Reluctant Warriors by Nathan Szajnberg
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Price: $27.95
Reluctant Warriors explores the lives of elite Israeli citizen-soldiers in action. They speak of their inner lives, how they became such a select group of fighters, what it is like to face an enemy, including the ambivalence, hesitance, as well as certitude about protecting their families, most of whom live within kilometers of the battlefield that is Israel. All these men chose to leave active military service, but continued as officers in the reserves. The author, a psychoanalyst, interviewed these soldiers over the years of the Second Intifada and Lebanese War. Each one had some family member or friend killed. They speak and want to be heard. The real action for these men is their inner reactions: fears and hopes and memories that will not rest.
A searing account of the pre-army lives and army experiences of . . . mostly kibbutz-raised Israeli soldiers, recounted with a tender love and a disciplined discernment that brings the reader to a distinctive combination of passionate identifications and objective understandings of the unique transformations from adolescence into a matured adulthood that marks the Israeli . . . experience.
– Robert S. Wallerstein, M.D.
Emeritus Professor, UCSF and former Chair of Psychiatry, UCSF.
Former President of the International Psychoanalytic Association.