August was supposed to be a return vacation for us, but Hassan Nasrallah had plans otherwise.
We had planned for months — my husband and I and three of our four children — to set out from Rehovot, Israel, for the Mequon home of my parents Dottie and Mert Rotter, juggling our work, camp and school schedules.
But at the last moment, my eldest child Yehiel went into Lebanon and I recognized that my place was here, close to the front lines in that critical hour. There would be other vacation opportunities.
Yehiel, 22, is finishing his compulsory army service as a master sergeant in the Maglan Special Forces unit of the Israel Defense Force. Though he had initially secured a vacation leave before his expected discharge in October; he instead found himself on the front lines in the war against terror, battling Iranian-supplied Hezbollah militants.
An avid runner and swimmer, Yehiel represents his unit in 10K races and hoped to take in as much greenery as Milwaukee had to offer. We had hoped to enjoy the Milwaukee-area bicycle trails and hiking in the Kettle Moraine State Forest.
This war, like all wars, was for my son and his unit a combination of boredom and moments of terror. Yet the high-tech pervasiveness of the battlefield is a new element that is omnipresent.
As one of the unit’s snipers, Yehiel has an assortment of scopes and laser pointing devices for his M-4 carbine. He also operates classified electro-optical battlefield equipment as well as a “plain” digital camera. With widespread night vision available to the Israeli troops, their principal theater of action is at night.
He received 20 months of training for his three-year compulsory army requirement, and had performed a variety of difficult and dangerous missions.
Yet, the most stressful part of the war for him was not the firefights, but the open-ended intelligence and reconnaissance forays behind enemy lines. Thank God his only war-related injury was the severe athlete’s foot that came with not removing his boots for a week straight.
The morale in his unit is high, as befitting young men pumped up to defend their country. And a seriousness of purpose underlies both his motivation and that of his peers. Yehiel, like his parents, is modern Orthodox in outlook, which helps him draw on spiritual strength.
His younger sister Orly volunteered for a combat engineering unit where her current four-month NCO (non-commissioned officer) training course was interrupted so that she could man a Gazan guard post, allowing more veteran units to join the war in the north.
When I moved to Israel, straight out of Shorewood High School and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison with secular Zionist motivation, I had no expectation that a quarter-century later I would have a working knowledge of the ways of the IDF.
But raising a family and imbuing our four children with values I hold dear has necessitated their internalizing the need to defend their country as best they can, in what is still an hour of need.
It is gratifying that they come to this understanding on their own, largely as a result our synagogue/school community and a lifetime of communal and voluntary activities, like religious scouts.
Lisa Levinson is a documentation archivist at the pharmaceutical manufacturer Biotechnology General Ltd. She lives in Rehovot with her husband Paul and four children.
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