Fear and Valor in Six Days: An Israeli Soldier's Testemonial in Perspective

by Yehuda Reves

Through the viewfinder of a bazooka, this book offers a critical view of fear, valor and pride, death and love, friendship and hatred, reality and mystical dreams, faith and the secular, as well, the end and the beginning.

Collected here are manuscripts, stories and thoughts written intermittently over a period of more than forty years in the diary of a fighter during and after the battles of the Six-Day War. Portrayed here is a bitter, cruel reality; how soldiers kill, are wounded and die on the battlefield. Here are described facts intermixed with imagination and dreams; a description that illustrates the nature of male society in the Israeli army with its blend of cunning, coarseness and innocence.

This book was written on the battlefront of North Samaria; and in the northern Golan Heights. The author served in the armored troops, as a commander of a tank company numbering six vehicles. All these manuscripts were stuck like bullets in the barrel of a gun since the war ended before they were ready to be collected in one volume that now includes the life experience and perspective of additional forty-plus years.

Yehuda Reves is a forester who, throughout his entire life, has observed people, trees, shrubs, the soil, and inanimate rocks with unaffected wonder. He was responsible for collecting seeds and for the propagation and planting of trees on behalf of The Israeli Forestry Department. Today, he travels and works in the reproduction of wild Mediterranean plants.

The author served in the Israeli reserve army as a junior officer for 32 years and has fought in four wars. He is married and has two daughters and nine grandchildren.

190 pages,14.5 x 21 cm