Jericho Vicinity, January 1991
Our base was situated in the northern Judean Desert on the outskirts of Jericho, equidistant from the refugee towns and the Jericho city center, and in relative proximity to the north tip of the Dead Sea, which means we were over three hundred meters below sea level, or more than two hundred meters lower than Death Valley. It was January 1991. During the day the blinding sun brought needed warmth to hard-baked earth and the ragged-edged canyons scorched white. At night the temperatures plummeted.
This was my annual military reserve tour of duty in the Israel Defense Forces, called miluim in Hebrew. We were deployed for thirty-three days, concentrated on the Allenby Bridge, a bridge that crosses over the Jordan River between Jordan and the West Bank territory occupied by Israel. Since December 1990, the checkpoint had been teeming with Palestinians and other refugees racing with time to flee Iraq and Jordan ahead of the imminent start of Operation Desert Storm.
We were about two weeks into the reserve tour, and at first there was nothing notably different about this Thursday night. We were inside a one-story, narrow army mobile shack lined with bunk beds that had been trucked into the base along with thirty others and plopped down on a stretch of flat dusty ground. We were going through the motions we had quickly settled into after the first few days on the base.
Parsi was lying on his cot in his sweats and a tee shirt smoking a...
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