Don't Ask Me If I Love Read Online Free

he was thinking. He never talked much, not even to me.
    For some reason, my thoughts trailed back to things that had happened a few months before. And it only increased my restlessness.

Chapter Two
    IT was during the first weeks after I had been made a sergeant in Ram’s company. We were doing our routine job of holding the line on the Jordan, and it wasn’t too tough, when you had gotten used to it. It wasn’t anything like the Suez Canal, which made Ram feel guilty. But I didn’t share this attitude.
    Then, one night, one of our command cars hit a mine and four soldiers were killed.
    It happened in the early dawn. At the first pale light of sunrise, the command car was on its way, collecting the ambush groups. I sat by the pathway with the other four members of my squad. We were to be the last to be picked up, and we waited quite a while. We sat wrapped in our coats and blankets, shivering violently, and clinging to our weapons with numb, frozen fingers. I closed my eyes wearily and wished that the sun would rise faster. The freezing night was worse than the boiling day, especially when you had to lie motion-lessly on the ground for nine hours. I always wondered how soldiers managed to fall asleep on ambushes. That was a trick I could never pull. The rattling of my teeth would wake me up immediately.
    It was very quiet. The soldiers sat silently, rubbing their red eyes and yawning. I felt sorry for them. They still had two and a half years ahead of them.
    From far away came the dim humming of the motor. I opened my eyes and blinked at the bright rays of the sun. I looked at my watch: it was ten minutes to five.
    The soldiers got slowly to their feet and stretched themselves.
    â€œWhy does he drive so slowly? That son of a bitch,” one of them said sulkily.
    Then there was a huge, shattering explosion.
    I jumped to my feet. Somewhere someone screamed with pain.
    â€œIt’s the command car, isn’t it?” one of the soldiers asked stupidly.
    I didn’t answer, I was already running toward the sound as fast as I could. The others followed after me, breathing heavily from the effort and their excitement. The blast knocked the command car a few yards in the air and it landed vertically on the side of the path. When we got there we found ten people lying on the ground. Six of the unit’s soldiers were only wounded but the other four were dead.
    â€œOh, my God,” the soldier who had asked if it was the command car way back at the pick-up point said. “Oh my God.”
    â€œCome here and give me a hand,” I told him, watching his pale face and feeling my own stomach turn. “Don’t just stand there, goddammit.”
    Two days later, we crossed the river along with five more companies of paratroopers, and went into a small village called Saame. We blew it up. The village had been known to be the base of the terrorists. We captured three of them, and another nine were killed. We didn’t touch any civilians, but we blew up all their houses. By noon we were back on the West Bank. We had no dead, and no wounded. The same evening Ram and I went to Jerusalem. One of the soldiers who had been killed by the mine had gone to school with us, though he was three years younger.
    We took a twenty-four-hour leave to pay a call on his parents. Ram did not want to take the C.C.’s jeep and so we hitchhiked. We had started out late and weren’t doing too well. It was past eleven o’clock when we finally reached the old police station of Latrun.
    This was the place where one of the bloodiest and most fruitless battles of the war of independence had taken place. The Israelis had not managed to take it then, but they did in June 1967. Since that time it has been just an old gray building, standing harmlessly on the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
    Ram and I were quiet and unenthusiastic. This leave held no charm for us. We stood there on the side of the road, each