ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, February 13, 1997 TAG: 9702130012
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ELISSA MILENKY
LIOR, A 21-year-old Israeli soldier, sat by the radio in the early morning hours last week and waited tensely for the announcer to read the list of the dead. The night before, 73 of his fellow soldiers were killed when two army helicopters crashed en route from Israel to south Lebanon for a troop change. No one survived.
Lior, like most Israelis that morning, feared he would recognize one of the names or remember one of the faces that would later cover the front pages of all the country's newspapers - a tragic picture collage surrounded by black ink. He waited to hear which men from his fighting unit in Lebanon had boarded the helicopter that chilly Feb. 4 night. Others waited to hear of relatives, friends, acquaintances.
Israel is a tiny country where the degrees of separation from such a catastrophe are extremely small - even for an American tourist like myself, living in the country just four months. I sat with my friend Lior in those early hours, waited and listened silently. He would later attend one of two simultaneous funerals held for the two men from his unit who indeed boarded one of the helicopters.
News of this tragedy filtered to the United States, but the magnitude of the event cannot be understood from afar. For Americans, who have themselves witnessed airline crashes and other disasters, the Israeli helicopter crash is a tragic event in a foreign land. The images of tearful Israeli soldiers shoveling earth into the graves of their friends quickly faded from the media, already overloaded daily with pain and sadness.
These images will never fade for Israelis, whose collective consciousness is in many ways defined by such events. The Israeli Defense Force is the backbone of this country's society, a civilian army in which nearly every Israeli teen-ager serves two to three years.
These young men and women, most ages 18 to 21, are visible every day in their olive-drab uniforms. They are riding the buses, walking through the streets and eating at roadside falafel stands. They are the sons and daughters of government officials, teachers, journalists, shopkeepers and farmers. Most of the soldiers killed in the accident were not old enough to have started their families, careers or even studies at universities, having only finished high school before entering the army.
Seconds after news of the crash was first broadcast, the country's military switchboard received 90,000 calls, The Jerusalem Post reported, from friends and family members who knew soldiers serving in Lebanon. People like Amram Mitzna, mayor of Haifa (the country's third largest city), had to wait torturous minutes or even hours before they knew their sons were safe.
A quote from an unnamed 13-year-old girl, which was published by The Jerusalem Post, puts the magnitude of the crash in perspective: "Seventy-three candies. Seventy-three dreams. Seventy-three pairs of eyes. Seventy-three happy families. Seventy-three could be anything. But not this time."
The crash plunged the country into a national state of mourning, sadness and depression. All restaurants, cinemas and other places of entertainment were closed for nearly two days. The country's two television stations showed only news, funerals, memorial services and music videos from Israel's astoundingly large collection of mournful songs. Candles burned in windows, store fronts and government buildings.
The people of Israel do not simply watch the news and shake their heads in sympathy at the misfortunes of others. Countless families here have experienced the loss of relatives or friends in a terrorist attack or in one of Israel's many wars, from my roommate's Hebrew teacher to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Both lost their brothers. They cried together.
In 1996 alone, 26 Israeli soldiers were killed in the south Lebanon security zone, all from Hezbollah terrorist attacks. The 73 soldiers killed in last week's crash were being transported to Lebanon by helicopter because the on-land caravans are slow and often ready targets for such attacks.
Many of the soldiers who serve in Lebanon, in this case an all-male fighting force included among the country's best soldiers, volunteered to serve in combat and know the risks in this volatile area. Countless stories about the individual soldiers who died last week tell of the same, general off-hand warning to friends and relatives before they left for Lebanon: "Maybe I'll return, maybe I won't."
At one soldier's funeral, a sister recalled her brother's pleas to see a movie with him before he left for Lebanon, She had complained she was too tired. "I'm coming back in 21 days, if I come back at all," he said.
A week has now passed since the helicopter crash, and the pain in Israel is becoming less raw and more introspective. Commercials again are being shown on Israeli television. Cinemas and restaurants have reopened.
People are beginning to deal with the loss in different ways. My friend Lior was standing at the cash register of a grocery store in Haifa the other day when an old women slyly dipped her hand into his shopping bag and dropped in two large pieces of chocolate. You are a soldier, she said, and I am proud.
Elissa Milenky, a former Roanoke Times reporter, is living on a kibbutz in Israel.
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