slip, and can’t think at all. We have only one desire: to throw away the damned stretcher together with our rifles and equipment, to lie down on the wet ground and sleep, sleep, sleep.
We are alone. A platoon of infantry soldiers and a corpse. With every step death is waiting. Every bush could be hiding an enemy, or we could walk into an ambush of our own people, who could mow us down. We don’t really care. We are so tired and tense that we don’t mind if we live or die. Even death doesn’t seem so terrible to us any more.
I still don’t know who it was that died. While I am carrying the front part of the stretcher, the tarp slips from his head. I know that face. Hey, that’s Yitzhak Heller, the section leader I met this morn-ing. The tarp slips a bit further, and I see his almost white trousers - and now it all comes back to me. That’s the man who I was not sup-posed to let out of my sight.
In the course of the action I happened to get in front of him instead of to his left. If I had kept the formation I would have been in the line of fire. That is the arbitrariness of war, that spares the life of one, and randomly kills another.
At long last we somehow get to Naan. When we see the
kibbutz our last energy is drained. We lie on the ground and wait for a patrol to come by. But our suffering is not yet over. We have to wait at the gate for the convoy of heavy weapons that is also headed for Hulda. We, the infantry, have to protect its flanks. Rifles in hand, we stare into the darkness. When the trucks stop we jump out.
We arrive at Hulda at three o’clock in the morning. It is drizzling, but we don’t notice. We don’t notice anything at all. If artillery opened fire on us - it wouldn’t make us move any faster. We don’t even know where exactly we are - whether we are in the camp or out-side it. We know only one thing - we can sleep. We take a blanket and lie down on the damp ground between the puddles, with our boots on. And go to sleep.
They didn’t give us much time to rest. In the afternoon we are out on patrol. We circle around Hulda and reach the camp of Wadi Sarar, where Iraqi volunteers are supposed to be stationed. As we walk next to the tracks we see a train approaching. We take our positions with the automatic weapons and the grenade launchers at the ready. The train is