Day of Remembrance

April 28, 2009 - 3:25 PM by Harry · Leave a Comment
Filed under: History and Culture, Holidays, Life, War

A soldier's funeral Remembrance day. Oddly enough, this is the one “holiday” that I always feel thoroughly connected to. Not sure why. I’m just not really a spiritual fellow. Ever since I was a little boy I had dreams of serving in the IDF. For years it was just fantasy and of course the first time I ever fired a gun as a soldier the reality of what being a soldier really meant sunk in.

I was lucky enough to serve in the IDF during a “quiet” time – relatively. It was before Israel pulled out of Lebanon and a few years before the second intifada started. I knew some guys who were seriously wounded in Lebanon, one guy in my unit killed himself during basic training (at home on a weekend off) but other than those instances, I didn’t personally know any soldiers who died.

So what do I usually think about during the sirens? I think about my friend who lost five of his former soldiers in a horrible brush fire in Lebanon during a firefight with Hezbollah, just a week after he was discharged (I’d met one of the guys the week before at my friend’s army release party). I went with him to two of the funerals. I think about the father of an old roommate who was killed by a sniper as he got out of his tank during the Yom Kippur War just hours after the ceasefire was declared. My roommate was 11 months old at the time. And I think about the history of my unit, the Seventh Brigade, and the sacrifices they made as they fought to protect our borders from our enemies in every single one of Israel’s wars. Victims of terror is another story all together. Some good friends have narrowly escaped with their lives (but with both physical and psychological scars), others I’ve known did not.

Photo courtesy of kodak agfa from Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

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