Excerpt From Chapter One, titled “Purple Rain”

Lieutenant Tal Omri raised his arm signaling forward and led Corporal Yoni Baranson and the rest of the Israel Defense Force platoon through the three-foot-wide gap cut out of the coiled barbed-wire barrier separating Israel from Gaza. Just before they stepped across, each soldier handed half of his dog tag to the squat, red-cheeked corporal responsible for tracking who was heading into harm’s way. Another dog tag had been split in two with one piece wedged into each combat boot.

On the other side of the squirrelly tangle of razor wire, the platoon divided into two lines and marched guardedly down a rutted dirt road. They shuffled ahead at a quickened pace without any chatter, carrying their heavy gear across several unkempt and unprotected fields, trying to reach the first low walls bounding the Gaza town.

Earlier in the day, the Southern Command received the order to cross the frontier into Gaza. The Givati battalions quickly deployed their infantry’s tactical plans with synchronized armor, engineering, and artillery. The Israeli Air Force added its mix of deadly F-16s and agile Apache helicopter gunships to provide dominant air firepower.

It was late 2008, and Yoni’s battalion was the first ground unit into Gaza since Israel’s unilateral disengagement in August and September 2005. When Hamas came to power six months later, the frequency of the Qassam rocket and mortar attacks escalated, as did the threat from tunnel digging. Israeli schools and residential areas were targeted, and kidnapping attempts were barely thwarted. The Givati Brigade was sent in to capture Hamas leaders and to ensure the rocket-launching areas were fully destroyed.

They had less than a mile to reach the low walls of the urban area. The noises from the heavy armor weapons, gunship rockets, and machine gun bursts screamed in Yoni’s ears. The cacophony exceeded anything he had experienced during training and two years of service. Funnels of sooty smoke and rounded clouds of dust tossed up by shelling impacts obscured the clear blue sky. Yoni imagined that some of these housing units had a view of the beach and the Mediterranean beyond.

He felt his heart race and heard his own labored breathing as he relied on sight to keep in touch with his team. With half a mile to the wall, Lieutenant Omri stopped, turned, and barked out “GESHEM SEGOL!” Literally translating to purple rain, that was the code for incoming mortar fire. He then dove away from the road and flattened onto his stomach into the slightest of a dusty depression. Fifty yards away, the mortar hit, jolting the ground and sending up a burst of dirt, rocks, and shrapnel. Nobody was hit. The Lieutenant gauged the timing and the distance to cover, and called for them to move up. With sixty pounds of weapons and supplies on their backs, they raced the rest of the way to the safety of the wall.

                                                                                    ***

It had been only a few months before that Yoni and his pal Doron had visited their friend Benji Mizrachi in Sderot, an Israeli town near the Gaza border. Thousands of rockets had rained down on the city and on nearby Kibbutz Kfar Aza. In the Sderot police parking lot, hundreds of crated boxes of projectile remnants were there for all to see. The rocket terror had come to define the town of Sderot.

Their car pulled up next to one of Kibbutz Kfar Aza's many bomb shelters. It was a small, concrete shell standing adjacent to a colorfully painted school bus stop. Kfar Aza, about two miles or eight precious incoming warning seconds from the Gaza Strip, had been a frequent target of rocket and mortar fire. Benji, a third-generation resident, led Yoni and Doron on a tour of the concrete-reinforced youth nurseries, the repaired shrapnel pock marks, and the new razor-wire-topped electrified fences.

As they headed to a pastoral overlook of Gaza, they walked past the flower garden where Jacob, an eighty-year-old Holocaust survivor, was killed. Benji added, with a touch of cynicism, that he was optimistic that someday the kids wouldn’t suffer from trauma and the parents wouldn’t have to choose which baby to grab from the playground before sprinting for cover.

                                                                                  ***

The staging area for the Givati battalion near where the incursion would eventually take place was an open, mostly flat field, stubbly with cut-down wheat stalks. The closest Gaza cities were Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun, and they were the source of the deadly rocket fire.

Yoni and his platoon assembled in the fields with the larger force preparing to go to war. Already the engineers had created a firing range, and an olive-green city of tents arose to house the soldiers and communications equipment. Latrines and mess tents were there for creature comfort, and larger tents for meetings and intelligence stood tall. Ample stores of supplies and ammunition were stacked for distribution.

Further away, the rows and columns of aggressive-looking Merkava tanks had chewed their way into place. They now stood shoulder-to-shoulder with aligned low-slung turrets and lethal cannons. Transports continued to bring in more bulldozers, APC’s, self-propelled artillery, and 4X4’s. The forest of whip-like antennae, along with Israeli flags, poked skyward.

Over the past few days, Yoni had sorted through his possessions, whittling them down to just what he would carry with him into battle. Now that he was nearer to the place and closer to the time, he was even more selective. Out went the running shoes that he had thought would be useful for a quick conditioning jog; out went a bound diary. He substituted extra ammunition and water. He would, at the last minute, jam in a few Kabanos meat sticks.

He made just one small sentimental sacrifice of his valuable backpack space. Years before, his Grandpa David had given him The Abridged Prayer Book for Jews in the Armed Forces of the United States. It was the same size as an index card. On the first page was inscribed the name Seaman David Baranson, and curiously, in parentheses, Borinski. In 1944 and 1945, David prayed from it while serving on the USS Massachusetts in the Pacific.

Yoni remembered stories about his Austrian ancestors, the Borinskis; he had heard the travails of his great-grandfather Isaac and the tragedies of Leon and Stefan. His little tan prayer book had been published by the Jewish Welfare Board in 1941. Now wrapped in a sandwich bag, it symbolized the sweep of his family’s history, from escaping Nazi Austria to defending Israel.

Just before the familiar Hebrew prayers in the tan book was a preface. Yoni would often glance at the first paragraph and marvel at its relevance and prescience.

May the prayer book, small enough in size to be carried in a pocket over the heart, bear the spiritual message of Israel’s ancient prayers to the heart of the American Jewish soldiers and sailors serving their country. The prayers here gathered together speak to the eternal aspirations of the Jewish people, and, indeed, all mankind. They lift the soul above the immediate cares and interests of the daily round to the sphere of tenderness, purity and faith that is divine. They link those that are far away from home with some of the most beautiful and uplifting associations of family life. They quicken the loyalty to loved ones and to all one’s fellow men. They strengthen against temptation and give courage to spurn evil and hold fast to faith in the ultimate triumph of the good, In furthering this high purpose, this little volume of devotion serves not only the men who use it, but the highest ideal of America.

But today as he prayed, Yoni wasn’t thinking about the words. He had too many distractions clouding his mind.

                                                                                        ***

Most of the characteristic good-natured army banter had slowly petered out as they approached the border staging area. One guy from Haifa, Ilan, put up a sign: “To all the virgins up there in heaven. We just wanted to let you know an especially rough month awaits you,” referencing the Muslim belief of what awaits martyrs in the afterlife. Nobody reacted to the braggadocio.

The youthful bravado, built on a sense of immortality and reinforced by surviving intense IDF training, was being replaced by the realization of the possibility of injury and death. In spite of the overwhelming military advantage, random events occur in war. People suffer grievous injuries, and people die. The possibility of causing harm to non-combatants or harming a fellow soldier worried most of the young men.

During the day, Yoni and his team attended briefings in which officers would rattle off a long list of warnings and tips about what was coming up. In a darkened tent, lectures about camouflage booby traps, mines, and sniper locations were given.

Yoni’s buddy from San Francisco couldn’t help but continually repeat a joke to all who would listen, “My commander growled at me, ‘I didn’t see you at camouflage training this morning,’ and I said, ‘Thank you very much, sir.’” Maybe it was nervous energy.

Protocols for communications, medical treatment, and resupply were reviewed. For every twelve combatants, there was one assigned medic, and combat doctors would cross over into Gaza. A stern officer advised, “Boys, when you have secured the area, make sure the enemy knows it too.”

Yoni was slowly coming to realize that in spite of all the rugged IDF training, this was the real thing, and he would never be the same. He was about to face the moment when the basics of his moral code would be shifted. Now it was his job to kill. Like all IDF soldiers, he had been schooled in the IDF code of ethics. It made clear the dual responsibility to defend the State while at the same time following the traditions of the Jewish People and respecting universal moral values regarding the value and dignity of human life.

At sunrise and sunset, when he woke and went to sleep, Yoni asked himself if this day would be his last. There was poignancy to life’s simpler acts. Like his pals, he wrote a letter to his parents that they should only read upon his death. Yoni had dated several girls back in Indiana before he moved to Israel to join the army, but none warranted a last will and testament reference. His letter was short on distribution decisions, but very clear in declaring that by serving in the IDF he was doing just what he had always wanted to do. He thanked his parents for sharing their values.

He watched the religious soldiers don their tefillin, wrapping the leather straps around their arms as they prepared for morning prayers. Standing together in uniform next to lethal machinery, these young, tanned men held their prayer books with their white tallitot billowing around their shoulders in the shallow breeze. Even with the drama all around them, their observance didn’t change.

                                                                                      ***

On top of all of his concerns, Yoni had to lie to his parents. Maya and Danny had been following the escalating violence, and he knew they needed his reassurance, or at least to hear his voice. Yoni was fully aware that his mom knew the ropes. She knew that every anxious Israeli parent who sent a child off to the IDF to protect the country felt death circling above. Every phone call, doorbell ring, and knock on the door carried the portent of disaster.

No matter how many times his mother told him about her dad, Yossi, being called up to defend Israel on a Yom Kippur morning and about receiving the shocking notification of his death days later, the story gave him chills. He understood that to protect her, he must go through a long-distance charade. He knew it was his job to diminish the reality of war and to instill confidence that, yes, in a few more days, he and his parents would chat and all would be fine. Unlike soldiers whose families were in Israel, lone soldiers couldn’t make frequent, quick calls to their parents to let them know that all was okay.

Danny, Yoni’s Indiana-raised dad, had fought against the pull of Israel on his son. But when he saw the inevitability, he reluctantly gave him his support.

                                                                                   ***

About two months before, Yoni had sent Maya an inspirational quote from Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion: “May every Jewish mother know that she has put her son under the care of commanders who are up to the task.” Maya had acknowledged the intent, but dryly advised that her mother, Dahlia, would have been highly critical of David Ben-Gurion’s successor, Golda Meir, and her preparedness for the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

When Yoni called home from the base, he told his parents that he got a letter from Susanne Langford, Danny’s pal Bobby’s daughter. She was about to travel to Israel to work with an Evangelical Christian Zionist organization.

Yoni asked, “When Susanne comes over, could you send her with some of my thick hunting socks? I still have one more winter to serve, and I’m tired of having cold feet.” He hoped referring to the future might put them more at ease.

Maya answered with a little more cheer, “Of course. How many pairs?”

Danny, also on the phone line and sitting in their kitchen, pressed Yoni to share some details about whether Givati would be called into action. He told Yoni that the papers talk about all the rockets and threatening words from both sides.

Yoni carefully replied, “Dad, if I knew, I wouldn’t say, I couldn’t say.”

He didn’t want to sound irritable. He decided to fib, “But I’m guessing it will all blow over, because Hamas knows better. It’s all a lot of posturing.”

Yoni suffered through these exchanges and did his best to soothe their nerves. It was a challenge, since every indication said that the Southern Command and Givati would be the point of that spear. After all, the motto of Givati was “Any place, any time, any mission.”

                                                                                    ***

In their green and tan battle gear, with gray-black straps and weapons, the patrol slid along the cinderblock wall. Their moves, with some positioned low and some high, were choreographed to provide 360-degree bubble coverage. Watching out for angles where snipers could find them and checking telltale trip wires or circular land mines just below the dust, they moved left toward the knocked-in opening. Hunched up next to the wall’s breach, Yoni and Yair used scopes to look up and down the alleyway on the other side of the wall. When it looked clear, they sprinted through to the side of the first apartments.

Wrecked cars, with windshields blurred by muddy concentric arcs scored from once-operating wipers, were scattered about. Several cars were burned out with blistering blackened paint. Garbage and shards of building blocks knocked down from the upper floors and caved-in balconies littered the streets. Electrical lines, many cut, hung in disarray like forest vines. Twisted iron reinforcing rods, no longer holding fast to poured concrete, pointed skyward.

Lieutenant Omri checked his map and directed the team southwest to find the buildings likely to hold the hidden rocket cache and provide shelter for Hamas fighters. Yoni heard the footfalls of his fellow soldiers crunching through the debris and rubble as he listened for commands from Omri. He knew they would have to move into the apartment maze about three blocks into the town, and that the further they got from the wall and the support teams, the more precarious were their positions.

The other Givati teams were also moving in the area, and they communicated constantly to ensure no friendly fire accidents occurred. Yoni heard all around him the Tavor assault rifles’ crack-crack-crack. The burst of growls and ricochet zings of a firefight echoed in the alleyways. It was followed by messages that bad guys were found and cleared out. The slow building-by-building exploration, each room an excruciating test, moved forward. It seemed the warning leaflets dropped by the Israeli Air Force had been heeded, and, so far, few civilians had been seen.

Lieutenant Omri told them that they’d reached the two apartment buildings they were assigned to investigate, and if necessary, destroy. Just across the next narrow street, they saw a mosque and a school already dinged with shrapnel, but still standing. Yoni guessed that the proximity was the reason both for the intelligence’s suspicion and for the caution against the apartment’s aerial destruction. The team blew in the apartment’s metal door and worked their way up the two flights.

Qassam rocket launching frames sat piled in one corner. Tables covered with stained cups and dishes stood in another. This was the place. Here was the building that they’d destroy.

The demolition team was radioed as they waited for an expected ten-minute delay. Lieutenant Omri began pulling his team out of the two buildings, deploying them in a defensive semicircle close to the adjacent apartments. Yoni sat back for a moment at the building’s corner and drank from his canteen. Over the last hour, he had only taken one long slurp of water to clear out the dust. He had fired only a few dozen shots. Now, the pressure from the danger and the strain from his heavy load sunk in.

As he replaced the stopper, he heard a massive concussion from somewhere behind the apartment. The apocalyptic noise overwhelmed his senses. The ground moving under him failed to register as something very unusual. The apartment that he had just left seemed to puff up, the walls bowing out and disintegrating. In his mind’s eye, Yoni watched himself drifting along in slow motion.

For a moment, he blacked out. With one or two steps, he staggered away from the bursting building’s walls. As he tried to react, he pivoted back and saw the cantilevered balconies just above him snap off and collapse onto him.

                                                                                       ***

Yoni was sure that he had not passed out, but he couldn’t recall the moment when the crushing weight landed on him. He was perplexed thinking he should have remembered, and he realized he might be in shock. He found himself lying faceup, staring at a building that was now just a waffle of floors and supporting columns. Swirling dust filled the air. There were no windows or walls, but the floors remained. Wires and pipes dangled in profusion.

Yoni didn’t even attempt to sit up, knowing that he was pinned firmly between his backpack and jagged shards of what were once two balconies. Now, the pain in his left arm and right leg registered. It was not bad at first, but it grew steadily worse. He knew that the pressure on his shoulder was from his arm getting twisted at an odd angle, and the rhythmic throbbing was accompanied by a sense of wetness.

Lieutenant Omri, through a cloud of dust, stooped down close to Yoni. “My friend, you are going to be fine. You were very, very lucky.”

After another moment, Omri asked, “Can you give us a minute to get you out?”

Yoni reverted to his jocular way, replying, “We need to discuss building codes with Hamas.”

Instinctively, Yoni knew that he would be evacuated and that he would survive. He wouldn’t die; he wouldn’t be left there. He rotated his head around, trying to see what had happened to the rest of his platoon.

Yoni asked, “Omri, what happened? Did we blow up the building?”

“No, we didn’t. I don’t think so. The blast came from the next building. Probably a booby trap that just went off. Please relax, stay still. You have a broken arm and leg, maybe a broken collarbone. Nothing more. Not even a shot in the rear…‘the million-dollar wound,’ as you Americans like to say.”

A swarm of fellow soldiers used all their strength and cleverly leveraged reinforcing rods to extract him from the blanket of broken building slabs. Medic Dodi Liebler oversaw the cleaning and wrapping of the wounds, and four men hustled Yoni on a stretcher back across the wall, back through the field. He would be taken to the armored transport and the medical ward.

                                                                                     ***

The soldiers jogged with Yoni’s stretcher, turning left and right, paralleling a worn footpath he couldn't see. To help manage the pain, he focused on the deep blue sky bounded by his towering IDF brothers, one at each corner. Later, he would remember the bouncing ride, sagging safely and comfortably into the canvas’s middle. It crossed his mind that the stretcher resembled a wedding chuppah.

Yoni’s thoughts drifted away from his injuries, and the thunderous sounds of the military maneuver now faded. He felt as though he were sinking deeper and deeper into warm liquid. He was suddenly overtaken by an innocent wonderment at it all. How did an Indiana-born boy end up fighting with the IDF, now wounded in Gaza? His ideals, dreams, and plans clashed with the reality of his injuries.

He was flooded with remembrances: a collage of family faces, bits of stories, and familiar voices called out. Yoni began to dispassionately reconsider his journey. He had always taken pride in his commitment and decisiveness. But now, with less confidence, he pondered how all this had come to pass. He considered his multinational family history and how it had led him to become a lone soldier. What came before?

While he recovered from his near catastrophe, Yoni would have time to puzzle over his unique story.

Excerpt From Chapter Seventeen, titled “Treatment”

Bobby felt the loneliness of battling cancer. His wife Andrea had been so kind and supportive. But the impossible-to-suppress fears for himself ping-ponged around in his mind.

Sometimes, Bobby thought back to his father and mother and their clear-eyed view of right and wrong. He faced the battle with cancer knowing he was his father’s son. Recalling the Indiana home where he was raised and the events that had shaped his life, Bobby thought to himself, Dad fought his way across Europe and survived to tell about it, and now I have to tough it out with radiation and chemo and whatever else is in store for me.

Bobby rearranged his blanket and began, “I’m Bobby Langford. I’m originally from a small town in Indiana, and my wife Andrea and I still live near there. We have a small winter home here in sunny Florida near Stuart.”

Brightening, he added, “I told my wife I could handle this one by myself. She’ll be here to pick me up afterwards. How about you?”

Pausing for a moment, Arnie had to organize his thoughts so he could give an equally succinct response. “I was born and raised in New York City, and we lived in New Jersey before retiring to Florida,” he said. “We have a place near Boynton Beach.”

Bobby nodded. Arnie Krakow continued, “Yeah, Fran will retrieve me later, too. She’s off duty right now.”

They sat in silence for a moment. Arnie noted, “Congratulations to us. Neither of us chose to identify our cancers.”

“Great. I don’t know about you, but I resent being tagged as the ‘fill-in-the-blank malignant organ guy,’” he said.

Gathering steam, Arnie added, “We both led full lives and there was no damn reason why some misanthrope’s ‘glad it’s not me’ pity should define me as one diagnosis, one flawed body part, and skip over the full measure of my life, and not acknowledge all the good stuff.”

Bobby smiled back and agreed, “Absolutely right. It’s the same as when somebody dies and all the chatter is about what in his last days or minutes he said or did. It’s all out of proportion.”

As Arnie repositioned himself in his lounge chair, a manila folder stuffed with news clippings slid off his blanket and onto the floor.

The clippings cascaded out. An auburn-haired nurse happened to see the minor accident and glided over. She scooped up the newspaper fragments and tucked them back into the folder. With a smile, she handed them back to Arnie.

Bobby casually asked Arnie, “Whatcha got there? Working on something interesting?” Arnie was now faced with a dilemma. He thought to himself that Bobby, who was a total stranger, seemed like a bright, affable fellow. They had exchanged only a few dozen unremarkable words, but Bobby did appreciate his gallows humor.

The real reason for the clippings was to help Arnie craft a letter to the editor of a national paper concerning a sensitive subject. Arnie was unsure of how to answer Bobby or how candid he should be.

Arnie cautiously inched forward with his explanation. “Well, I don't know your politics, but here goes.” Deliberately avoiding the big reveal about his touchy subject and his point of view, Arnie stalled, “I'm writing a letter to the editor to a national paper. It probably won’t be published, but it makes me feel better.”

Bobby listened carefully, waiting for the specifics. He showed no reaction and simply inhaled and exhaled a little more deeply. The tubes, the funky colored liquids with the little bubbles, the antiseptic smells, and the unnatural quiet of the facility had slowed down his reality.

It had occurred to Bobby that he had surrendered some big chunk of himself to the science that was keeping him alive; instead of the flowing medicine becoming part of him, he had become a part of the invasive, hygienic, therapeutic plumbing. He was just one stage, one human component, in a chemotherapy filtering and absorption process. Where did he end and the chemistry begin?

When first forming relationships with people, Arnie knew you should proceed slowly, ducking and weaving around any potentially sensitive subjects. Certainly, his wife Fran appreciated when he chose to “just let it go.” Fran was just as committed to his causes, but she thoughtfully selected who was worthy to discuss them with.

Robert Langford – he’s a Christian, he’s gotta be, Arnie thought to himself. Therefore, especially when it comes to Israel, you should step cautiously forward into the dark waters of political or religious discourse. First dip in your opinionated big toe; check how cold the water is.

Being Jewish himself, Arnie saw Christians as a people for whom things came more easily and more naturally. After all, America was largely a Christian country. He figured Christians could feel at home, comfortable in their own skins.

When it came to how Christians, in general, felt about Jews and Israel, Arnie assumed a genuinely benign indifference. He guessed they viewed Jewish stereotypes with some amusement.

“I want to refute the false, uninformed, and probably malign claims made by a bone-headed, biased reporter. He is the typical hack that the paper employs. The paper has a bad reputation for its…” Arnie decided to slow down as he verbally ran to the end of the proverbial dock.

As he lay there essentially motionless, Bobby waited for the specifics. Bobby’s mind was pleasantly still, and he watched Arnie struggle to articulate his issue.

Arnie revealed, “This biased columnist is impugning the sincerity of Israel's desire for peace with the Palestinians. He’s accusing Israeli leadership of hypocrisy, delay, and dishonesty. This self-appointed genius wrote that Israel's settlement policy was singularly ruining the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and he didn't once mention the generous offers Israel has made that were rejected.”

Well, I guess I’ll find out now if we’ll be friends or not, Arnie thought. Once again, he had opted for bluntness. Arnie pondered whether his chemotherapy mate knew or cared about the subject and whether he would respond with interest. Hey, he might take the absolute opposite point of view.

Over the years, Arnie had struggled to accept the reality that not everybody was predisposed positively to Israel and to the Jews. He was painfully aware that many Jews and non-Jews were simply indifferent to the festering geopolitical Middle East Gordian knot. It was an old story for Arnie. It was Arnie’s story.

Today Arnie hadn't wanted to litigate Israel’s or the Jewish people's many trials and conflicts. Yes, he could vigorously argue the case; he could, with legal exactitude, trot out the evidence. He could cite the millennia-old archeological and biblical proof. He could refute the oldest and most cleverly masked anti-Semitic or anti-Israel canards. He could face down the Holocaust deniers, the biased, the haters, the self-loathers, and the ill-informed.

Today, Arnie was worn down. He would have preferred talking about movies, travel, favorite foods, or family. Even over the few seconds describing the letter to the editor, Arnie regretted revealing his deeply held beliefs. It was too much.

With the cancer and all the associated uncertainty, Arnie had softened. His passionate, hair-trigger combativeness was being replaced by self-pity. The stress of juggling doctors, medicines, and medical discoveries weighed down on him.

Bobby simply told him in a low, even voice, “My best friend is Jewish, and his wife was born in Israel. Over the years, we've kept up with all the fighting, terrorism, and efforts to make peace.”

Confidently, Bobby professed, “The initiatives of Barak in 2000 and Olmert in 2008 would have given the Palestinians almost all of what they want today. Even the 1947 UN Resolution 181…it offered the Arabs a lion’s share of British-controlled Palestine. Arafat and Abbas, they’re two guys who just can’t get beyond the victimization story line.”

He looked to Arnie, asking, “Wasn't it Abba Eban who said, 'They never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity’?’’

Arnie just lay silently in his medical lounge chair and didn’t move a muscle. He wondered if all this was real. He was stunned.

Bobby had even more to say, but for now, he closed his eyes and tried to relax until his treatment was completed.

Arnie sat quietly, alone with his thoughts. His mind wandered back to memories from before he knew he had cancer.