Rabbi Moshe Dikshtein - Be'er Sheva - Part 8

00:19 Speaker 1 Moishe, we heard your fascinating story. You reached the point where the Rebbe tells you, “Sir, it’s time to enlist in the army.”

00:28 Speaker 2 Yes.

00:29 Speaker 1 And now you’re about to enlist. Tell us.

00:33 Speaker 2 Yes. A father with two— a father, a father of two children in Be’er Sheva goes to the recruitment office. Hello. ID card, this and that. I had an exemption—I mean, I have an exemption, and I want to cancel it and go into the... What happened? First thing, the mental-health officer. They listened to me: mental health.

00:58 Speaker 1 Oh, they sent—first thing, they sent you to the mental-health officer?

01:01 Speaker 2 Straight to the mental-health officer, first thing.

01:03 Speaker 1 Who’s the lunatic? Who’s the lunatic who wants to enlist in the army?

01:07 Speaker 2 The mental-health officer was a Chabadnik.

01:11 Speaker 1 Oh, Meidovnik? [unclear]

01:13 Speaker 2 Chaim Ekler. What?

01:14 Speaker 1 Oh, no...

01:16 Speaker 2 Chaim Ekler. And... I went in to see him. He asks me what’s going on. Anyway, I said, “They sent me to you.” “Why?” I said, “Listen.” He said, “You really do need a mental-health officer.” So I told him, “Listen, it’s an instruction from the Rebbe.” “It’s what? An instruction from the Rebbe? That’s different.” Fine. He asked me a few questions, checked off this and that, and wrote something. “Go back to whoever sent you.” I go back to him; he opens it up. “All right. Go to Camp Natan. There’s a medical center there, an army medical center, and they’ll examine you. I’ll call them now and tell them to receive you for the examination.”

01:59 Speaker 1 No, meaning when you say “examine you,” you mean check whether you’re fit for service.

02:03 Speaker 2 Check my eye, see—no, check my eyes, whether I’m crazy, whether I really can...

02:08 Speaker 1 Okay.

02:09 Speaker 2 Anyway, I get to the eye doctor there. He looks into my eye with all his equipment and says, “I don’t see a scar”—from the surgery, the procedure they’d done on my eye. I said, “Right, because it was done with a laser.” “With a laser?” I said, “Yes.” “What’s that? Where were you?” “In the United States.” “Do you have a letter or anything?” I said, “Of course.” I take it out and show it to him. He looks at it and says, “This is the first time I’ve seen anything like this in Israel. There’s really no scar left...” Anyway, he tests my vision; I can see. Great. He sends me back to the recruitment office. I get there, they look it over. “Good. You’ll receive an enlistment date with all the instructions about what to do and how to do it. You’ll be in Stage B.” Stage B isn’t—it isn’t full army service; it’s something like twenty, twenty... Anyway, I was assigned four months of basic training.

03:13 Speaker 1 Four months of basic training—that’s Stage B?

03:16 Speaker 2 Stage B. I had a high medical profile, fit for combat, and boruch Hashem, I was strong too. Anyway, I won’t tell the whole story of what basic training was like. But I had a machine gun on one side and water on my back. That was my assigned gear.

03:35 Speaker 1 Right.

03:37 Speaker 2 Why water? Because on the first march—the first march, in the morning, we got up with no weapon, with those stiff boots and socks.

03:48 Speaker 1 Where was basic training?

03:50 Speaker 2 Basic training was at Training Base 13. Training Base 13 is the military police. For guard duty, some kind of guard unit—it doesn’t matter. Anyway, the first march was twelve kilometers, in new boots. You can barely walk; you’re waddling like a duck. After about four kilometers: “Everybody stop. Take out your canteens and drink half a canteen.” I took out my canteen—glug—and finished the whole thing. I’m standing next to the platoon commander. He says, “I said to drink half a canteen. Why did you drink a whole one? Thirsty? Want some water?” “Yes.” I took out my second canteen and drank that too. “Still thirsty?” I say, “Yes.” So he gives me the half-full canteen he had. “Still thirsty?” I said, “Yes.” He gives me his full canteen. That means I drank three and a half canteens after four kilometers. He said, “Wait, wait. You’re not... You’ll carry your own water. You can manage that yourself.”

04:59 Speaker 3 A little bucket of twenty liters.

05:01 Speaker 2 What? Yes, twenty-five liters. With the... with the... what’s it called? The board with the carrying frame. That’s it. So of course, the first time they padded the whole thing right away so it wouldn’t rub my back raw. But that was it. That was it.

05:20 Speaker 3 Your first greeting from the army.

05:22 Speaker 2 A greeting from the army, yes. We got back. They’d taken us out in the early morning, while it was still dark. We got back in the morning, and everyone was lying there, all the injured men, the [unclear], the [unclear], the injured. Anyway, I take off my boots, and my sock is stuck to my foot. Huge blisters, fluid leaking out. I can’t walk. The squad commander sees me—everyone else was young; I was the old man there. “Tell me, Rabbi, what is it?” I said, “Look at my feet. Look at my feet!” I don’t know what he did. He gave me some kind of liquid and put it on. It burned terribly, burned me. But that was that. Now I was walking around in socks. He took me aside, brought a jeep, put my boots down and drove over them a few times. He softened them until they were like margarine. Those were my boots for years and years and years. I kept wearing them like that. Anyway, basic training was very hard, and meanwhile...

06:38 Speaker 3 What part of the country was that in?

06:40 Speaker 2 The Shomron.

06:42 Speaker 3 Ah.

06:43 Speaker 2 Navigation exercises, alone at night. Listen, it was very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very hard.

06:52 Speaker 3 They were preparing you to conquer Syria or something. What was the Syria part, exactly?

06:55 Speaker 2 They were preparing us to be combat soldiers. What do I know? Afterward they took us to be combat soldiers, combat soldiers. Rifleman 05. Then the First Lebanon War started. No, wait, sorry. After four months, you go to a course for whatever your assignment is. They sent us to Herzliya—sent me to Herzliya. There was an anti-aircraft school there, to train on the Vulcan.

07:26 Speaker 3 The twenty-millimeter Vulcan cannon.

07:28 Speaker 2 Yes. The Vulcan, yes, twenty millimeters. A six-barreled Vulcan. There was a course there too, about a month. That wasn’t simple either. And that was it. Then came the First Lebanon War. The First Lebanon War. Yours truly gets an emergency call-up for anti-aircraft duty. No, we were there; I was in the First Lebanon War. After they saw they didn’t need us for anti-aircraft duty, because the Vulcan was only being used against infantry, we took down floors—every floor above the ground floor, we took it down. But it was very, very...

08:08 Speaker 3 They used you to... they used you to bring down buildings.

08:12 Speaker 2 Yes. They took a whole battery and split it into units. Each unit—what do I mean by a unit? Each vehicle went somewhere else. One with the paratroopers, one with Golani, one with Givati. Each one—we were completely dispersed. We weren’t together in our armored personnel carriers. Each of us was... And of course, we were the kings of whichever battalion or company or platoon we joined. We were the kings. We drove first, clearing the way.

08:49 Speaker 3 Interesting.

08:51 Speaker 2 That was the sound of the...

08:53 Speaker 3 Very interesting.

08:55 Speaker 2 And, uh—what was I saying? Right. In the middle of the war, they saw that we weren’t being used for anti-aircraft duty anymore; they were only using us alongside infantry. So they sent a few of our vehicles and the younger men for infantry training.

09:18 Speaker 3 Ah.

09:18 Speaker 2 We had to jump off the vehicle and get down, jump off and get down, and... drop to the ground and fire grenades. Go through basic training all over again, what we’d already done, to refresh it so we could be infantry. Oaths. Anyway, we got through that too. I’m sitting there—just so you understand, there were no phones, and my wife had warned me that if I went to Lebanon, she didn’t know what she would do. She absolutely would not let me go to Lebanon. Even if I had to disobey an order [unclear], or turn up sick—anything but Lebanon, because the rumors were terrible. Missiles and...

09:59 Speaker 3 Wait, you’re talking about after the war, when all kinds of attacks began.

10:04 Speaker 2 Yes, I’m— but—one second, I’m talking about the war now.

10:09 Speaker 3 She didn’t agree to your going to the war itself?

10:12 Speaker 2 She didn’t agree to my being in mortal danger in the war itself. “You’re a father of children. You’re not going. They can’t send you...” Uh.

10:20 Speaker 3 Okay.

10:21 Speaker 2 Now, whenever someone got leave to go home from the— We didn’t have telephones, so we had to use a wired field radio, with that generator. Anyway, there were no phones. So whenever someone went on leave, he’d get to Afula or Kiryat Shmona or somewhere, with a list of phone numbers, and make a call: “Hello, uh, your husband’s fine, everything’s fine, we’re training.” And I wasn’t allowed to mention the word Lebanon. Afula. We’re in the Afula area, in the area, uh... No Lebanon. And of all people, my best friend let the word Lebanon slip. Oh, did I hear about it when I got home. Never mind. Anyway, I’m sitting—this is already toward the end of the war, though we’re still fighting because we’re still taking territory, but it’s getting close to the end. I’m sitting up on a jeep, one of those big ones, with the .30 or the .50, whatever was up there, and I hear over the radio: “Dickstein, are you listening?” Now, you’re not allowed to say names over the radio. So I give the driver a nudge: “Tell me, what’s this ‘Dickstein’ over the radio?” He says, “Yeah, okay, that’s you.” “Yes, yes, yes, I’m listening, I’m listening, I’m listening.” Mazel tov, you have a daughter. At a certain map coordinate, there’s someone waiting, a soldier who’ll replace you. There’s a—there weren’t safari trucks yet then. There’s a vehicle there that’ll take you to Kiryat Shmona. You have seventy-two hours’ leave. A daughter, and seventy-two hours. And I’ve got my webbing on, the grenades, the ropes, everything, everything, everything on me. I come off patrol, get into the vehicle and travel from Kiryat Shmona to Be’er Sheva. And I’m covered in dirt and black with soot. The whole way I’m hitchhiking; there’s no... Also

12:33 Speaker 2 Yeah, along the way, people—there are good people and bad people. Anyway.

12:38 Speaker 4 No shortage of those.

12:40 Speaker 2 Look, I’m standing at the entrance to Kiryat Shmona, near Fatima Gate [?], near Kiryat Shmona. I’m standing there for half an hour. You can’t believe it—nobody stops for me. People, are you out of your minds? I’m here guarding you, stationed up there in Ali and on Mount Hermon, and you won’t... Anyway, I stood in the middle of the road with my weapon. A car came along and I stood right in the middle of the road. If he didn’t stop, I was going to fire into the air; I didn’t care. So he stops. “What happened?” “You’re taking me now. Get me out of this hole.” “I’m going here, here, here...” I said, “Go here, here, here. Wherever you want after that, but you’re taking me away from here.” Incidentally, “here” was Haifa. I was so angry with him. Never mind, from Haifa I got to Be’er Sheva pretty quickly. At two in the morning I arrive at the maternity ward. I walk into the hospital looking like this. You know that old webbing, not the new kind? You’ve got grenades here and a rope hanging there, and everything, and the [unclear] hanging half off... and the weapon slung over me like this. I come in, and at the maternity ward there’s a buzzer; you press it and they buzz the door open. It’s a whole procedure in the middle of the night to get someone to answer. I grabbed it and—whoops—opened the door, took the whole...

14:11 Speaker 4 The whole mechanism.

14:13 Speaker 2 Everything. “What? Who are you?” I said, “It’s me.” Now, I hadn’t seen myself. I can only imagine what I must have looked like. “My name is Moshe Dickstein and my wife is here.” “Yes, yes, yes, yes, your wife had a daughter, everything’s fine. She’s in the—everything’s fine. Just go home and take a shower. She shouldn’t see you looking like that.” I went from there to the police station and checked in all my gear, all the webbing, everything. I only kept my weapon. I came home. My mother, of blessed memory, was at home with the children.

14:49 Speaker 4 Uh.

14:51 Speaker 2 And of course the children were asleep. I showered and had something to eat. In the morning, [unclear]... Come on, we’re going to see Mommy. I had two children, Mendy and Shalom. We’re going to see their mother, my wife. “Oh, you’re here, wonderful,” and... I gave my daughter her name afterward. When the seventy-two hours were up, it still hadn’t been a Monday or Thursday, so I gave her her name in the shul in Ali. I asked for an aliyah to the Torah because I’d had a daughter, and then I named her.

15:23 Speaker 4 In Ali. Above Beirut.

15:25 Speaker 2 Yes, yes, that’s where it is.

15:27 Speaker 4 Not everyone in the world knows where Ali is, Moshe.

15:31 Speaker 2 All right. On the Beirut–Damascus highway.

15:33 Speaker 4 Yes.

15:35 Speaker 2 That’s it. Anyway, that ended—the first emergency call-up ended. Two months later I got a second emergency call-up. And...

15:47 Speaker 4 What now?

15:48 Speaker 2 I was in air defense. All of that—training and holding the line, line after line, and the western sector, the western sector, more line duty, the western sector, line duty and air defense. Later we moved from the Vulcan to the 20-millimeter gun, and after the 20-millimeter gun, the Chaparral. All sorts of equipment... Later there was a 40-millimeter gun. We saw the guns once a year or once every two years, when we went to Sirkin. Do you know what Sirkin is? There was an emergency equipment depot there, where we’d grease and clean everything. That’s when we saw the artillery. And once every three years there was training—three days of training. We’d go to Ga’ash and fire a few shells out to sea with the guns. That was all the reserves were: line duty, line duty, line duty, line duty, army, army, army, army, army, army. That’s it. More children were born, and when the seventh child was born, they transferred me to Civil Defense. There wasn’t a Home Front Command then; it was Civil Defense.

16:48 Speaker 5 What year was that?

16:52 Speaker 2 That was a year before the first Gulf War.

16:57 Speaker 5 Ah, yes, because Home Front Command was established right after the—

17:04 Speaker 2 After the Gulf War.

17:05 Speaker 5 Yes.

17:06 Speaker 2 Now, what did they explain to me about Civil Defense? There was [unclear], though.

17:12 Speaker 5 Yes.

17:13 Speaker 2 Now they sent me—they gave me a sort of list: what did I want to do? This and this and this. It had the initials ZACH written there. What’s ZACH? I thought it meant armored vehicles, units, units. My head was still in...

17:31 Speaker 5 Combat.

17:32 Speaker 2 I thought it was some kind of—what?

17:34 Speaker 5 Combat.

17:34 Speaker 2 My head—yes, my head was still in the army. What did it turn out to be? What’s ZACH? Identifying the fallen. I was floored. Anyway, I went to a course at Training Base 13 in Tzrifin, and that was my welcome. I said, “What is this? What kind of thing is this?” I started asking what this ZACH was. So they told me ZACH meant identifying the fallen. All right, I said, if that’s how it is, it’s hashgacha pratis. So I took a month-long course in identifying the fallen and graduated as the outstanding trainee.

18:16 Speaker 5 I don’t believe it.

18:16 Speaker 2 Later on they ran a squad-commanders’ course in identifying the fallen. I did really, really well there. Anyway, they also sent me to teach, so I became an instructor too. And then came the first Gulf War. Another emergency call-up.