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"They were a different lot back then..."
Josh Wander interviews Jerusalem Post art editor
and political cartoonist Meir Ronnen about his recollections
from the Six Day War
1967 - I rushed back from an assignment in the United States
to Jerusalem in order to join my unit of the Jerusalem Brigade.At
the secret Camp Stone in the Katamon section of the city.
I remember being stunned when we were issued with brand new
uniforms, brand new mess tins and Uzi sub machine guns. I
sensed then that war was imminent.
Sergeant Haim Barkai, who was a economics professor at Jerusalem's
Hebrew University (and later became the dean of the department)
asked my colonel to enlist three volunteers from his department
and the colonel, Nechemia Oz, then asked me to train and integrate
Barkai's fellow faculty members into the unit. I was told
to train them how to use every weapon we had, including the
.30 cal. Brownings. All of the trio were married with children.
A week or so later we heard the code word "sadin adom" or
"red sheet" on our radios and knew the war had begun. We were
bussed to Sanhedria, and after advancing through its cemetery,
entered a trench system below Ammunition Hill, a heavily fortified
Jordanian poisition. Before we could get settled, the Jordanians
opened fire. Within the first half an hour of the war, two
of my three trainees were killed.
The strange thing is that even today I cannot remember how
either of them looked. It is as if, as they were killed, my
memory of them was wiped out...
Early the next morning, near the end of the battle at Ammunition
Hill I rose out of my trench to watch some paratroopers placing
satchel charges on the last Jordanian bunker directly in front
of me. The Jordanians at once fired at me, their tracers passing
just above my head. I was impressed they were fighting us
to the bitter end. Later that morning, we buried the Jordanians
in one of their trenches. I took a black marker that I kept
in my pocket for drawing cartoons and wrote on the cover of
a Jordanian log book, "Defence Army of Israel - Here lie buried
17 brave Jordanian soldiers". I used a dead soldier's shoe
laces to attach it to a rifle and planted it in the ground
on top of the grave... King Hussein of Jordan was later to
write about this grave marker as a acknowledgment of the bravery
of his troops.
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