“There would be a field of thorns,” Rafi told her, “and you’d have to cross it. And to do so, your mind simply has to refuse to consider the pain. To think only about getting across, to make the pain irrelevant.” Or there was Hunger Week, during which the recruits were not allowed to eat or sleep for seven days. Each evening, the officers would make a barbeque next to the starving recruits. They would grill steaks, lay out a feast, and then they would say to the recruits, “Come, why don’t you eat with us?” And if someone gave in to his hunger and ate, that was the end: just like that, he’d fallen, and that same day he was sent back to the regular infantry. Once the officers gave out chocolate balls. “Just a small treat,” they said, “we’ll all eat them together,” and on the count of three the soldiers put them in their mouths and bit down on what turned out to be balls of goat shit.

Of course he had been ready to die for his country, Rafi told her. To believe that one was willing to die for one’s country was the bare minimum required to even enter into the selection process, though along the way there were many boys or men who discovered that they were too afraid to die or to suffer, who couldn’t dissolve their fear so that it seeped out like an odor from the pores of their skin, and the moment this was detected, they were immediately disqualified. It was not until later, after Rafi was discharged from the army and fell in love, that he came to see the grotesqueness and absurdity of dying for one’s country, of dying and also being willing to kill.

In the back seat, their boys became quiet: the oldest one, the only one with a phone, had taken it out, and the others were leaning in to see.

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