"Really?" The girl gazes at him in admiration. "But why aren’t you wearing any marks of rank?"
"Oh, you mean these shoulder straps?" Jamus sticks his hand in his pocket and pulls out the marks of rank of a captain. "I always take them off when I am in Tel Aviv. I don’t like wearing them in public."
"How is that?" Such modesty is beyond her comprehension.
James smiles condescendingly. "This is how it is. I prefer people to see me as a human being, not as a particular rank. After all, every shirker in Tel Aviv is wearing something similar. As a fighting officer I don’t want to be compared with them." The girl’s admiration becomes boundless.
"Doesn’t it have a bad influence on your people, when you don’t show your rank?"
"The opposite," Jamus assures her. "A good commander doesn’t lead his people with his marks of rank, but with the force of his per-sonality. And besides, the men like democratic superiors. And when they see us walking around Tel Aviv in the uniform of ordinary sol-diers, they respect us all the more."
"But at camp you wear your marks of rank?"
"Unfortunately we have to," Jamus groans. He winks at me "Maybe we should put the things back on."
"And what are you?" The girl turns to me.
"Who? Him?" Jamus interrupts, before I can present the facts. "He is a military writer."
"Really?" the girl gasps. And I too have risen steeply in her esteem. I feel like telling her that I haven’t been awarded this bombastic title by the army. That I am really just the miserable leader of an even more miserable squad in a combat company. But should I really spoil Jamus’s wonderful game? So I pull "my" shoulder straps out of my pocket, those of a senior lieutenant, and fix them in their "right" place.
The truth is that we keep these things with us for the sake of sur-vival. We know that both sides tend to kill the lower ranks among the prisoners. Not officers. That has nothing to do with generosity or respect, but simply with military logic. The intelligence corps demands that captured officers should be brought to them - for the extraction of information.
Our calculation, after long consideration and discussion: when it looks as though we are going to be captured, we hope we can put on