everything to overcome the enemy? Will we be able to adapt to civil-ian life again after everything that we have experienced here?

Late in the night I hear a quiet voice.

"Uri!"

"Yes"

"You OK? Need anything?"

"A cool beer wouldn’t be bad"

He laughs and disappears, but not before throwing me something. A piece of chocolate. In the last battle I carried his rucksack after he had collapsed with exhaustion.

A strange experience, this Calabush. Actually you can’t really be punished if you are already in a fighting unit. What can they do to you? Withdraw your leave? You don’t get any anyway. Cut your pay? Very well. The two lira that you get ... In any case the Calabush is nothing to fear if you have just come back from a dirty position where you were bombarded for hours by mortars and artillery.

Discipline in a fighting unit depends only on the personality of the commanders and the will of the ordinary soldiers. There is nothing more dangerous than the feeling of an ordinary soldier that he has been unjustly treated, that things are happening behind his back, that he hasn’t been given what he deserves. A fighting soldier is effec-tively a volunteer, even when he has been conscripted.

The battle for Isdud inflicted serious losses on the battalion. The first company was completely out of action. Its commander, Aryeh Kotzer, was already a legendary figure on the front. The fate of his people had shaken him so badly that he had to be transferred to a post at HQ for the time being. Our company was lucky and was the only experienced unit remaining in the battalion. The third company consisted mainly of young recruits.

Since we had not succeeded in destroying the armored column at Isdud, we were now given the task of confronting it and blocking its fur-ther advance. In the night of 6 July we tried to reach Kibbutz Nitzanim,⁸ which was under heavy fire. In the darkness we passed Hill 69, where our people had started to dig in. But even before we had reached Nitzanim we got the news that the kibbutz had surrendered. We received the order to withdraw.

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