Meeting an Israeli Tank Commander, a Dallas Couple and a Parisian in an Israeli Laundromat

Tonight after a long bike ride, I walked to a laundromat on Jaffa Road, a mile and a half from my hotel. The laundromat had three washers, two dryers and, lucky for me, one other customer who could explain what I needed to do to operate the machines.  

That customer, Joshua, told me that I needed four 5-shekel coins for the washer and at least one 5-shekel coin plus 1-shekel coins for the dryer.  I went to a store around the corner and got Gatorade and the required coins and started my laundry.  

A few minutes later, a couple from Dallas, Tony and Patty, who were on a Church trip had showed up. I told them what they needed for the washer, the dryer and the soap dispenser. 

Joshua came back 20 minutes later and started folding his clothes from the dryer. I thanked him again for telling me how the laundry worked and told him about Tony and Patty. We talked about travel. I told him my first travel was with the Army to Germany as a tank commander.  Joshua was a tank commander in the Israeli Defense Forces IDF! He was on a Megach 6 tank. He served in the 90s, after the Patton tank I served on was retired from the active-duty IDF.

Israeli Megach 6

He told me he was famous in the IDF, not for being a tank commander but for falling from a helicopter.  In 1994 he volunteered to be a MEDEVAC dummy, loaded onto a Huey helicopter on a stretcher and flown to a field hospital on a training exercise. He was loaded on the middle stretcher on the left side of the aircraft, but not strapped in securely.  The helicopter took off, banked left 20 meters above the ground and Joshua fell--and bounced. He remembered the fall and bouncing on landing.

The helicopter landed. The other fake patients were unloaded and the doctor ran to what was now his real patient. Joshua had broken ribs and a collarbone and leg fractures, but no head injury. He could remember the whole incident in slow motion--including seeing hundreds of soldiers watching him fall and saying the Israeli version of "Oh Fuck!"  

The doctor treated the worst of his injuries on the ground and in Russian-accented Hebrew said, "I am sorry to tell you we must put you back on the helicopter."  Joshua made a full recovery.  

While we exchanged injury stories, a young woman named Nguyen (sounds like Wen) came in. We told her about the coins she needed.  She spoke French so I could tell her in French when she seemed confused about the English explanation.  

After Joshua left, I found out Nguyen lives in Paris. She came to Paris from Vietnam as a school girl and went to a school for girls set up by Napoleon in Saint Germain-en-Laye, a beautiful town west of Paris.  We talked about how beautiful the towns are west of Paris: Chatou and Rueil-Malmaison along with Saint Germain-en-Laye.  

Patty and Tony came back and told me about how they were traveling around Israel visiting kids in hospitals and seeing the sights. Nguyen helped a Chinese couple to get the right coins. I put my bike clothes in a bag and left for dinner.   

I can hardly wait to find a laundromat in Latvia! 

Meeting up with The Jewish Story Podcaster in Jerusalem

Rav Mike Feuer, host of The Jewish Story 

on The Land of Israel Network

This morning I walked to the Power Coffeeworks on Agripas St. in Jerusalem to meet Rav Mike Feuer, host of The Jewish Story a podcast on The Land of Israel Network.  I have been listening to the podcast since 2017, alternately listening the current episodes, now in the 1950s, and the episodes from the beginnings of the Jewish people.

In person, Mike looks just like his photo, upbeat and energetic and bubbling with what he is doing and learning and thinking.  Mike was born and raised in Cleveland. He moved to Israel 18 years ago after graduate studies. He teaches at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. He is also an organization consultant and makes dinner for his family every day--it's in his schedule. He and his wife have five kids between five and fifteen years old.

We talked about bad knees and running and family and the state of Israel and America.  We also talked about learning in the Jewish community, the limits of reason, and the how stories really define who we are. The Jewish Story  helped me to see the panorama of Jewish life over more than three millennia.

At my Reform Synagogue in Lancaster, I study Torah with Rabbi Paskoff. He is very committed to the Diaspora Jewish experience.  From Mike I hear the story from a man who left America for Israel and is raising a big family (by American standards) in a land that is a terrorist target.  Though White Nationalism in America is making Anti-Semitism worse every day.

We also talked about the political divide in Israel. At one point the owner of the coffee shop interrupted, pulling a book of a shelf near us then running upstairs to get two more.  He proudly said he had books from Rabbis with widely different opinions in his coffee shop.  He came to Israel from South Africa. When I first arrived and ordered coffee I could hear his outpost-of-the-former-empire accent, but could not tell whether it was South Africa or Australia.

Mike told me about a new book series he is writing on with co-author Dave Mason. They just published the second book in the Age of Prophecy  series. I got the first already on Kindle unlimited. It's called Lamp of Darkness. It is a series to bring the world of the Biblical Prophets to life for modern readers.  Mike grew up on science fiction and, in a way, ancient history is a galaxy far, far away.

After two hours we were still talking excitedly about life, the universe and everything, but I had to get to the bike shop and pick up my ride. What a wonderful morning.

28 Hours, 739 Miles, A Full Circle of Israel

Israel, from Eilat to Golan

On Friday morning, November 1, I got up at 4:30 am in Paris and began a long day of travel that ended on the beach in Eilat, Israel.  The usually fast train ride direct from Luxembourg station to the airport was twice as long because of track work, two trains, then a bus. 

But after a long walk and the extra security checks that come with flying to Israel, I boarded a full 737 for the 4-hour flight to Tel Aviv. I knew before I left America with a swollen knee, I would not be able to ride the 300-plus mile distance from Eilat to Golan, so I decided to see the whole country in a 739-mile circle that started as soon as I cleared customs and picked up my Hyundai rental car. 

By 4pm I was driving the first of 200-plus miles to the southernmost city in Israel: Eilat. I got a hotel two blocks from the beach that was the cheapest hotel in the city. All the signage in the hotel was in Russian and Hebrew. I might have been the only guest who was not from Russia.  The city was alive with party music till well past 4am, but I fell asleep early after the long travel day.

At 7 this morning I got up and walked to the beach. There was a roped off area with several swimmers doing "laps" swimming back and forth between the ropes marking the swimming area. As soon as I started swimming and tasted salt water, I realized this was the first time I swam in the ocean. I had played on the beach when I was a kid and with my kids, but I never actually swam.  It felt great. And the water was so clear I could watch the fish swimming underneath me. 

After the swim, I showered and drove north, all the way north to the Mount Bental observation post, part of one of the greatest tank battles in Israeli military history.  Just 160 Israeli tanks stopped 1,500 invading Syrian tanks. After the battle just seven Israeli tanks were still in operation and most of the crew members were killed or wounded.  The Syrians lost 900 tanks and suffered thousands of casualties. 

From that scene of violent battle, I drove back to the south to Tiberias on the Sea of Gallilee.  On the way to Tiberias on the northwest shore of the sea is the Mount of Beatitudes monastery, the site, according to tradition, of the Sermon on the Mount: a memorial to peace just an hour away from a memorial of armored warfare. 

On the drive north I traveled along the eastern border of Israel including the entire length of the Dead Sea. So going back to Jerusalem, I drove near the Mediterranean coast.  For the rest of the week I will take shorter rides near Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and places in between.   

The Beach in Eilat, Israel

Paris Training Race and West Along the Seine

Today I am back in Paris and riding longer distances getting ready for Israel. I rode 42 miles from the south side of Paris to the daily training race at l'hippodrome in the southwest of corner of Paris.

After an 8-mile warmup ride, I joined the with a small group going about 18mph. A half-lap later a faster group went by so I sped up and joined.  At the end of that lap, six guys went by going even faster, so I sprinted onto the end of that group that was averaging 22mph.

I stayed with them for three laps.  I was using Strava so riding with this fast group meant I set a half dozen personal records, and I moved up to 9,500th of 19,500 riders who set times on the two-mile oval.  I also moved up to 43rd among the 140 riders who set times in the 65-69 age group.

After five laps I turned off and made a tour of my favorite towns west of Paris. I rode up and over Mont Valerian through the town of Suresne. I used to stay there when I was in Paris on business 20 years ago because I could wake up early, roll down the hill and ride the daily training race.

After Suresne, I rolled down the long hill into Rueil-Malmaison. The company I worked for had an office there. It's a lovely town on a bend in the Seine.  After that I rode west along the Seine to Saint Germain-en-Laye. This town has an amazing park and Hotel d'Ville and is the setting for the novel Paris in the Present Tense by Mark Helprin--my favorite book by one of my favorite authors.

I rode back through Chatou and stopped for lunch a Maison Fournaise. I'll write a separate post about that.  Paris is a lovely pace to ride.

Visiting the Bastogne War Museum and the City

A Sherman tank hit on the right side. Inside the tank there are holes and gouges in every surface and part.  The crew was cut to pieces when their own armor became projectiles that ricocheted around the turret and hull.

The Bastogne War Museum honors the soldiers who fought the last Nazi offensive to a standstill in the cold woods of Belgium and refused to surrender when surrounded.  On this 75th Anniversary year dozens of celebrations will mark significant moments in the battle, beginning in November and continuing into 2020. 

A complete list of all the events and photos are on the museum website here.

For me the tank in the photo above reminded me of the fate of so many tank soldiers. When armor piercing shells blow a hole in armor plate, the armor itself becomes the shrapnel that ricochets inside the tank, killing and maiming the crew. 

M45 Quadmount antiaircraft gun used by the American Army with variants like this one used in a ground installation or mounted on half tracks.

 The museum has a large display on the history of The Holocaust.

This Sherman tank with its bright US Star on the side led me to wonder if the German gunner who hit the tank above used the star as an aiming point.

The commander of the surrounded soldiers of Bastogne was asked to surrender by the attacking Germans.  His reply was "Nuts!" He became famous for that reply and holding out against the attackers.  On his Wikipedia page that commander is identified as General Anthony Clement "Nuts" McAuliffe. 

Tanks Painted in Protest? As long as it's not My Tank!

 A Sherman tank in front of the Bastogne War Museum 

painted by a street artist to honor victims of violence.

In front of the museum in Bastogne is a temporary display of art from the fall of the Berlin Wall--30 pieces of wall painted to commemorate freedom. An M4 Sherman tank in front of the museum was also repainted to remember the victims of war and violence around the world.  The other tanks on display in the museum are, of course, painted as they were during their wartime service.  

Seeing a Sherman repainted by a street artist in front of a war museum was jarring.  Should a war machine be repainted as an anti-war protest?

  

Soviet tanks repainted in rainbow and pink as 

anti-war protests.

I realized I did not mind seeing former Soviet tanks painted pink or with love symbols. The Soviet Army was my Cold War enemy. They lost. So defacing their tanks was okay.

But seeing the Sherman tank painted in protest made me uncomfortable. That was an American tank. 

Then I remembered the mixed feelings I had just a week ago when I saw American-built M60 tanks, the tanks I served on in the Cold War, rolling into Syria.  More than 2,000 of the 3,000 tanks fielded by the Turkish Army are M60s.  The tank I served on was part of the attack against the allies Trump abandoned.  I did not like seeing what could have been my old tank rolling across the desert in service to a dictator. 

And then I thought of why tanks are painted in protest and as monuments and memorials.  Tanks are used as targets or monuments or left to rust because they can't be recycled. Armor plate costs more to metal than the recovered metal is worth. So tanks can't be melted down to make Mack trucks or Mercedes road cars. 

Tanks are war machines.  It would be best if unneeded war machines could be reused peacefully, but since they can't they will be monuments or palettes for protest for centuries to come. Armor plate a foot or more thick won't rust away anytime soon. 

Belleau Wood: Soldiers and Marines Stop a Huge German Attack in 1918

I visited Belleau Wood in northeastern France, site of a battle unlike most of the terrible trench warfare of World War I. In Belleau Wood, newly arrived American Soldiers and Marines reinforced the allied armies against a new German attack. Hundreds of thousands of German soldiers were transferred to the west as Russia left the war to fall into revolution.  

At Belleau Wood the Americans first stopped the German assault then counterattacked, never stopping to dig trenches or retreat from the attacking army.   At one point, a French commander told the Americans to fall back and dig trenches.  A Marine captain said, "Retreat? Hell no. We just got here."  

The story of the battle is available form many sources.  I visited to see how the world heals itself from the horror of war.  Belleau Wood is beautiful.  The rolling wheat fields that surround it where so many Marines died in a direct assault in June of 1918 were fallow, long past harvest at the end of October a century  later.  The wood itself, splintered by millions of bullets and tens of thousands of rounds of artillery, are peaceful, carpeted with leaves and showing no signs of rage and death.  

The cannons that ring the monument to the Marines in a clearing in the wood are black, somber and as peaceful as the woods around them. On this trip I will visit battle sites and Holocaust sites to see how life goes on after slaughter.  Belleau Wood and the rolling farm country around it could hardly be more different than the temporary terror of 1918.  Moments of heroism and long years of peace are both part of the human condition: both very real and a very real paradox that both exist in the same place--though not at the same time.