As a wounded soldier himself, sustaining quite a severe injury at the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Uzi Lotan knows very well that it is a very hard and lengthy process before a soldier is ready to open up and start talking about hard, war-experiences. Keeping quiet is simply a sure and safe emotional-defense mechanism, which no veteran willingly lays down for fear of breaking down without it.
It took two years and a series of pentothal shots - truth serum - before Uzi was ready to open up slightly. Truth serum is a colloquial name for any of a range of psychoactive medications, used to obtain information from subjects who are unable or unwilling to provide it otherwise. As a matter of fact, even now, over 40 years after the war, at the age of 64, Uzi sometimes comes up with "new stuff" he never told anyone before!
The reason why we are telling you all this is because some of the wounded IDF soldiers being treated in Israeli hospitals, for injuries sustained while fighting in Gaza, have started opening-up and talking. They are telling the media in Israel of horrific, terrible things they have encountered in the past five days, since entering into Gaza.
Uzi notes, "The basic quotes were taken from listening to injured soldiers on The Voice of Israel Channel 2 (BET) RADIO Stations – all in Hebrew, of course. The date of the interviews on Reshet Bet: 22 July 2014, midday.
"This is essentially the account of the interviews, as I wrote them down, while listening. As you may understand from the comments above, this very much relates to my personal testimony and hard experiences of war. I wanted to draw the audience’s attention to the magnitude of the trauma, which caused these soldiers to start off-loading so quickly."
The bitterest and toughest battles apparently took place in a suburb of Gaza called Shja'iya. The fact that some of them are indeed talking, is either a sign indicating that they are naturally-open characters, or more likely, that the trauma they experienced was of an enormous magnitude that if they won't talk, they'll explode! Uzi believes that the latter reason is the valid reason.
The Gazan Human Shields | And this is what the soldiers are telling:
"We went into Shuja'iya, to discover and destroy the Hamas' terrorist tunnels. We discovered there an entire underground-city, with multi-shaft, wide tunnels, with Wi-Fi & air-conditioning systems, concrete walls, and stocked to the ceiling with weapons and explosives. Some of the tunnels are so wide, that they can ride back and forwards on Vespa type scooters..."
"And then came the worst! The Hamas 'fighters' started sending towards us 13- and 14-year-old Palestinian children, running at us, wearing explosive-laden suicide-bomber belts! Those children were death-trapped, and became human-bombs, by their community's adults!
"We were trained to fight adult-soldiers or any other skilled adults, enabling us to defend our families and countrymen. But this? We had no other option but, in self-defense, to shoot them at as far a range from us as we could, before the 'responsible-adult' that sent them used his mobile-phone to detonate the belts, and kill us".
One of the injured soldiers ended up by saying: "I do not know if I'll ever be able to sleep again: the pictures of those poor children, killed by my gun, will probably never leave me!"
Let us conclude with the sad words of one of Israel's past Prime Ministers, the late Mrs. Golda Meir: "We may be able to forgive the Arabs for the killing of our children. We cannot however forgive them, for forcing us to kill theirs! Peace will come when the Arabs start to love their children more than they hate us!".
No comments:
Post a Comment