As we count, we are all equal in G-d’s eyes

It was the first time, as an officer, that I came under fire. Well, sort of. We were stationed on the edge of the Bekaa valley, in Lebanon, and intelligence had information that terrorists might try to infiltrate south through the valley, under cover of darkness. We had orders to mount an ambush to stop them from getting over the border into Israel.

At the ambush site, after sweeping the area for safety, the men lie on the ground in the form of a star, feet on the inside and heads out, with every one given different, over-lapping quadrants they are responsible for watching. For five minutes, nobody moves; you lie in total, tense silence, listening to the sounds of the night for anything that doesn’t seem to fit in.

The officer in charge is designated 12 o’clock, and your first sergeant, directly behind you and looking the opposite way, is called six o’clock. This way, everyone gets oriented pretty quickly, and in the event of trouble you don’t have to figure out which direction it’s coming from. 

All of a sudden, around midnight, night turned into day and the silence exploded into a cacophony of gunfire as they opened up on us. We were lying on a low hill in the middle of a large valley, with a few scattered Arab villages round about, and in the space of about five seconds our entire left flank was filled with the sounds of gunfire. 

We had obviously come under heavy attack, and our position must have been “made.” At this point there was no longer any point to maintaining silence so I started yelling out commands as loud as I could above the sounds of gunfire. There are a number of things that go through your mind in such a moment, but most of all you discover how good all the training you received really was. They teach you not to wait until you are attacked, but to constantly be thinking what you would do in the event you are attacked, something I had been reviewing in my mind more as a “stay awake” exercise just a moment earlier.