Mem­bers of com­bat res­cue units of the Israel Defense Forces are trained to oper­ate in com­pli­cat­ed, often life-threat­en­ing, sit­u­a­tions. But noth­ing pre­pared them for Octo­ber 7, 2023. 

Now an IDF reservist has writ­ten a riv­et­ing account of that har­row­ing day, focus­ing on his own sto­ry and the sto­ries of oth­ers in his unit. Mil­i­tary reg­u­la­tions stip­u­late that, because the author is a spe­cial forces mem­ber, his iden­ti­ty can­not be revealed; for this rea­son, his name is redact­ed to ​“Guy M.”

As Sergeant Major Guy M. head­ed to his unit base the morn­ing of Octo­ber 7, one of his team­mates, Ron, and his wife, Tamar, were awok­en by explo­sions. They lived on a kib­butz so close to the Gaza bor­der that mis­siles fired from there usu­al­ly flew over­head, beyond the kib­butz. Ron’s first thought was that he was hear­ing the pyrotech­nics from the near­by music festival. 

Then he looked out and saw ter­ror­ists in the kib­butz fields. He felt like ​“his eyes were send­ing his brain false infor­ma­tion.” The infor­ma­tion was all too real. As he and Tamar man­aged to fend off the ter­ror­ists, a theme that runs through­out the nar­ra­tive is intro­duced: Where are the police? Where is the army? 

When he got to the Unit 669 base in cen­tral Israel, Guy, who is also a com­bat para­medic, was one of a team of three reservists direct­ed to head south, to Kib­butz Nachal Oz. Their mis­sion was to clear the kib­butz of ter­ror­ists, going house to house, build­ing to building.

At the same time, oth­ers from Unit 669 were cir­cling in a heli­copter, look­ing to land and air-lift casu­al­ties to hos­pi­tals. Then they flew back to help oth­ers who were wound­ed, encoun­ter­ing scenes no train­ing could have pre­pared them for. 

By after­noon, Guy and his team head­ed for Kfar Aza, where there were severe casu­al­ties and too few med­ical sup­plies, neces­si­tat­ing Guy to make triage deci­sions while try­ing to con­ceal his deep sense of despair. ​“A mass-casu­al­ty inci­dent, a bat­tle­field, count­less fatal­i­ties and injured, and it’s all hap­pen­ing inside the ter­ri­to­ry of the coun­try,” he recalls. It is a heart-rend­ing cry, in a nar­ra­tive that is both hor­ri­fy­ing and fas­ci­nat­ing, and impos­si­ble to put down.

Ambu­lances, medics and Hatza­lah vol­un­teers began arriv­ing and the bat­tle con­tin­ued into the night. Guy and his unit went on to Kib­butz Be’eri, a scene of mass car­nage. ​“Nobody could have imag­ined some­thing like this ever hap­pen­ing, not in our worst col­lec­tive night­mares,” writes Guy.

Guy M. has writ­ten a per­son­al sto­ry, but it’s also a sto­ry in which ​“the per­son­al and the nation­al in the events of Octo­ber 7th are tight­ly — almost inex­tri­ca­bly — bound togeth­er.” In oth­er words, it’s a unique­ly Israeli story.