeking to understand the world needs to understand soldiers, but the language of soldiers tends to be bizarre and opaque, an apt symbol for the impossibility of communicating their experiences to people safe at home. infantryman in Afghanistan in Sebastian Junger’s book War. We need a thistle.” Listening to the Israeli military frequencies when I was an infantryman nearly two decades ago, it was (and still is) possible to hear sentences like these, the bewildering cousins of sentences familiar to anyone following America’s present-day wars. JERUSALEM-“We have two flowers and one oleander.
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