Summary

Avi is among a platoon of engineers put together in the spring of 1994. He dislikes authority and scorns hierarchies but he also doesn't shirk responsibilities and it is time for him to complete his mandatory military service. Avi and his platoon are eventually to be posted at a hill in southern Lebanon called the Pumpkin. Like most men conscripted in the Isreali army, Avi and his comrades are in their late teens or very early twenties. As they go through their training, "their faces needed to lose the softness of childhood and assume [...] the definition of adults" (8).

Avi begins service as a model trainee but soon begins to question authority and the nature of the military system. He "suddenly understood that what they wanted to do was prevent him from thinking" (10). After a few months of training in the desert, Avi...