Leaving tomorrow morning from Ben Gurion Airport after an interesting, if exhausting, ten days of traveling all over in Israel. Today we did the Armored Corps memorial in Latrun, on the road to Jerusalem, one of the world’s largest displays of main battle tanks and other armored vehicles—as well as the names (and digital pictures) of the thousands of young tankers killed in Israel’s forced wars.
Then we went to the memorial for my host’s branch of the IDF, the Combat Engineers. It’s conveniently placed on the road they cut to Jerusalem (to bypass a Jordanian blockade of the main road) in the 1948 War of Independence. Their list of dead is much shorter, because contrary to civilian opinion it’s a lot safer to be in the open than cooped up inside a tank. If you’re interested in where else I’ve been, from Ben-Gurion’s desert home the afternoon of the day I arrived to yesterday’s passage of the rabbit warren streets of Jerusalem’s Old City, go here.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 