For Troops, A Sense of Moral Clarity

Israeli soldiers cover their ears as an artillery unit fires shells toward southern Lebanon from a position in northern Israel. (By David Guttenfelder -- Associated Press)

NEAR THE ISRAEL-LEBANON BORDER, July 21 -- Lt. Col. Yosef Vilnai is a big, bluff man from Israel's coastal plain who was called up for reserve duty last week as the army he joined four decades ago went to war in Lebanon. His elation in fighting this new war, one with a clear front line and firm public backing, was evident Friday on a fallow field here that has become a makeshift base for an Israeli artillery battery.

Vilnai, 62, served as a tank platoon commander in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and he participated in hard fights along the Beirut-Damascus Highway. His army-reserve service took him into the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, troublesome places for a soldier who votes for the dovish Meretz party.

Here at the booming artillery post, less than a half-mile from the border, he delivered sweets, cigarettes and magazines to the young conscripts firing the big guns. He carried the torn, sweat-drenched cap of a conscript from an armored unit up the road -- symbolic proof, he said, of a passion in the ranks that has been elusive in the recent past. "Even for me, I feel this is a war that is right," Vilnai said.

After years of fighting a morally murky war in the occupied Palestinian territories, Israel's army is suddenly engaging a more obvious enemy.

The mix of veterans and conscripts serving here, behind a hill that shears away to Lebanon, say the Hezbollah raid into Israel that captured two soldiers and the subsequent rocket attacks by the radical Shiite militia on surrounding cities have made it clear that Israel faces formidable threats, removing the political qualms some of the veteran soldiers felt serving in the West Bank and Gaza.

Between bangs, there is backgammon, guitar playing and spirited talk of a war that feels to many here like the storied ones their fathers fought in 1967 and 1973 -- fights against outside threats, less encumbered by the painful issues raised by an occupation of Palestinian territories that proved politically divisive and ethically troubling to the many Israelis who worried about what ruling over Palestinians was doing to their own state.

Israel's 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended with a unilateral Israeli pullout six years ago, was also a searing experience for many of the soldiers now serving as senior officers. But judging by conversations at this artillery post, the nature of Hezbollah's strikes inside Israel -- territory the group's leader, Hasan Nasrallah, calls "occupied Palestine" -- has framed for conscripts and veterans alike a more defined enemy and front.

"In the intifada, we were fighting over land," said Sgt. Igal Nudelman, 22, from the Israeli city of Rishon Letzion. "Here we are fighting for our country."

Nudelman, bespectacled with a thin beard, is nearing the end of his three years of mandatory military service, a powerful common national experience that has helped assimilate generations of immigrants from throughout the Jewish diaspora.

Until fighting broke out 10 days ago, he spent his time on a base near Tel Aviv, teaching soldiers the technical specifications of the tanks firing round after round behind him. A thick column of black smoke billowed from the Hula Valley a mile from his post, the result of a Hezbollah rocket strike.

But Nudelman had other worries -- his mother, for one, who he said panicked over his northern deployment because "she told me I've been in the center of the country the whole time and I don't know how to fight."

"We all talk about this, we live it," said Nudelman, who intends to study economics after the service. "And we want it to end as soon as possible, either through diplomacy or this," as the guns banged behind him.