I Am Somewhere In Israel.

This is what you’re always told to say when you’re at a Secret Military Base, a quaint custom that predates this time when you can probably find out what they are serving for dinner at the base using Google Maps and an iPhone.

This Secret Location is Secreter than most, located as it is next to the Really Secret Nuclear Reactor, which officially does not exist, despite the road signs in the city of Dimona that point, in Hebrew and English, to the Nuclear Research Facility. Go figure.

But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. Whether you’re a Guns or Butter guy, if the military here wasn’t what it is, there is little practical argument that we would be here at all. If you read that sentence enough times, slowly, I think it may make sense

The military is a huge part of the fabric of society. It brings almost every 18 year old from all parts of the society together, shakes and stirs them really hard, and turns them out no sooner than 3 years later, a little more blended together. Then everyone goes back for reserve duty at least 30 days a year until they are 49, to keep the recipe fresh. So while there is still more…stuff…going on than a Fair and Balanced Reporter might want to admit, there is still a mosaic of shared experience that gives most some common ground.

The motivation is pretty simple – when people all around have been shouting for the past 60+ years that they are going to push you into the ocean, even if it seems sometimes that those guys are at least one fry short of a Happy Meal, at some point there is reason to think you gotta at least be ready to push back. Hard.

If I am not exactly a child of the ‘60s, I did live through them. This whole military power concept remains puzzling to me. I agreed with John Lennon and whatshername when they sang about giving peace a chance, except in this part of the world where, too often, they’ve had to give war a chance.

Maybe this is because the Ribakoff family military history is a bit…limited, not counting, of course, General Beauregard Ribakoff, the Confederate general famous for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. But I digress.

One of my strongest memories of my January trip here, towards the end of the Gaza action, was seeing a line of helicopter gunships, hovering in place. They (and I) were facing south, while the missiles from Gaza were coming north. It turns out that This Somewhere in Israel is where those helicopters are based.

Helicopters have always fascinated me, maybe because of their sheer….implausibility. Whenever I think that all that holds a Real Airplane up in the air is….suction…I want to check that life vest is really under my seat, and that my tray table is in the full upright position. And helicopters are these…weird…looking things that sometimes resemble what Dr. Wizard did with erector sets. Let’s see here, you want me to get into this thing that goes straight up in the air and…hovers? Right.

The choppers we see today are hardly state of the art – they are Cobras, a ship that first flew in 1965. The avionics, at least of the ones they let us see, resemble those in a Piper Cub more than a modern airplane – what pilots call steam gauges. More than ungainly, these things are butt ugly.

This does not mean that you want to mess with one (or call it butt ugly to its face); my guess is it would make you very dead, very fast.

We hang out with some of the pilots, men and women who don’t look old enough to drive. (OK – 1 political observation: there are, it is my guess, exactly 0 Iranian women helicopter pilots, if only because women in that society are generally not allowed to be taught to read. But I digress). I am struck by their calmness, and by how different they are from most American kids their ages, like getting one of these old things and going up in the air to get shot at, and to shoot back, is just another day at the office.

I suspect I might not look at these guys and gals with quite the same awe if I was living on the ground in Gaza. I have previously said that I don’t want to get into the politics of any of this, except to assure you at the top of my voice that, like everybody else in the Middle East, I am Right and Everybody Else is Wrong. But if Chairman Mao (now there’s a name that doesn’t get thrown around much anymore) was right that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, I’m looking at lots of political power here. I, personally, prefer it to the political power I saw when the Qassam missiles from Gaza were flying north over me while I was driving south to visit some Bedouin kids last January.

So this has wandered off in a direction I didn’t anticipate, something that happens some days when my computer takes me out for a run. My parting thoughts as we drive away is that I was happy to have seen this Somewhere in Israel, if only because lots of other Somewhere’s In Israel to exist. And, maybe, prosper.