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Sunday, April 12, 2015

The Lion's Gate by Steven Pressfield


 
Lot of excellent histories have been written of the Six Day War, whereby Israel against seemingly overwhelming odds overcame the combined forces of Jordan, Syria and Egypt.  Steven Pressfield, author of one of my all-time favorite combat novels, his classic "Gates of Fire" about the Greeks at Thermopylae, has shown his ability to write about a specific war in terms of its universality.   He  takes a different approach in  The Lion's Gate. It is what he calls a "hybrid history," a narrative story drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews with veterans of the war, documentary research and the author's imagination. The whole book is composed of first-person accounts, most factual but a few invented. And what an account it is.  That account is not “balanced”. There are no Arab stories. The author wrote it that way to tell about war as it meant to a people. We know that beliefs come down to us from history which in the Middle East seems particularly dark and confused. And so is “justice” over thousands of years.

Belief in their mission never wavers among the Israelis. "If we lose, what our enemies will do to us will make Auschwitz look like summer camp," says Danny Matt, a paratroop commander under Ariel Sharon.

A former U.S. Marine, Pressfield knows war and he knows the men who fight wars. He admires the Israelis for their victory, but he does not discount the grim losses on both sides.

 Pressfield relates one soldier’s conclusion which surely rings true for all wars 

"We looked death in the eye but death did not look away," he says. "He took as many of us as he wanted."  I found this account most interesting.