Morality through the periscope of a tank
Yehuda Avner, JP Op-ed, 19 June 2003
Classic warfare is fundamentally a contest of wills fought to impose so much stress on the enemy that he loses the will to fight. A war of terror has the same intent, but with a singularly insidious twist: The enemy can be anybody, anywhere.
He is without uniform or identification. His targets are random. His weapon is fear. He knows no constraints. He comes in all kinds of guises, often in the costume of his victims. He seeks to shatter nerves and break morale by flaunting the impotence of the authorities to protect the public. He uses his own women and children as his shield, and often as his combatants. He seeks to goad the defender into ever-harsher countermeasures so as to stoke the general hate. He strives to corrupt the defender's military professionalism and discipline through combat stress, demoralization, fatigue, boredom, overkill, inner conflict, and moral rot.
And, in so doing, he goes all out to sow despair and hammer the message into the agitated hearts of the other side that the conflict is immoral and unwinnable.
This was the gist of an armored brigade commander's remarks to a group of battalion and platoon reservist officers wrapping up a 48-hour refresher course before deploying with their men in the Nablus sector for a 32-day stint. The commander, whom we shall call Avi, dwelt at length on the IDF's operational responses to Palestinian terrorcraft, and rounded off with a pep talk on the army's Code of Ethics.
Then he handed over to the second-in-command, who ordered his men to gather their crews for a final night exercise, which he, the brigade commander, would observe.
I had met him at a private gathering some days before, when he gave a talk on "Morality in War," and was so taken by his quiet air of authority and intellectual honesty that I collared him afterwards to pump him for more. The result was an invitation to visit him at his base the following Thursday.
It was hot that Thursday, oppressively hot. The sun was going down when I arrived, but a wind blew relentlessly from the east, fanning the countryside like a blow-drier. A dozen tanks were parked higgledy-piggledy at ammunition trucks, where squads were loading shells by the glare of headlights. A guard at the gate directed me to the brigade commander. He was leaning against an armored jeep surrounded by his officers. And it was there that I heard him give his talk on terrorism.
"Crews, prepare to mount the tanks!" a junior officer yelled after the briefing was done. And then, "Crews, mount!" The brigade commander watched with the eye of a connoisseur while the engines of the upgraded Patton M-60s - the Magachs - ignited, coughed, snarled, and roared. Then, as the column began to move off, he slid into his command jeep and invited me to follow.
He was in his forties, a bulky fellow in drab olive green fatigues with a shock of curly, sandy hair covered by a knitted kippa. His epaulettes marked him as a colonel. And in that twilight hour, as he sped alongside the clanking, snorting armored column through a curtain of diesel fumes and whirling dust, he cut a dashing figure.
THE METAL brutes clawed and ripped at the elephant-colored stones, up a rugged slope to a ridge that terminated in a long, rock-strewn valley stretching into a narrowing V and dominated by steep, partially wooded hills. At the valley's tapered end was the rubble of broken concrete blocks, earthen bricks, and pulverized plaster. Strange dark weeds that always seem to sprout in destroyed places grew between the cracks.
And rising out of the debris, like the effigies of some wacky Stonehenge shrine, were the targets - a circle of blown-out tanks and banged up armored personnel carriers, punched through with bull's eyes.
Creaking and rearing on their stationary tracks, the steel beasts fired their salvos at them with savage precision, rendering a cacophony of thunderclaps, smoke and flashes redolent of the walloping and clanging and thumping finale of "1812."
And then, on some unseen signal, one of the behemoths began crawling along the valley floor. Avi, plugged in to the command network, handed me earphones to listen in:
"Driver, sharp right! Stop! Obstacle on left flank. Now, forward! Full speed! Reverse! Now, sharp right again! Go! "Gunner, combat range! Two thousand meters! Fire! Loader, reload! Driver, faster! Watch out, another obstacle on your left! Gunner, combat range, 1,500 meters! Fire! Direct hit! Mazal tov!"
A couple of hours later the crews eased themselves out of their protective gear and space-age helmets, slipped off their Galil rifles and bivouacked around bonfires at an encampment on the valley's edge, where they munched on sandwiches as thick as Bibles. Avi joined them, and I asked him why the tank commander had to give such precise instructions to his driver. "Couldn't the fellow see where he was going?"
"Yes and no," he answered. "When a driver's hatch is closed he can see virtually nothing on his flanks beyond a 17-degree radius, which is about the range of his periscopes. He has to rely largely on his commander in the open turret to guide him."
A picture flashed into my mind. It was of a Sky News reporter telling his viewers the previous week that the Israeli tank they were watching on their TV screens crawling along an alleyway in a West Bank town with its turrets closed was maliciously grating its flanks against the shuttered storefronts to vandalize them.
When I told this to Avi he laughed in an unmirthful way. "The driver was probably doing his damnedest to avoid hitting those storefronts," he said. "In such a narrow confine the slightest fraction of a turn can cause a scrape without him ever knowing it."
And then, in an odd mixture of challenge and mischief, he added, "Like to try for yourself - see what a tank driver sees when his hatch is closed?"
DISMAYED AT the prospect but too mortified to say so, I submitted to big meaty hands bundling me onto a tank turret, pulling on me a helmet and protective gear, seizing me by the waist and armpits and lowering me, neck craned, shoulders crammed, torso twisted, legs dangling, through a narrow hatch into a metal pit and suspending me thus until my feet, little by little, rested on the driver's seat below.
Then I squiggled down to squeeze my backside into it and found myself entombed inside a cramped steel belly, encrusted with rugged instrument panels, packed shell racks and other fearsome paraphernalia. The stench of cordite, diesel, oil, exhaust and sweat was overwhelming. So was the claustrophobia.
The colonel's tinny voice scratched through the helmet's earphones: "I'm sealing you in now - closing the hatch." Everything went momentarily black. I was not a happy warrior.
By the eerie beam of a searchlight mounted on the turret I could make out three periscope slits, one directed forward and the other two angled off at either side. Peering through them I saw what a tank driver sees - a constricted vista that gives him no view of either his flanks or his rear.
I was ready to climb out.
The colonel's voice clawed through again: "On the floor there's the accelerator pedal. You're in neutral, so just press it. Get the feel of the engine." I did. I had the sense of being inside a percussion instrument.
After what seemed an eternity the colonel opened the beast and hauled me out. He hosed down my fevered senses by leading the benevolent applause of the crewmen who had been watching the spectacle from the start.
"So now you know what it feels like!" he said, tossing me a smart-ass little grin. And then, "Now let's go for a spin - get the feel of a tank on the move." He strapped on a helmet and body gear, climbed into the commander's turret, had me contorted into the loader's turret by his side, switched on a searchlight, and spoke into his headset: "Driver, take us across the valley, up the hill, and back."
The fellow in the tank's belly sent the monster jolting, rumbling, lurching and crunching over the valley's rocks toward the target area, then up a terraced slope, causing my head to bounce about my shoulders like a jack-in-the-box. I tried to imagine what it must be like jammed into this thing in war, jittery, exhausted and befuddled in a world of screaming shells, fire and blood. By the time we clattered back to the encampment I was black and blue. My face, I fear, was as white as my hair.
It was now close to midnight, and the senior officers retired to their quarters while the rest of the men, aged anywhere between 22 and 45, bonded with all the wisecracking banter of a boy-scout summer camp before turning in.
Lawyers, bakers, teachers, falafel vendors, accountants, shopkeepers, factory workers, hi-tech executives - these motley crews of reservists who teamed up year after year for frontline duty displayed an infectious camaraderie and fraternal elitism one is hard-pressed to explain. But their uncommon acts of valor in combat are proof that this deep and stalwart bond exists.
MEDITATING ON this truth I, guest for the night, was about to doze off when I heard a voice speaking to another, whispering close together in the darkness of the tent: "Did you read the editorial in today's Haaretz?" "Yes." (I too had read it. It was about alleged IDF abuses of Palestinian civilians, and the imperative to protect the human rights even of terrorists.)
"Did you ever do anything like that?"
"Like what?"
"Abuse civilians."
A longish hush. "Sort of. Once - last year."
"What happened?"
"I don't care to talk about it."
"Come on, get it off your chest. You'll feel better."
In a flat, inflectionless whisper, as if to dull the memory of it, the owner of the voice told how, on the outskirts of Jenin, the tank he commanded had come face to face with a parked Mercedes taxi, its roof rack loaded with suitcases. The taxi stood outside an isolated Arab house.
Seeing no one around, he had ordered the driver to crush it, shove it aside, and move on. Just like that! The humdrum way in which he related it made him sound like a casual onlooker delivering a monotonous report on some inconsequential occurrence to an uninterested party.
"Why didn't you knock on the door and tell the car's owner to move it?"
"What - leave the safety of my tank? Are you crazy?"
"True!"
"And, besides, we were dead beat. We were sleep-deprived. We hadn't closed our eyes in 36 hours. It was hot. We were bored. We were fed up. The tedium was enough to drive one crazy. And just the week before we had lost two of our own. So we were hurting as well."
"But, surely, none of that can justify ?"
The other man cut him off with a hiss that was harsh and cracked. Wallowing in his own sorrow he whispered in gory detail how an explosive device had slammed into the side of their friends' tank in a Jenin labyrinth, raining blood, oil, shrapnel, brains and smoke over theirs.
"They had been fool enough to get out of their tank to check out some minor repair," he lamented.
"And what happened to you? Were there repercussions for the Mercedes?"
"Avi court-marshaled me. He threw the IDF Code of Ethics at me."
"What did you get?"
"A stiff reprimand and a big fine." And then, wearily, "Enough! I'm going to try and get some sleep. Nablus awaits us in the morning."
Poignant emotions churned in my breast throughout the rest of that sleepless night. As the weeks fade to months and the months to years, I mused, the images of that man's two dead friends by their smashed tank, and of the Arab Mercedes he crushed afterwards, will surely linger in his memory. I reflected, too, on the way normal people can behave in abnormal times.
This led me to ponder our own kids and grandkids in uniform, and the extraordinarily abnormal and perilous circumstances they have to face fighting a foe that knows no humanity.
Which, in turn, led me to dwell on the tradition of humanity in the IDF - an army where human-rights transgressions are brought to light, penalties are paid and justice is done.
And this, ultimately, led me to thinking that in the broad scheme of things, there is surely no other army anywhere where brutality has been so consistently humiliated by inborn decency, cruelty so shamed by ingrained morality.
