Mind Picker: Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier's Story of a Forgotten War

This book is about the lives of young people who finished high school and then found themselves in a war – in a forgotten little corner of a forgotten little war, but one that has nonetheless reverberated in our lives and in the life of our country and the world since it ended one night in the first spring of the new century. Anyone looking for the origins of the Middle East of today would do well to look closely at these events.

“The Pumpkin” was the Israeli code-name for a small fortified structure within the security zone of southern Lebanon (a string of such structures ringed Israel's northern border in the 1990s, originally built at the request of the Lebanese militia in response to Palestinian guerrilla activity in the area), and “flowers” was their code-word for injured soldiers (“oleanders” was used for the dead). While author Matti Friedman doesn't actually say that the IDF ever made a portmanteau out of the two words, this is obviously the source for the title of his memoir about serving his mandatory military service at this outpost, Pumpkinflowers. Friedman does a service to history by writing about this “little war”: not only does this slim book nicely capture the experience of these young soldiers as they were thrown into combat duty, but Friedman makes the case that it was during this standoff that the techniques of the modern terrorist (recording videos for media consumption, the use of IEDs, fighting a long game without clear military objectives) were tested and perfected. I found it to be a really interesting read.

Israel had gone into Lebanon all those years ago because of Palestinian guerrillas attacking across the border, but the Palestinians were long gone. The enemy had changed, and now it was Hezbollah. This group was Lebanese but created by Iran, the rising regional power, with the help of Syria, which controlled Lebanon. Hezbollah took orders from the dictatorship in Syria and from the clerics running Iran. Hezbollah was supposedly fighting to get us out of Lebanon, but Hezbollah leaders made clear later that they had rebuffed Israeli offers for a negotiated withdrawal. They didn't want us to leave; they wanted to push us out, which is not the same thing. By killing soldiers in the security zone they didn't convince Israelis to leave but rather that the security zone was necessary, and we dug in deeper and deeper to justify what we had already lost. This changed only with the helicopter crash, which had nothing to do with Hezbollah. Subsequent events show that they hoped to use their war against us to become the dominant power in Lebanon, which they went on to do with considerable skill. Their war seems to have always been as much for their country as it was against ours.

Pumpkinflowers is divided into four parts. In the first, Friedman describes life at the Pumpkin in the early days of its existence, as preserved in the copious correspondence of one of the soldiers from that time named Avi. In the second, a group of peace-loving kibbutzers form a protest group known as the Four Mothers: as they could see no strategic value to the security zone, they could see no reason for their sons to lose their lives there; as this was an era of optimism with a dovish Israeli government, their message gained a following. When two transport helicopters collided and seventy-three soldiers died, it was the beginning of the end for the Pumpkin. In the third section, Friedman himself is assigned to the Pumpkin right out of high school, and he does a good job of describing the life there, the long stretches of boredom interrupted by alarms: but are those guerrillas crawling through the forest towards the Pumpkin or are they wild boar? Is that tracer fire from the village or fireworks? The atmosphere changes as the days count down to the decommissioning of the Pumpkin: not only does no one want to be the last man to die defending a position that is about to be abandoned, but the soldiers look wistfully towards the seaside Lebanese town they've been observing for years, wondering if they would ever be able to walk its streets in peace. In the fourth section, that's exactly what Friedman does: as he was born in Toronto, Friedman uses his Canadian passport to book a vacation to Lebanon some years later. He discovers a friendly and generous people who love their country and are proud to show it off. He also discovers that the streets are filled with propaganda: with posters of the martyrs who died “fighting for the liberation of Occupied Palestine”, the bookstores prominently displaying the inflammatory Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Friedman is successfully able to pass as a Canadian tourist, but as he travels further and further south, approaching the Israeli border, the Lebanese people become more suspicious, the propaganda more pronounced, the conversations more tricky (one old man asked Friedman if he liked Jews, and when Friedman replied, “Not particularly”, the man nodded and said that was good because they kill small babies, indicating the meagre size with his hands). As was his goal all along, Friedman is able to nonchalantly ask his cab driver to take the interesting looking forest path up the hill, and he arrives at the pile of concrete rubble that is the remains of the Pumpkin. This final section was the most interesting to me, probably because in it Friedman is the most introspective.

On the hill we had been at the start of something: of a new era in which conflict surges, shifts, or fades but doesn't end, in which the most you can hope for is not peace, or the arrival of a better age, but only to remain safe as long as possible. None of us could have seen how the region would be seized by its own violence – the way Syria, a short drive from the outpost, would be devoured, and Iraq, and Libya, and Yemen, and much of the Islamic world around us. The outpost was the beginning. Its end was still the beginning. My return as a civilian was still the beginning. The present day might still be the beginning. The Pumpkin is gone, but nothing is over.

The IDF's years within Lebanon had all the hallmarks of a “war”, but despite 250 dead Israeli soldiers (plus the unreported number killed on the Lebanese side), this conflict was never named, the soldiers involved were awarded no campaign ribbons. I quoted at length in this review, because even after finishing Pumpkinflowers, I still can't keep straight which terrorist group was sponsored by which country and how that has led us to where we are today; with suicide bombers, and trucks full of explosives detonated outside embassies and police stations, and videotaped beheadings reported all too regularly, it's easy to throw up one's hands and say, “Who knows how we got here?”. Friedman does a very good job of linking one to the other, and along the way, tells an interesting story of the traditional soldier's experience with fighting a new type of conflict. Here's my only complaint: some of the material feels merely reported, without the deeper introspection, and I smirked when I saw that Friedman thanked his high school Creative Writing teacher for consulting on his manuscript: if this makes sense to other readers, I'd say that the periodically overwritten/superficial passages felt exactly like a high school Creative Writing project. But that's not to say that this book doesn't have value: I'm glad to have read Pumpkinflowers and I learned much from it.