"We must be quite near Hebron," claims Reuven. He still believes that "his" Cassiopeia is the right one. "Rubbish," answers Israel, a Holocaust survivor from Poland. "We are near Beer Sheva." I myself believe that we are near Faluja.
"What do we do tomorrow?" asks Hadad nervously.
"Either or ..." laughs Micki. "If we are near Farouk, we will be slaughtered. If not, we’ll drive home."
"Shut your mouth!" says Reuven. "I’m dog tired." Israel is pre-pared to stay awake. Reuven and Micki fall asleep. I hear their first snores, then my eyelids close ...
* * *
"Get up!" Someone is shaking me. I wake up. On the horizon is the first faint light. My comrades are all awake already, their rifles in their hands, and the hand grenades hanging from their belts.
My first feeling is satisfaction. The sun is rising in exactly the right place - according to "my" Cassiopeia estimation. But I don’t have any time to savor my victory. Everyone is staring at a large, dark block in front of us, that is getting more definite the lighter it gets. It is an Arab village. In the middle is the minaret of a mosque with a very unusual form. We only know one single village with such a remarkable minaret - Jaladiyya. The village is in our hands.
We stare at it, at first skeptical and confused, then humor wins the upper hand. We laugh until we cry. We were already thinking of an epic battle, flight, imprisonment, or worse. And now we find our-selves two hundred meters away from Jaladiyya, five hundred meters from our Jassir base. "Get in the jeep!" Albert manages to say through his laughter. It is a small step between the ridiculous and the heroic...
* * *
In Jassir they stare at us like ghosts. Compared with our grinning faces our comrades look like convalescents from some serious illness. They gather round us, climb on the jeeps, hug us, and kiss us. Then Aryeh appears. He stammers, screws up his face, tries to say some-thing, and can’t make a sound. The radio operator tells us what hap-pened: when we got lost eight hours ago they were sure that we had been killed. Aryeh had already informed the battalion commander. When they then saw a cloud of dust and our jeeps appeared, they