Narrative: Stories

I've been asking my friends about their war experiences. I don't have a narrative, just a bunch of experiences I was told firsthand from soldiers. They're not even stories. Stories have a beginning and a middle and an end and some sort of plot, but when you're experiencing life things don't fit neatly into stories.

So in no particular order:

#1

When Yossi and his guys were in Gaza last summer they would carpool. One of the guys would pick up Yossi and a few others, they'd drive just over an hour to Be'eri and park in a parking lot near the kibbutz. Then the army would provide an armored vehicle to take them from there to the base in Gaza. Then after a week to ten days they'd carpool back. That's it, just a commute to the war and back.

An American relative sent me a song that was written about the war, which apparently was a hit among American Jews: "Daddy come home... fighting a war so far away." I admit that the song made me cry because it's a kid asking where his father is and that hits close to home, but guys - the war isn't far away. It's literally a fucking commute.

#2

One friend, let's call him A, is doing his reserves in an intelligence unit that's responsible for collecting information about our own hostages. This is interesting because usually intelligence is about researching the enemy, not your own people. One day he mentioned that he has hostage files on his personal computer and he should probably erase them for security reasons.

#3

Friend B's reserves are a little nightmare-inducing, not because he's in the war zone but because he deals with identifying bodies. Trigger warning: dismembered bodies. Skip ahead if this bothers you.

When the attack on Oct 7th was happening the paramedics were evauating unidentified casualties. They couldn't necessarily tell whether a body belonged to an Israeli or Palestinian, and unfortunately many bodies were in fact just body parts. Some body bags ended up with an uneven number of limbs. So B spends his time looking for DNA of Israelis among the Hamas body parts. At first it was just about understanding which missing people were kidnapped and which were actually killed, but even a year later there's still missing information and those body bags might still hold clues.

#Note

I'm removing my friends' identifying details for security reasons, so I have no proof that these experiences are real. Except that I heard them firsthand from friends. More experiences coming soon.