Soldier who lost friends in attack to return to battle

LIEUTENANT Yaron Genkin never saw the Hezbollah guerrillas he and his men were fighting.

What the 21-year-old tank commander did see were explosions all around him and two friends killed.

But three days later, after attending their funerals, the battered and exhausted soldier says he is ready to return to the battle.

Lt Genkin led a convoy of tanks into the south Lebanese village of Maroun al-Ras early Monday to evacuate infantrymen hit by a Hezbollah ambush.

Suddenly, he was under fire himself. He heard an explosion and saw an enormous plume of smoke emerging from the last tank in the convoy. He poked his head into the tank and found his friend, Lt. Lotan Slevin, lifeless inside.

He had little time to grieve. Mortars and anti-tank missiles were landing all around and the tank was filled with soldiers who were wounded, some seriously. So Lt Genkin left his good friend behind, jammed a half-dozen of the wounded into his own tank and fled to the border.

“During the evacuation you don’t think about anything. I just tried to get out with the wounded as quickly as I could,” he said.

As they fled, a second tank was hit by a roadside bomb, killing another friend, Staff Sergeant Kobi Smilig, and injuring the battalion commander.

“I couldn’t return fire. I had too many injured men in the tank that I couldn’t rotate the cannon. Also, I couldn’t tell where they were firing from,” he said.

At one point, he asked for authorisation to fire at a home he suspected was a source of fire. He was refused, for fear of harming innocents, he said. Not once did he see the guerrillas, the “invisible enemy”.

After rolling into Israel, he cried as he was hugged by two surviving friends atop his tank.

A photo of the image was captured by a photographer.

But to date, Lt Genkin had yet to speak about what he experienced.

Only at Lt Slevin’s funeral did it all sink in.

“At the funeral, I realised what had happened and it broke me,” he said.

And yet he is prepared to go back into Lebanon.

“We still have assignments, and we still have work to do,” he said.

“Am I afraid? Of course, but I’ll do it all over again.”

Many soldiers say they can’t wait to fight in Lebanon. They want revenge in light of the mounting Israeli casualties.

Lt Genkin said it all looks different after you’ve been in a battle.

“Whoever comes with a ‘fighter’ attitude saying he’s looking for action, hasn’t been in there,” he said.

“Whoever has been in battle like us is a thousand times more careful. It makes you grow up, for sure.”