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At a temporary forward camp inside Syria, we encountered Chaim Topol —the movie star who played Tevye the Milkman in Fiddler on the Roof. As soon as the war started, Topol rushed home from London to volunteer his services. He was assigned to be an escort officer for visiting correspondents. The soldiers who crowded round the actor were not disappointed. "I took some correspondents to the Sinai the other day," he told the men, grinning. "When we got close to the shooting, one of them said that he had to get back to Tel Aviv because he had a deadline." The soldiers laughed.
Driving deeper into Syria, we passed abandoned concrete bunkers built into the sides of the hills by the Syrians and protected by blast walls nearly six inches thick. Strewn about were hundreds of empty cans of Danish beef and Lebanese cheese. A camouflaged truck, looking quite new, sat abandoned outside one of the bunkers. Our escort officer, a major in intelligence, searched the truck and came out with a manual printed in Russian.
The Israelis had converted one bunker into a first-aid station. The soldiers stood silently, saying nothing, not even smoking. Others were sprawled out as still as corpses. "They're not dead," one grizzled trooper explained, "just dead tired." He explained that the men had been in combat since the opening shots of the war. One soldier asked me to phone a message to his parents. On a piece of paper ripped from a brown grocery bag he scribbled: "Dear Mom and Dad. I am writing this between battles. Don't worry. I'm O.K. Everything is fine. Love." Another soldier handed me a list of names and phone numbers, asking me: "Please call and just say drishat shalom [regards] and tell them we're O.K."
Further south we came upon a row of Israeli Centurion tanks and one muddied Ford station wagon. A bald, roly-poly civilian, incongruously wearing a white shirt and dark trousers, was distributing egg sandwiches and cold drinks. He was a construction contractor from a town near Nazareth, too old to fight in the war. Every day he packed his station wagon with sandwiches and ten-gallon containers of soft drinks and drove to the front. Whenever he found a unit, he stopped and distributed his refreshments.
Later, near a battered fort, we spied the only flag we had seen all day, a shredded, blue and white Star of David. Commanding the fort was a young lieutenant from Tel Aviv. Leaning against a bunker, he reflected bitterly: "Back home they call this 'the Yom Kippur war' or 'the war of the Day of Judgment.' I call it 'the meaningless war.' There's no point to it. We are fighting it because the Arabs started it. We are just pounding each other to hell, causing a lot of casualties, breaking each other's necks for no earthly reason. The Arabs are not going to get back their territory this way. We could achieve that result by talking. But here we are fighting to kill each other—and we are going to kill a lot of them, the poor bastards."
From Karsten Prager in Damascus: