be studied, no gear parade, no briefing on rules of engagement nor possible scenarios of eventualities and responses. However, I had already begun to prepare for it when I was still a child.
In third grade we played a game of “illegal immigrants” against “the Brits.” My father played a principal role in the game: he brought along an authentic Sten gun from Mr. Shem Tov’s weapon collection, preserved in the moshav ever since his Palmah* days. He even brought along a strange balaclava made of greenish-brown wool that had two points jutting out of the sides.
In our game, we pretended to be Jewish underground Hagannah fighters battling the British colonial police. We marched through the darkness towards the beach, where other kids were waiting. These kids played the role of new illegal immigrants to the land that would become Israel. They disembarked, as it were, from their rickety boats. Their faces were the picture of despair. They carried the square suitcases of yesteryear and they all repeated the Hebrew phrase that the Hagannah supreme command had taught them: “I am a Jew in Eretz Israel,” “I am a Jew in Eretz Israel.” We “Hagannah heroes” repeated the same phrase in order to blend in with the immigrants. And so the Brits, the bad guys in this game, couldn’t tell who was a sun-tanned Hebrew-speaking Sabra fighter and who was a new immigrant. These immigrants, coming from faraway places, knew not a word of Hebrew, the language without which the Jews would never be a nation, as was written over our schoolhouse doorway: “Two things without which Jews will never be a nation: the land and the language.”
This was how the Jewish underground fooled the Brits and smuggled in the illegal immigrants who went on to fight the Arabs and made room for us in this country, which was nearly empty anyway to begin with. If the Arabs had not started the fighting, we never would have even needed the war, for we have always sought only peace. Then the illegal immigrants learned the language and this is how we became a nation.
But that was only a childish game. By the time I was ten years old, Jews were allowed to come here and there was no more need to smuggle in illegal immigrants.
Not knowing I would eventually run into you, my little thief, my first real soldiering was as early as the fourth grade—our initiation into night maneuvers in our youth movement. We went out for hag ha’ma’alot, the holiday on which a ceremony of fire inscriptions and torches marks the start of a new year. Every age group would rise up the movement ranks towards the superior levels of counseling and fulfillment, from childhood to youth and on to soldiering in full faith.
Before our first night maneuvers, our excitement knew no bounds. I remember trying on a khaki army belt at home. My mother fit it with a canteen, camouflaged in olive green like the rest of my kit and filled with water. I wore the belt with the canteen over my dark blue shirt, dark enough for night and thick enough to protect me from the thorns we would crawl over while training—“Fall! Crawl! Aim! Range! Fire!” The color blue also stood for simple labor, for we were farmers’ children after all. The shirt was embellished with a red ribbon, for we were socialists as well and believed in the right of every man to equality and liberty. The shirt was tucked into thick blue work trousers that had to be rolled up because they were real adults’ work clothes, and I was short even for my own age.
Evening approached and preparations peaked. For weeks we had slaved over the fire inscription of our group’s name: “Lahav.”* We wrapped sacking around metal wire and dipped it in diesel fuel. Each group prepared an inscription bearing its name, along with another inscription such as “Laavoda, Lahagana Velashalom”: (“For work, for defense, for peace!”), which was the movement’s motto. The inscriptions would be put up at the basalt quarry out in the moshav fields by the older counselors and ninth-graders.
On the night of the holiday the different groups marched to the fire ceremony one by one. The younger kids were told to expect a surprise at the end, and there were rumors galore about what the surprise would be.
We marched uphill on a dirt track. Dark had fallen all around and we walked further and further from the moshav lights, our familiar sense of security fading slowly, replaced by a certain pleasant fear, the kind we knew from galloping on a horse through the moshav fields. We passed by the last goat shed and the old water tower.
“Hey, we’re on our way to the cemetery,” someone whispered, mainly to break the silence and perhaps even to relieve our fear.
“Shhh … quiet!” the counselor scolded us.
“This Yaron can’t take anything seriously,” Jonathan whispered to Michal, as she walked next to him in the line.
Secretly, I envied Jonathan for getting ahead of me, again, with his mature, brave talk. Yaron fell silent. He understood very well, as did the other fourteen kids in the group, that we were doing something serious. The lines marched deeper into the dark. On our left was a citrus grove with its threatening shadows, on our right was a vast field of grain. None of us knew where we were headed. We just repeated to ourselves in silence the orders we had received in our last training session.
At this last training session, our counselor was Kfir, who was not very popular. He was pale and pimply and not the kind of counselor-idol that Elad or Omri were; Elad or Omri were real men who went on to become naval commandos. When Kfir gave us our night maneuver instructions, he said that when we heard someone shout “grenade!” we were to stand still. But his two co-counselors, Hadar and Ella, felt he was making a horrible mistake. The three began to whisper to each other, but then a loud voice shouted, “No arguing in front of the kids!”
We enjoyed the authority crisis taking place in front of our very eyes. Two of the counselors went out to inquire with the elder counselor, who knew about real army stuff. When they came back, Kfir corrected himself. He said that when we hear “grenade!” we should obviously jump sideways and count: Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, and, boom! Whoever did not lie down in the ditch by the road, curled up with his hands over his head, was already dead for sure. And Kfir added that he knew this, of course, but earlier he had been talking about a lighting grenade—so when we hear someone yell “projector!” we really should stay put like statues, because the British sentries light up the area from their towers and look for movement.
On the real night maneuvers, when we heard “grenade!” we jumped into the thorny bushes. And we stood as still as statues when we heard “projector!” While walking, we kept the proper spacing between us—not so far that we couldn’t maintain eye contact, but not so close as to get blasted by the same explosive charge. When the counselor whispered “count off!” to the kid at the front of the line, that kid quietly passed it on to the next kid, and so on until the count reached the counselor at the back of the line. Then that counselor would whisper “one” to the kid at the back of the line, and the count would eventually reach the front of the line again. Everything was done while walking, and it all had to take place as quietly as humanly possible.
With the years, these counts became simple. Unlike the treks in the army where the guy in front of me would be sweaty and tired. On that first night march I followed a pretty girl and was eager for the next count so I could move two steps ahead, place a secure hand on her shoulder and say “six,” while inhaling some of her body scent. After all, in full daylight I would never dare place a hand on that shoulder: she would see me blush and I wouldn’t know what to whisper to her. And here came night maneuvers to my rescue, making sure that I didn’t get lost in the fields or lynched by an Arab gang or kidnapped by the Brits, and allowing me—ordering me, in fact—to whisper into a pretty girl’s ear over and over again.
After the long trek, we stopped and gathered in silence. We were told that we were to be accepted into the secret fold of the movement, and that the acceptance ceremony would take place on top of a nearby hill. And since the hill was infested with enemies, we would have to sneak up in pairs. Two by two we ventured forth up the hill. On the way we encountered a British sentry with a torch. When the torchlight got close to us we froze as we had practiced, and in the last meters near the top we crawled among the basalt rocks and summer thorns.
At the top sat the secret commanders with masked faces. They read aloud an oath and made us sign it with our thumbs dipped in blood-like gouache paint. We swore