Yuval save lives because he’s a doctor.
The Arab baby, Tara, had four heart defects. Tara had come to Israel through Save a Child’s Heart, a program that sponsors surgery for children from poor areas. Doctors had inserted a shunt in Tara’s heart. Eight stitches threaded down her chest. Tubes emerged from her ribs, from her clavicle, from her hand.Through all the wires, Yuval could see that Tara was “innocent, untouched.”
“When they come from Gaza at age 3 or 4, they have that look in their eyes,” he later recalled. “That ‘I know the dangers, don’t get too close to me.’ ”
As Yuval bent over Tara, the monitors beeped alarms. Tara’s lungs had filled with fluid. “It was horrible to think this little girl was going to go,” recalled the nurse, Svetlana Kakazanov.
“Adrenaline,” Yuval ordered. He felt for the center of Tara’s chest with his thumbs, and pumped.
It was sad for Yuval, but he often thought that the Gaza children had “a 90 percent chance of becoming terrorists. But mainly it’s not their fault, it’s ‘the situation’s’ fault. And I’m not treating ‘the situation.’ I’m treating the child.”
. . .
Now in the ICU, as Yuval ordered a second shot of adrenaline for Tara, as her lungs were being puffed manually, Yuval felt the differences disappear again. So what if she was from Gaza? “All that mattered was that she’s blue, and she has to be pink.”Yuval kept pumping the baby’s heart. Five minutes passed. He stopped to listen for a beat, but every time he stopped, the blip of the monitor’s green cardiac line went flat.
“Third dose of adrenaline,” Yuval ordered. He wiped his brow. He thought, “She has no reason for dying. She’s going to come back. She has got to come back.”
Sometimes, Yuval said later, “I can see the children that died while I was trying to resuscitate them.” The blond 9-year-old boy, crushed by a car. The green-black baby born at 23 weeks.
There were also the faces Yuval didn’t see: “the small, dark image — I don’t visualize the face behind it — of the terrorist I was ordered to fire on.”
He couldn’t let Tara’s face join the others. He had to breathe her back into improbable existence. Things that seemed impossible, he said — peace for Israelis, for Palestinians — Yuval still believed could be true.
He pressed his stethoscope to Tara’s ribs. The irregular blip of her heart steadied, and leveled, to 120 beats. He could hear the exquisite swish of her circulating blood.
Tara’s chest was rising. He said, “We got her back.”
He’s also a pilot.
At 2:30 a.m., air force sirens woke Yuval. Tamar didn’t stir as Yuval leapt from their warm sheets, they recalled in interviews about that night in October.”Is it the mission we briefed for?” Yuval whispered into his phone.
“Something else,” a voice said from headquarters. “You’re going south.”
Yuval shot into the hallway in his underwear. He had 15 minutes until takeoff.
Every movement, every zip and shiver, from Yuval’s pillow to his Cobra had been timed. Two seconds to rinse with mouthwash. Forty-five seconds to pull on his flight suit and boots. Ten seconds to sprint to the car, parked nose-out. Six minutes to drive to the airfield, including swerves, in case a jackal crossed the road.
By the time Yuval reached his helicopter, four wire-guided missiles had been loaded. The crows roosting on the rotor blades had flown. Yuval strapped on his helmet and plugged into the cockpit radio. He recalled hearing:
“Your mission is to attack a group of terrorists. They launched a Qassam rocket at Israel and they’re about to launch again.”
In the past four months, the army says, more than 1,000 rockets and shells have been launched against Israel. On this night, the army said, four men from Islamic Jihad were attacking. Yuval entered the coordinates — northeast Gaza, four miles from the Israeli town of Sderot — into his electronic map.
The radio said: “All four are approved for targeting.”
Yuval’s heart, already beating fast, began to pound, he recalled. Usually, Yuval fired warning shots, or destroyed the launchers. Now Yuval and his wingman were supposed to take out a whole squad, he said. Kill four men, or be a failure.
Yuval wouldn’t be human if he didn’t have doubts, but he observes
“My oath as a doctor is primo no nocere, do no harm,” he said. Even as a pilot, when he’s ordered to kill, “I try to think of it as — I’m helping to save lives, and not hurting lives.”
We can only hope that someday soon he will be able to ply his first trade and not his second.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
