“What am I waiting for?”

There was an open rectangular hatch in the steel roof, through which the dim light of the stars could be seen when the clouds occasionally parted. The whole team was sleeping on the steel floor, and I was sitting on the bench and looking up at the night sky. I only had an hour or so till the end of my shift, and then Lidor was supposed to take my place on the bench next to the radio transmitter.

- What are we wating for? - I whispered to myself.

Of course, I knew exactly why we were waiting in that place: I knew that at some point, there would be rockets flying at us from the other side of the mountains on the horizon, and when that happens - our mission is to locate the source, and destroy it.

That answer was not at all satisfactory in my opinion, so I tried to search deeper, and thought that actually, each of us was probably waiting for something else entirely: Ari, for example, was sleeping in the corner and waiting for his fever to go away. Being the team’s medic, I tried my best to make his wish come true but frankly, I had little more than Paracetamol tablets to offer the poor guy. Ido was waiting to finally get demobilized, and go home for good, while Hanukkah was waiting to leave the team and go to the officer’s academy. Feitelson was waiting to see his girlfriend at home once we’re on leave, and Noam was supposed to go to his sister’s wedding in two days. Quite sadly, given the current circumstances, none of these scenarios were probable.

Then I asked myself again - what is it exactly that I’m waiting for?

Am I also waiting for my time to shed this uniform? Am I waiting to go home? Am I waiting to finally kill someone? Am I waiting to die?

It seemed as if my conscious mind was feeling threatened by this particular line of thinking, so it took me less than a second to lose concentration, and find myself staring at the stars again.

The night sky was quiet, flawless, still, and with no cloud in sight. The wind had ceased to harass the tall grass around our M-109 Howitzer cannon, and the trees fell silent. For a few seconds there, it got so quiet that I could hear my own heart beating slowly under the kevlar plates in my vest. And then the siren came.

The quiet of the night was relentlessly shattered by the wailing of the alarm, by radio chatter, and by Hanukka’s orders:

- Wake up! Battle stations! Get the breech open! I want a shell in here right now! - He screamed, and we obeyed.

- Opening breech! Charge and shell in the cannon! Targeting ready! - we shouted back in unison.

- Target coordinates received! Permission to load granted! - Hanukkah gave the orders, and Noam and I began loading the shell and explosives into the breech, as Feitelson calibrated the targeting computer. We were ready. Now we just had to wait for the Captain’s command to fire.

I waited another few seconds in place but then curiosity took over me, and I stepped onto the bench and looked through the hatch in the roof. At first the horizon was dark, but then there was a little spark of light rising far off in the distance, and then another one, and another one...

I couldn’t tear my gaze from those little sparks, and looked on in horror as they grew larger and larger. And I asked myself one last time - “What the fuck am I waiting for?!”

Then my world turned white, my hearing failed, the ground shook underneath my feet, and a violent shockwave pushed me down to the steel floor of the cannon.

I couldn’t see a thing, I couldn’t blink or move a muscle, but in that moment of sheer dread I have found my answer: I was not going to wait for the second explosion. I was not going to wait to pick up my friends in pieces.

I thought that there are soldiers exactly like us on the other side. There is probably also a medic exactly llike me out there: who had sworn to do no harm, who had promised his mother to come back home, who wants to grow old with a woman he loves, and to keep his brothers alive. I wished that it had not been this way. I wished that I could convince myself that the men seeking our deaths were animals that deserve to die in our stead, but I couldn’t. I knew that my life had no more worth than theirs, and that I had no right to to do the thing that I was about to do. However, I also knew that I am done waiting: I knew that I wasn’t going to keep Noam’s sister waiting. I knew that I wasn’t going to deny Ido’s mother the opportunity to see him come back home and that I was not going to stand between Feitleson and his girlfriend’s loving embrace.

I stood up, closed the hatch, and pulled the firing cable.

The recoil shook the cannon as forty kilograms of explosives and steel were launched into the air. We loaded another shell, and then another one... And I wasn’t waiting for anything anymore.