Aaron Wolf's "A Purity of Arms": A Memoir of an American in the Israeli Army

Aaron Wolf's memoir, A Purity of Arms: An American in the Israeli Army, published in 1989, makes the reader feel the sweat and chill and exhaustion of training in the Israel Defense Force. The author, who was raised in San Francisco, had been in Israel (when he was 13) during the 1973 war. Thirteen years later he joined the IDF. By the end of 18 months training, he was a sergeant certified as a paratrooper.

Freezing while patrolling the border with Lebanon at night, he had no qualms at shooting down anyone trying to sneak across the border. Drawing on letters he wrote to his parents, Wolf shows a fit young man who is proud of his skills as a marksman and his ability to withstand the elements, sleep deprivation, dehydration, and very long marches... and to enjoy leaves that included gorging on Snicker bars and catching up on Spiderman's exploits.

A sense of his style is afforded by this analysis of the prostrating heat of the Judaean desert:

"You drink all the time because there's the constant threat of dehydration, but there's no way to drink yourself cool. I drink off one canteen and, boom, I'm on the second. I feel the water dissipating even as it goes through my throat. Dissipating so it never seems to reach my stomach. It goes out through my pores, evaporation so quickly it creates a new form of torment. I get a salt crust on my fatigues that immediately sets my skin to itching and keeps the air from circulating through my clothes."

Toward the end of his service, he was posted to Gaza, where the "purity of arms" became very difficult to maintain. The Intifada pitted soldiers with rifles against pre-teens with stones. He and his comrades ( individuated by Wolf well and with economy of means) were "neither trained nor equipped to deal with situations like this. We're combat soldiers trained for combat." The soldiers are ashamed, disoriented, frustrated, "mad at the Palestinians for throwing [baseball-sized] rocks, for swearing at us, for making us arrest them." He also writes of frustration at "the press for fanning the flames.... As soon as they show up, the violence escalates."

The last part of his book is all-too-relevant to US soldiers trained for combat but having to deal with enemies who are indistinguishable from civilians. Frustration leads to brutality, which feeds the hatred of the occupied, which feeds insurgency in a vicious cycle.

Since the 1967 conquests, many Israelis have felt the soul of the Jewish state was compromised by occupying lands with overwhelmingly Arab populations. In implicit contrast to those drafted to fight in Vietnam, he writes that "plenty of people, including some of the soldiers themselves, have their doubt about the morality of our presence there. But the doubts--even the anger--are never expressed as mistreatment of the guys who have to be there." Wolf write ironically of the incessant post-hoc analysis of everything they do, and of the differences between IDF soldiers of different background: "The Americans are a pragmatic bunch. We get up promptly but not enthusiastically. We work quietly and methodically and are always finished just in time for inspection. The Europeans spend the morning bickering and are sometimes ready on time. As for the South American--they clearly don't want to get up." How he got from a hill above the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco, where both his parents had studied "turn-on, drop-out" hippies to the IDF and a determination not to have a beard makes for an interesting tale. Restless in college, Wolf joined the Merchant Marine before moving to Israel (BTW, he went into studying water management after his stint of active duty in the IDF).

Wolf has an eye for the telling detail and is a compelling story-teller. His account of being assigned to keep the peace in a demonstration of angry ultra-nationalist Jews in an entirely Arab neighborhood of Jerusalem is particularly gripping. It includes a terrified young Arab girl pulled out of the street by Wolf's patrol and delivered to an aunt on the same side of the street. His account of his first jump from a plane is similarly crisp, reminding me of the crystalline prose of pilot/author James Salter (The Hunters, Burning the Days).

IDF training is especially intense, and A Purity of Arms provides a fascinating account of what it is like and what a smart and committed young man born and raised in the US undergoes and feels during the intensive training, and about then having to try to curtail violence while policing a deeply resentful occupied population.

The book has been around for nearly two decades (and, unfortunately, is out of print). I feel that I picked it up when I was ready to try to understand the molding of IDF soldiers, and that it is at least as relevant now as when it was published. I am always interested in thoughtful accounts of cross-cultural encounters, which is one of the strands of Wolf's memoir.

A Purity of Arms is a great and all-too-timely book. Wolf returned to the US, earned a PhD at the University of Wisconsin and is now a professor of geosciences at Oregon State University, specializing in conflicts over water.