eta_ta (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} eta_ta) wrote,@ 2007-02-10 10:39:00 |
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"$48 million isn't enough money. But it's a start."
3 clicks in my morning rounds (from Exit Zero, to Solomonia and then to Israel Matzav) brought me to the first-person account.
The event to the best of my recollection:
Monday evening, February 18th, Rachel and I were watching the news which was filled with reports of attacks on roads throughout the country. I had been planning to drive to Ashkelon to do shopping the following day but these reports, combined with bad case of cabin fever, put me on my high horse and I started declaiming on the Zionist Imparitive" of getting in the car and going for a ride. Thus do the stupid get into trouble. Rachel gave me a list of what to buy, I got into the car, lit my cigar, turned music up full blast, and set off. At this hour - it was now about 7 pm - there were no hitchhikers so I turned the music up really loud and puffed away like the Chatanugo ChuChu. (For those who care, the music was "Enter Spring" by the British composer Frank Bridge, one my obscure favorites.)
I was, I thought, alone on the road. It was dark and I was on the last lap through Indian Territory about a kilometer and a half from the Kissufim checkpost. My headlights picked up a car that seemed to have stopped at the side of the road. I thought this unusual, as no one stops on this road unless they are forced to by some technical problem. I slowed up as I approached the vehicle, intending to offer assistance if necessary. Just as I drew abreast of it, I was hit by a burst from a Kalashnokov AK47 machine gun. The shooter must have been hiding in darkness on the other side of the road. There were four bullets, two hit me in the hand and one in the leg.
(A mystery: the car has been repaired and returned to us. We were told that there were over a dozen bullet holes. I do not recall anything other than that burst of four. Either the car was used for target practice later or the Bullet Fairy came by spreading largesse without my being aware.) My car rolled on for a few yards and stopped. I assume I was in shock but I was both awake and aware. I was in excrutiating pain from my leg but felt nothing from my hand. I looked at what remains of my hand.
My first thought - and I apologize to my many Christian friends for who what I'm about to say may seem offensive - was the stigmata of Jesus Christ. The palm of my hand had been blown away. One could have put a tennis ball through it, though given my pention for exageration, I should have said a golf ball. I was looking at the back of my hand and so I could see that my thumb was in tact; my index finger was damaged, it looked like a hot dog that had been on the boil for too long with the skin flayed, but I knew it was alright because I was able to bend it. My middle and ring fingers were gone, my pinky appeared to be intact. Except for the pain in my leg, I felt nothing. I felt no emotion. Unlike 28 years earlier when I lost my right arm in the Yom Kippur War, and under went a series of emotional, even spiritual upheavals, which you may be unfortunate enough to read about in a future letter, I felt nothing. Not even fear. It was as if I were an observer, detached from what I was observing.
Unbenounced to me, an army jeep with an officer and a driver, had been a few hundred yards behind me. They raced to the scene, pulled up directly behind me, and came out of their vehicle. They ran towards me and one of them said "we'll protect you". There was a burst of gun fire and they both fell along side my car. At this point the shooter appeared from the darkness.
He was wearing the uniform of the Palestinian Police. He walked up to the two soldiers laying on the ground. He paused to look at me. We stared at each other. He had no expression on his face and he looked like Geraldo Rivera. He turned from me and proceeded to shoot each of the downed soldiers in the head. He then turned back to me. We stared at teach other again. He was standing in front of my car, caught in my headlights. Behind him there was a guard rail. We stared at each other. I suddenly was overcome with emotion. It was not fear, it was hatred. I never, ever, felt the degree of anger and hatred that I felt towards him at that moment. I wanted to kill him.
Kill is the wrong word. I wanted to pulverize him. I wanted to erase the son of a bitch from this earth.
(Shortly after leaving the hospital, at home, I woke up in the middle of the night and walked into the kitchen. I turned on the light and saw what appeared to be a large brown bug on the floor. I was suddenly taken back to the scene in the car and was again flooded with the emotion of hatred. I stepped on the bug and kept mashing it into the floor until Rachel came out and stopped me. I then realized that instead of a bug, it was a large chocolate chip and I had smeared it half across the kitchen floor. Poor Rachel.)
The car was idling. The shooter held a hand grenade in one hand and his AK-47 in the other. We stared at each other. With an elegance - I know it seems an absurd word, but it's the only one that fits - and nonchalance that would do credit to Saladin and his other forbearers, he flipped the hand grenade at me.
I watched it come towards me with total indifference. It hit the roof of the car directly above my head, made a dull noise, and rolled off the back of the car without exploding. He then raised the AK-47 and aimed at me. At this point in fury and frustration, I pressed my good foot on the gas pedal. The car shot forward directly at him.
He was surprised but agile and was able to move fast enough so that I did not get him dead center and mash him against the guard rail. Instead, I had merely given him a glancing blow, which knocked him off balance. He bounced off the guard rail, picked himself up and calmly walked to the side of the car. We stared at each other again.
I suspect that I had succeeded in really pissing him off because what he should have done was to go back into the darkness and wait for his next victim. Instead, he stood in the roadway, exposed, determined to finish me off. He raised the AK-47; I looked down the barrel. I felt no emotion.
There were shots. He was apparently so intent on me that he hadn't heard other jeeps driving up. A soldier had opened fire and wounded him and another grenade which he had, exploded on him, finishing him off. The soldier who wounded him was injured by the explosion and I am amazed that I, who was even closer than the soldier had been, received no further injury.
(This is the type of incredible coincidence which is common in Israel. The young soldier who shot him and saved my life, and who may lose an eye from the explosion, is connected to me in a strange way. He is a distant relative of my closest friend, Arthur Evner, who died some two years ago. The boy was at Arthur's funeral when I delivered the eulogy.)
Things now get foggy. There was more shooting, though I don't know at what. I suspect soldiers were simply shooting into darkness on both sides of the road in case there might have been a second and third shooter. Four soldiers, in full battle dress, crouched near my car assuring me that they would protect me. Except for the pain in my leg, which was really excruciating, all I felt was embarrassment that these children were putting themselves on the line for me. An army medic approached me, started to bandage my hand and then my leg. Some time passed, I have no idea how much time.
Civilian faces appeared out of the darkness and stared at me. Some of them were neighbors and I said "Don't tell Rachel. I will tell her." I was approached again by a medic and told him that I was fine and that he should busy himself with the other wounded. It was not until a day or two later that I learned that the car at the side of the road contained the body of a beautiful 30 year-old mother of two. (I have her picture in my room and I say without irony or bullshit, that if given the choice I would not have hesitated to trade places with her.)
A new face appeared telling me that I was to be put on a stretcher and carried to an ambulance a short distance away. I said that I would walk to the ambulance. This was incredibly stupid on my part as I had no idea how serious my leg injury was but I did it, leaning on two soldiers who half supported me to the ambulance.
Once in the ambulance my cellphone rang. It was Rachel, she had heard that there had been a shooting incident and that there were dead and wounded and knew that I was on the road. I told her that I had been wounded but it wasn't serious and that I was already in an ambulance on the way to Soroka Hospital in Be'er Sheva. Apparently my voice was still very strong and she was reassured. In any case, and this is worthy of volumes in itself, Rachel is the heroine of the whole story. She had gone through it 28 years before and has now gone through it again, and has been magnificant throughout.
There is so much more that I have to write, but I am exhausted now and my typists' fingers are shorter by at least half an inch. So I just want to close with one last incident, which brings me to the hospital.
Throughout this entire event, I never once felt fear until I was in the ambulance to Soroka. The medic sitting next to me spent the entire time - 40 or 50 minutes - shrieking at the top of his voice at the driver "You mainiac !!! Be careful, you're about to hit that car, you're about to this, you're about to that."
I was seized with such a fright that I would have survived the shooting only to die in a crash on the way to the hospital that I kept repeating "Sh'ma Yisroel" over and over until the ambulance finally disgorged me at the hospital entrance.
Good Night. G-d bless you all.
Moshe Saperstein, Neve Dekalim
As Carl in Jerusalem said,
"Moshe Saperstein is one tough dude. $48 million isn't enough money. But it's a start."
3 clicks in my morning rounds (from Exit Zero, to Solomonia and then to Israel Matzav) brought me to the first-person account.
The event to the best of my recollection:
Monday evening, February 18th, Rachel and I were watching the news which was filled with reports of attacks on roads throughout the country. I had been planning to drive to Ashkelon to do shopping the following day but these reports, combined with bad case of cabin fever, put me on my high horse and I started declaiming on the Zionist Imparitive" of getting in the car and going for a ride. Thus do the stupid get into trouble. Rachel gave me a list of what to buy, I got into the car, lit my cigar, turned music up full blast, and set off. At this hour - it was now about 7 pm - there were no hitchhikers so I turned the music up really loud and puffed away like the Chatanugo ChuChu. (For those who care, the music was "Enter Spring" by the British composer Frank Bridge, one my obscure favorites.)
I was, I thought, alone on the road. It was dark and I was on the last lap through Indian Territory about a kilometer and a half from the Kissufim checkpost. My headlights picked up a car that seemed to have stopped at the side of the road. I thought this unusual, as no one stops on this road unless they are forced to by some technical problem. I slowed up as I approached the vehicle, intending to offer assistance if necessary. Just as I drew abreast of it, I was hit by a burst from a Kalashnokov AK47 machine gun. The shooter must have been hiding in darkness on the other side of the road. There were four bullets, two hit me in the hand and one in the leg.
(A mystery: the car has been repaired and returned to us. We were told that there were over a dozen bullet holes. I do not recall anything other than that burst of four. Either the car was used for target practice later or the Bullet Fairy came by spreading largesse without my being aware.) My car rolled on for a few yards and stopped. I assume I was in shock but I was both awake and aware. I was in excrutiating pain from my leg but felt nothing from my hand. I looked at what remains of my hand.
My first thought - and I apologize to my many Christian friends for who what I'm about to say may seem offensive - was the stigmata of Jesus Christ. The palm of my hand had been blown away. One could have put a tennis ball through it, though given my pention for exageration, I should have said a golf ball. I was looking at the back of my hand and so I could see that my thumb was in tact; my index finger was damaged, it looked like a hot dog that had been on the boil for too long with the skin flayed, but I knew it was alright because I was able to bend it. My middle and ring fingers were gone, my pinky appeared to be intact. Except for the pain in my leg, I felt nothing. I felt no emotion. Unlike 28 years earlier when I lost my right arm in the Yom Kippur War, and under went a series of emotional, even spiritual upheavals, which you may be unfortunate enough to read about in a future letter, I felt nothing. Not even fear. It was as if I were an observer, detached from what I was observing.
Unbenounced to me, an army jeep with an officer and a driver, had been a few hundred yards behind me. They raced to the scene, pulled up directly behind me, and came out of their vehicle. They ran towards me and one of them said "we'll protect you". There was a burst of gun fire and they both fell along side my car. At this point the shooter appeared from the darkness.
He was wearing the uniform of the Palestinian Police. He walked up to the two soldiers laying on the ground. He paused to look at me. We stared at each other. He had no expression on his face and he looked like Geraldo Rivera. He turned from me and proceeded to shoot each of the downed soldiers in the head. He then turned back to me. We stared at teach other again. He was standing in front of my car, caught in my headlights. Behind him there was a guard rail. We stared at each other. I suddenly was overcome with emotion. It was not fear, it was hatred. I never, ever, felt the degree of anger and hatred that I felt towards him at that moment. I wanted to kill him.
Kill is the wrong word. I wanted to pulverize him. I wanted to erase the son of a bitch from this earth.
(Shortly after leaving the hospital, at home, I woke up in the middle of the night and walked into the kitchen. I turned on the light and saw what appeared to be a large brown bug on the floor. I was suddenly taken back to the scene in the car and was again flooded with the emotion of hatred. I stepped on the bug and kept mashing it into the floor until Rachel came out and stopped me. I then realized that instead of a bug, it was a large chocolate chip and I had smeared it half across the kitchen floor. Poor Rachel.)
The car was idling. The shooter held a hand grenade in one hand and his AK-47 in the other. We stared at each other. With an elegance - I know it seems an absurd word, but it's the only one that fits - and nonchalance that would do credit to Saladin and his other forbearers, he flipped the hand grenade at me.
I watched it come towards me with total indifference. It hit the roof of the car directly above my head, made a dull noise, and rolled off the back of the car without exploding. He then raised the AK-47 and aimed at me. At this point in fury and frustration, I pressed my good foot on the gas pedal. The car shot forward directly at him.
He was surprised but agile and was able to move fast enough so that I did not get him dead center and mash him against the guard rail. Instead, I had merely given him a glancing blow, which knocked him off balance. He bounced off the guard rail, picked himself up and calmly walked to the side of the car. We stared at each other again.
I suspect that I had succeeded in really pissing him off because what he should have done was to go back into the darkness and wait for his next victim. Instead, he stood in the roadway, exposed, determined to finish me off. He raised the AK-47; I looked down the barrel. I felt no emotion.
There were shots. He was apparently so intent on me that he hadn't heard other jeeps driving up. A soldier had opened fire and wounded him and another grenade which he had, exploded on him, finishing him off. The soldier who wounded him was injured by the explosion and I am amazed that I, who was even closer than the soldier had been, received no further injury.
(This is the type of incredible coincidence which is common in Israel. The young soldier who shot him and saved my life, and who may lose an eye from the explosion, is connected to me in a strange way. He is a distant relative of my closest friend, Arthur Evner, who died some two years ago. The boy was at Arthur's funeral when I delivered the eulogy.)
Things now get foggy. There was more shooting, though I don't know at what. I suspect soldiers were simply shooting into darkness on both sides of the road in case there might have been a second and third shooter. Four soldiers, in full battle dress, crouched near my car assuring me that they would protect me. Except for the pain in my leg, which was really excruciating, all I felt was embarrassment that these children were putting themselves on the line for me. An army medic approached me, started to bandage my hand and then my leg. Some time passed, I have no idea how much time.
Civilian faces appeared out of the darkness and stared at me. Some of them were neighbors and I said "Don't tell Rachel. I will tell her." I was approached again by a medic and told him that I was fine and that he should busy himself with the other wounded. It was not until a day or two later that I learned that the car at the side of the road contained the body of a beautiful 30 year-old mother of two. (I have her picture in my room and I say without irony or bullshit, that if given the choice I would not have hesitated to trade places with her.)
A new face appeared telling me that I was to be put on a stretcher and carried to an ambulance a short distance away. I said that I would walk to the ambulance. This was incredibly stupid on my part as I had no idea how serious my leg injury was but I did it, leaning on two soldiers who half supported me to the ambulance.
Once in the ambulance my cellphone rang. It was Rachel, she had heard that there had been a shooting incident and that there were dead and wounded and knew that I was on the road. I told her that I had been wounded but it wasn't serious and that I was already in an ambulance on the way to Soroka Hospital in Be'er Sheva. Apparently my voice was still very strong and she was reassured. In any case, and this is worthy of volumes in itself, Rachel is the heroine of the whole story. She had gone through it 28 years before and has now gone through it again, and has been magnificant throughout.
There is so much more that I have to write, but I am exhausted now and my typists' fingers are shorter by at least half an inch. So I just want to close with one last incident, which brings me to the hospital.
Throughout this entire event, I never once felt fear until I was in the ambulance to Soroka. The medic sitting next to me spent the entire time - 40 or 50 minutes - shrieking at the top of his voice at the driver "You mainiac !!! Be careful, you're about to hit that car, you're about to this, you're about to that."
I was seized with such a fright that I would have survived the shooting only to die in a crash on the way to the hospital that I kept repeating "Sh'ma Yisroel" over and over until the ambulance finally disgorged me at the hospital entrance.
Good Night. G-d bless you all.
Moshe Saperstein, Neve Dekalim
As Carl in Jerusalem said,
"Moshe Saperstein is one tough dude. $48 million isn't enough money. But it's a start."
