The winner of the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize for The Aleppo Codex returns with the gripping true story of a band of young Israeli soldiers, including the author, who in the 1990s were charged with holding an outpost inside Lebanon known as the Pumpkin.
Using humor, pop culture, and even musical references, Matti Friedman recreates the wartime experience in a narrative that is part memoir, part journalism, part military history. The years in question were pivotal ones, seeing the perfection of a type of warfare that would eventually be exported to Afghanistan and Iraq and has come to seem like the only kind of warfare in existence - wars in which there is never any clear victory, but not quite enough lives are lost to rally the country against it.
It was one small hilltop in a small, unnamed war in the late 1990s, but it would send out ripples still felt worldwide today. The hill, in Lebanon, was called the Pumpkin; “Flowers” was the military code word for “casualties.” Award-winning writer Friedman re-creates the harrowing experience of a band of young soldiers—the author among them—charged with holding this remote outpost, a task that changed them forever and foreshadowed the unwinnable conflicts the United States would soon confront in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
