Pumpkinflowers Read Online Free Page B
Author: Matti Friedman
Soviet immigration and now lying on beaches near the Lebanon border, exposing their pale bodies to the unfamiliar ferocity of our sun.
The army gave the outposts pretty names like Basil, Crocus, Cypress, and Red Pepper. This reflects a floral preoccupation in our military, which in naming things generally avoids names like Hellfire or Apache in favor of ones like Artichoke, a night-vision apparatus for tank gunners, or Buttercup, an early-warning system for incoming mortar shells. In the jargon of army radiomen, wounded soldiers are âflowers.â Dead soldiers are âoleanders.â It isnât a code, because it isnât secret. Instead the names seem intended to bestow beauty on ugliness and to allow soldiers distance from the things they might have to describe. If you listened to the language of the Lebanon troops, you might have thought they occupied a kind of garden.
The Pumpkin was set up three miles due north of Beaufort Castle on a hilltop where nothing significant is known to have happened before the events recounted here or since. The military archives contain no record of the outpostâs construction, or at least none I could find.
In Hebrew the outpost was called Dlaâatâjust Pumpkin, not
the
Pumpkin. But I have always thought of it as a place that deserves the definite article in English. As the Pumpkinâs first historian in any language, and almost certainly its last, I grant myself license to call it in translation whatever I want. The name now seems to hint at the kind of magic at work in the transformation of a bare hilltop into the scene of emotion and drama and its sudden transformation back into a place of no importance at all.
8
A VI SAW THE green hills and valleys beyond the border and felt the first bite of the cold that came with altitude. The new arrivals thought about being in a foreign country, about what it meant to be surrounded by hostile territory. And then they were put to work.
Whatever heroic exploits existed in their imaginations, they discovered as all newcomers did that life at the Pumpkin was a matter of the grueling tasks necessary to maintain dozens of men on an isolated hill: washing pots, chopping vegetables, cleaning and greasing the machine guns, filling sandbags, an endless schedule of chores interrupted by turns in the guard posts and a few hours of sleep at night that were themselves interrupted by turns in the guard posts. Then Readiness with Dawn, and then it would all begin again.
What was the Pumpkin? A hilltop rectangle of earthen embankments the size of a basketball court. It was accessed by Israeli soldiers from the east on a road mined with some regularity and by the enemy from the west through several riverbeds that ran hidden from their towns up to the ridge.
The outpost was threatened by a guerrilla haunt in a nearby copse of terebinths and pines known as the Forestâa name that bore genuine menace in the soldiersâ minds, although the vegetation was to a real forest as the placid puddle known as the âSeaâ of Galilee is to a real sea or as the trickle of the âriverâ Jordan is to the Mississippi.
To the north the hilltops of the Ali Taher range continued through Outpost Red Pepper before terminating in a triangular peak capped with Outpost Cypress. Beaufort Castle was visible to the south, and in between was Outpost Citrus. These were the positions of the Red Line, the farthest extremity of the area under Israelâs control.
Just to the west, outside the security zone and inside Lebanon proper, spread a plateau occupied by the Shiite town of Nabatieh. One day eleven years before, in 1983, an Israeli force had blundered through the town during the Shiitesâ most important religious festival, and the soldiers became surrounded by an angry crowd. They opened fire and killed two people, helping ensure the enmity of the Shiites and aiding the rise of their new military force, Hezbollah. Nabatieh was a
The army gave the outposts pretty names like Basil, Crocus, Cypress, and Red Pepper. This reflects a floral preoccupation in our military, which in naming things generally avoids names like Hellfire or Apache in favor of ones like Artichoke, a night-vision apparatus for tank gunners, or Buttercup, an early-warning system for incoming mortar shells. In the jargon of army radiomen, wounded soldiers are âflowers.â Dead soldiers are âoleanders.â It isnât a code, because it isnât secret. Instead the names seem intended to bestow beauty on ugliness and to allow soldiers distance from the things they might have to describe. If you listened to the language of the Lebanon troops, you might have thought they occupied a kind of garden.
The Pumpkin was set up three miles due north of Beaufort Castle on a hilltop where nothing significant is known to have happened before the events recounted here or since. The military archives contain no record of the outpostâs construction, or at least none I could find.
In Hebrew the outpost was called Dlaâatâjust Pumpkin, not
the
Pumpkin. But I have always thought of it as a place that deserves the definite article in English. As the Pumpkinâs first historian in any language, and almost certainly its last, I grant myself license to call it in translation whatever I want. The name now seems to hint at the kind of magic at work in the transformation of a bare hilltop into the scene of emotion and drama and its sudden transformation back into a place of no importance at all.
8
A VI SAW THE green hills and valleys beyond the border and felt the first bite of the cold that came with altitude. The new arrivals thought about being in a foreign country, about what it meant to be surrounded by hostile territory. And then they were put to work.
Whatever heroic exploits existed in their imaginations, they discovered as all newcomers did that life at the Pumpkin was a matter of the grueling tasks necessary to maintain dozens of men on an isolated hill: washing pots, chopping vegetables, cleaning and greasing the machine guns, filling sandbags, an endless schedule of chores interrupted by turns in the guard posts and a few hours of sleep at night that were themselves interrupted by turns in the guard posts. Then Readiness with Dawn, and then it would all begin again.
What was the Pumpkin? A hilltop rectangle of earthen embankments the size of a basketball court. It was accessed by Israeli soldiers from the east on a road mined with some regularity and by the enemy from the west through several riverbeds that ran hidden from their towns up to the ridge.
The outpost was threatened by a guerrilla haunt in a nearby copse of terebinths and pines known as the Forestâa name that bore genuine menace in the soldiersâ minds, although the vegetation was to a real forest as the placid puddle known as the âSeaâ of Galilee is to a real sea or as the trickle of the âriverâ Jordan is to the Mississippi.
To the north the hilltops of the Ali Taher range continued through Outpost Red Pepper before terminating in a triangular peak capped with Outpost Cypress. Beaufort Castle was visible to the south, and in between was Outpost Citrus. These were the positions of the Red Line, the farthest extremity of the area under Israelâs control.
Just to the west, outside the security zone and inside Lebanon proper, spread a plateau occupied by the Shiite town of Nabatieh. One day eleven years before, in 1983, an Israeli force had blundered through the town during the Shiitesâ most important religious festival, and the soldiers became surrounded by an angry crowd. They opened fire and killed two people, helping ensure the enmity of the Shiites and aiding the rise of their new military force, Hezbollah. Nabatieh was a
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