Even though 46 years have passed since that terrible war, the memories are still strong and refuse to fade. Sometimes, mostly on the eve of Yom Kippur, I page through articles that I published in Haaretz at the time, when I was a young journalist.
A few days after the ceasefire was declared, I starting sending the paper feature articles about the feelings among the reservists on the front line in Sinai. I had been called up for six months straight, and through the articles I tried to let the civilians on the homefront know how the reservists were feeling and discuss what was bothering them.
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We were a platoon of reservists there on the dunes, near Tassa, not far from the town of Ismail, 8 km (5 miles) from the Suez Canal. We slept in foxholes that we dug in the sand and covered with slabs of corrugated tin. We had no lights, and when it got dark we read by candlelight. During the day, we watched Egyptian soldiers' movements, but mostly we were busy preparing meals from the daily rations we received.
In the first article, I told readers about the difficulties of phoning home. In an age of smartphones equipped with Whatsapp and Twitter, it's inconceivable that for weeks we couldn't talk with our wives or children. I wrote, "Ever since the war, we haven't been able to call home. Newspapers published pictures of portable telephones on the western side of the canal, but our unit never got any, for some reason, not even once."
In another article I told them about one of my comrades who, when he left for furlough, took not only his dirty laundry and his gun, but also a carton of eggs: "When we saw Tal wrapping up a flat of 30 eggs, we thought it was a joke but he answered, 'It's serious. I'm taking eggs home. You don't know that there's a serious egg shortage in the city?'"
At the end of December 1973, an entertainment troupe visited us for the first time. I wrote, "In the afternoon, a military vehicle stopped at the entrance to the outpost. Out came a red-haired, bearded guy who played the accordion, a pretty girl who had brought a xylophone from her home in Givatayim, two siblings from Argentina – Glorida and Fredo – who sang songs accompanied by a guitar, and a fat reservist who served as the emcee and told jokes."
We near the canal got to see our first movie in February 1974. It was fun, in the heart of the desert, to see naked young Swedish girls. I described it as follows: "Last week, we had a refreshing experience and watched a movie. The movie was screened from a truck hooked up to a generator. They hung up a white cloth, and to the side sat a technician and a film projector. The technician said that it was a Swedish film called '17,' which had been produced in Sweden a few years ago. It was a little strange to get used to the idea that we were sitting on the IDF's front line, a few hundred meters from the Egyptian Second Army, watching a Swedish erotic film."
In a different article, I wrote about a brief, moving encounter we had with Egyptian soldiers.
"For four months, we saw them digging down in the sand a few hundred meters away. Suddenly, in the middle of the day, three soldiers from the Second Army in their light uniforms approached the barbed wire fence and waved. For a moment it seemed as if they wanted to surrender because they had come without weapons. But when we got to the fence, it turned out that they wanted to talk to us and take pictures, and trade Egyptian coins and banknotes for our [Israeli] lira – and shake hands. All of a sudden, the barriers were down and we saw that, like us, they wanted to go home and leave the tanks and the sand dunes. Later, we took a picture together. They gave us their home addresses and asked that we send them the historic photo."
