They crossed the border into Lebanon two days ago. ‘I wanna go home, I wanna go home!’ Nathan, born and raised in Buffalo, New York, from where he runs a mildly succesful webshop with kosher consumption items, is crying. He’s rolling around in the grass. His commander is staring at a map. The lieutenant has received an order to turn back and enter a village. This morning they were shot at there and one guy, Josh, a Jewish cowboy from Montana, was hit in the right butt cheek. He had to be evacuated. One of the men said: ‘He’s done riding horses with that tuckus.’They never saw who shot at them. ‘We’re fighting ghosts’, cries Nathan. ‘Why can’t we just bomb them? What is the point of this? What is the point of this? I wanna go home! Bomb them!’

Jesup is wondering why their unit leader isn’t doing anything about Nathan’s breakdown and Jesup doesn’t feel like doing anything about it either, because he is secretly enjoying how their unit is breaking down. Not that he wants the war to fail, but he realizes that his side has to be humiliated first, before the leadership finally overhauls the Israeli army and whips it into an effective fighting force. To get something new and better, the old has to crumble first. He also gets a lot of Schadenfreude from seeing his lieutenant make a complete fool of himself. He can’t stand the guy, he brags too much about how rich and succesful he is in civilian life.

Jesup says: ‘So let’s just go back down, back to the village, orders are orders.’ The lieutenant looks at him in horror. ‘You think we should do that?’

‘It’s an order. We’re soldiers. That’s what soldiers do, we follow orders.’

‘Yes, but you were there. Someone shot at us.’

‘Yeah, soldiers tend to get shot at. Especially when they walk into someone’s else’s territorial pissings.’

The lieutenant looks back at the map.

‘Staring at that map isn’t going to change things.’

‘Maybe we should be doing something else.’

‘Like what?’

‘Maybe they have some cave where they are keeping their weapons, outside of the village. Maybe we should find that.’

‘Oh jolly’, says Jesup. ‘You’ve really thought it through.’

Over the radio they get asked what the hold-up is.

They hear some rustling in some bushes, and 8 guys who had until now been sitting in the grass watching their buddy Nathan go bonkers, jump up and unload their automatic weapons at some big rocks.

Jesup yells directly into the lieutenant’s ear: ‘Are you going to stop them? They’re alerting the enemy to our presence and wasting ammo!’

The lieutenant does nothing. Strange, cause you would expect a manager at Wells Fargo, based in Sacramento, California, to be faster at decision making.

Eventually the men have to reload.

A little bunny hops from behind the rocks and slips through the legs of one of the men.

One of them says: ‘Careful, it could be booby-trapped!’

Jesup sighs and asks: ‘You think Hezbollah straps bombs to rabbits?’

‘They are terrorists. They will do anything to kill us.’

‘Maybe they poisoned the bunny and his droppings are full of that poison now and we are right now breathing in poisonous vapors from the bunny’s droppings’, says Jesup.

The soldier puts a scarf over his face.

Jesup rolls his eyes.

‘So lieutenant, are we going back to the ville?’

The lieutenant looks at Nathan.

He is kneeling in front of the lieutenant, his hands held up in prayer. ‘Can you call in air strikes on the village? Please, lieutenant. Please, just waste them all.’

‘Nathan, I also don’t know why our guys aren’t bombing it. But my hands our tied, the orders are clear, we have to go back down there and sweep the area.’

‘You mean door by door?  Door by door? What if they are there?’, cries Nathan.

He goes back to rolling in the grass.

Jesup is flabbergasted. Nathan should obviously be sent back. He’s demoralizing everyone here.

‘Lieutenant, maybe we shouldn’t keep Nathan here.’

‘Jesup, we have to be supportive. We are a democracy, we take care of our own.’

‘Well yes, that’s why am saying he needs help. We should send him back.’

‘He just needs to let it out. We’ve all been very stressed lately.’

‘If we are a democracy, let’s vote on it. Who thinks we should send Nathan back? By show of hands?’

The others don’t react. All they do is stare at Nathan who has stopped rolling, but is now lying on his back and biting his own hand and making odd grunting sounds.

Jesup shakes his head.

‘Ok, let’s move into the ville then.’

‘Am your commanding officer and you are gaslighting me.’

‘What? How am I gaslighting you?’

‘You’re trying to take over.’

‘That’s not even what gaslighting means.’

‘It is. We had a workshop about it. Wells Fargo has an excellent training programme.’

‘This is ridiculous.’

Jesup takes off his helmet and sits down.

They again get the order that they should go back into the ville.

The lieutenant lets their command post know that they can’t move on account of suspected fierce enemy resistance.

He gets asked to be more specific.

‘Enemy present in high numbers. Suspect some kind of trap. Also animals are behaving strangely.’

A major, who was a junior commander back in the invasion of 2006, yells that this is exactly why they are supposed to sweep the ville. Engage the enemy. Now.

The lieutenant makes two guys carry Nathan.

He is thinking out loud and says: ‘We should capture some Lebanese kid and make him walk in front of us.’

‘Maybe some kid is playing with his bunny somewhere close’, says Jesup.

‘How can you know that?’, asks one of the men. Adam, who runs an erotic night club in Tel Aviv.

‘Who else do you think is rigging the bunnies with bombs, Adam? It’s some shepherd kid staring at us from way up that hill up there. Laughing his ass off.’

‘You have no way of knowing that’, says Adam sullenly.

‘Of course not!’, yells Jesup.

‘Hey, hey, don’t bully your colleagues, I mean, comrades in arms.’

‘Can we finally wake up to the fact we are in a war zone? We go back to the ville. Half of us gather all the men there, aged 12 to 60, let’s say. The other half guards them. We search every house. We confiscate whatever weapons we can find and we go back to base camp. Anyone suscipicous we take with us.’

‘Are those our real orders?’, asks Noah, the son of a relatively wealthy family. They own a real estate agency in Haifa.

‘Yes!!!’, yells Jesup.

The lieutenant orders them to start moving, back to the village. He tells them to keep their eyes open. Maybe they will spot some kids and they can capture them and be safe that way.

Nathan wriggles free. The two guys carrying him try to catch him, but Nathan runs back in the direction of the Israeli border. As if he’s planning to run 20 miles, back to safety.

He doesn’t run 20 miles, he does shoot up, 5 feet, and lands with no legs and his guts hanging out.

‘Is he dead?’, asks Noah.

‘Looks like it’, says Jesup. ‘We should have given him some tranquilizer and we should have sent him back.’

‘Was it that bunny?’, asks Adam.

‘No, it wasn’t the bunny. It was a mine.’

‘You see what an idiot you are, Jesup? That bunny wasn’t boopy-trapped, it was trained to lead us into a minefield.’

‘By a mad Iranian scientist, right?’

‘Possibly’, says Adam. He looks pensively at what’s left of Nathan.

The lieutenant tells HQ.

This time they are allowed to return to base camp.

The lieutenant gets promoted for keeping his cool.

Jesup is kicked out of the army a few weeks later.

The experience sets him on a path to become a strong, pro-Palestinian voice.