Sergeant Major Ben Kerido shares real time, first person updates from the front lines of Gaza during Operation Swords of Iron
Ben Kerido
“I’ll pick you up at the local mall near your apartment at 3:00 am.” My good friend called me. He served in the same IDF special forces reserve battalion as me in a sister company. The peaceful Shabbat (Sabbath) and holiday morning erupted into an unfathomable nightmare of incoming Gaza missiles and over a thousand Hamas terrorists infiltrating Israel, kidnapping and slaughtering both soldiers and civilians alike in a manner resembling the pogroms of Nazi Germany.
At 1 am my reserve unit was mobilized, and by 3 am my friends and I were on our way down to a military base not far from Gaza. The streets were deserted besides military and police traffic. As we approached the southern portions of Israel, familiar infrastructure and the “stomping grounds” of my younger years now resembled the movie set of a dystopian apocalypse film.
Emptiness and abandonment defined the region, besides a scattering of IDF Hummers with mounted machine guns. We arrived at the base to check in and prepare our equipment and weapons. The mood was heavy. Normally when I am deployed with my unit for scheduled service or training, our spirits are high.
The “boys” are getting back together, many of whom have been best friends for over a decade and a half, with joking, teasing, pranking. Not this time. This time the mood was solemn. There was a switch in our heads.
A close friend of mine, “Archie,” was considered a sensitive intellectual; in his professional life he was an architect. Now, he was cold and hard. His eyes burned with fury, and reflected the rage in my own eyes — and the rest of the unit.
Eventually we had gotten ourselves together and we received our first set of orders. Heavily-armed Palestinian Arab terrorists from Gaza still controlled more than a few Israeli Jewish communities. We deployed to search our sector for hidden terrorists and established ourselves in defensive positions in a rural area of forests and farmland. We boarded our military transport to the edge of the “safe zone”. To be continued…
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