March, 2026

Another war? Nothing new.

In 1972 I lay in the mud in pouring rain at 2 a.m., on night patrol along the Jordanian border, as rockets fell on nearby Ashdot Yaakov.

I was a soldier in 1973 as well.

Since then. I have spent more than a little time in shelters—safe rooms meant to protect us from Saddam Hussein’s poison gas—and heaven knows how many times I have descended into the shelter in my home in the Sharon. At least two hundred times.

Such is life on the brink of chaos.

But sometimes the world slips from the brink into chaos itself.

I was driving north to Yossi’s funeral. Yossi—a fisherman and my late wife’s first cousin—had died after a two-week illness. He was about my age.

A doctor had just called me on my car phone and told me to get a scan of my urinary tract (it later came out fine). Yossi had just died. My head was spinning. I had seen him only three days earlier.

Still—the brink of chaos.

I turned off the radio and the phone so I could focus on the road.

Suddenly, I saw several cars pull onto the shoulder all at once. I kept going. A few hundred meters later I reached a bridge and saw people lying flat on the ground, hands over their heads. Two men were peeing on the side of the road.

Then it came.

Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom. Chaos.

The sound was deafening. My car shook.

I stopped and looked up. Now I understood: Iranian missiles incoming, and Israel’s air defenses intercepting them overhead.

The noise was incredible.

I eventually reached the funeral. I did not hear a single word of the eulogies. All I could think about was how sad it was that Yossi’s brothers and his wife could not come to the burial—there were no flights to Israel.

And the boom, boom, boom—still piercing my ears forty minutes later, as Yossi’s body was lowered quickly into the ground and the crowd dispersed.

T. S. Eliot wrote in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

“and in short, I was afraid.”