By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 22, 2006; A01

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.

"Ten days ago you might have been right here, having a picnic with friends," said Lt. Col. Olivier Rafowicz, 44, referring to the valley here, filled with lemon orchards, edged by stony hills and, on Friday, cloaked in a heavy haze of smoke. "The truth is they want this land."

Parents, neighbors and just regular people from nearby towns wend their way down the chalky road to this post bearing cakes and candies and a bit of encouragement for the troops, visits impossible to make in Gaza and the West Bank. Most of the soldiers here are conscripts more than a year into their service, now living in a row of old-school army tents along one dusty side of the camp.

"I'm here to give them strength to do this work," said Chaim Avraham, 57, who delivered cookies, candy and cigarettes at twilight. His 20-year-old son, Benny, was kidnapped and killed by Hezbollah gunmen in the disputed area of Shebaa Farms a few months after Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in May 2000, he said.

"They must finish the job with Hezbollah," he said.

Some of the soldiers were not overly sympathetic to the plight of Lebanese civilians ravaged by the Israeli assault that followed Hezbollah's July 12 raid. "They should complain to Hezbollah," said Pvt. Alex Gronov, 21.

Two weeks ago, Gronov, a year and a month into his military service, was firing artillery shells into Gaza to stop rocket fire along what is now Israel's second front. Those rockets, fired by the military wing of the radical Hamas movement that won the Palestinians' parliamentary elections in January, are smaller and less accurate than those in Hezbollah's arsenal. But many have fallen inside southern Israel since Hamas fighters captured an Israeli soldier in Hamas's own June 25 cross-border raid.

To Gronov, the two fronts belong in different categories.

"This is actually war, not a joke," said Gronov, a wiry 21-year-old from the southern city of Ashdod. "Hezbollah is far more serious, more dangerous. This is not a joke."

The five tank-born artillery cannons here aim just over the ridgeline less than a half-mile away, sending shells one after the other whistling into the distance. Rafowicz said the guns fire according to intelligence relayed from surveillance drones to a small armored vehicle, bristling with antennas, parked at the far side of the post. He said Hezbollah is firing rockets from the backs of trucks, meaning "the targets we are seeing have a life of one minute before they move on."

First Sgt. Gil Yoresh, 28, is not used to having targets so far away or so clearly defined. His time fighting in Gaza introduced him to a far more intimate battlefield -- warrens of refugee camps and cities, he said, that "we were right in the middle of."

"The people there hated us," said Yoresh, who is from the southern Israeli city of Kfar Arif. "This is a huge difference -- a clear enemy who is outside and I am here, in Israel. In Gaza, it was always hard to tell."

The roads along the northern border are largely abandoned, lined with charred patches and plumes of smoke from hundreds of Katyusha rocket strikes that landed in the scrub and olive orchards. A column of roughly 20 tanks and armored personnel carriers idled along the road near Avivim, the farming community closest to the toughest ground fighting in recent days.

Only two families remained there Friday. Israeli jets screeched overhead. From a hilltop a mile inside Lebanon, columns of dust and debris appeared, followed by hollow bangs.

"War," said Sgt. Yaniv Mizrahi, 20, a unit commander deployed inside Avivim who has also served in the West Bank city of Ramallah. "There the war is always. Here it is once every one or two years, but this is tough."

In the twilight, soldiers hustled to pallets bearing clusters of 155mm artillery shells, lugging ammunition like heavy footballs into the tank. To Pvt. Aviv Ben-Shimon, 19, the bang of the gun that at 30 yards feels like a punch to the chest is part of a war Israel has fought throughout its 58-year history.

"It is the same all the time," said Ben-Shimon, whose parents live in the West Bank settlement of Ariel. "They are against us."