On a few of those tense days after his Israeli military unit crossed into Lebanon, Sgt. Brian Waxman got his share of kidding. "They'd say 'You wish you were back in Queens now, don't you?
' " recalled Waxman, 22, a Floral Park native who moved to Israel in January 2004, and served with the Israeli army in the conflict in July and August. "Then, they'd say they wished they were in Queens, too." Waxman, to his family's delight, came through the conflict unscathed and is now back in Queens for a monthlong visit.
"It's nice to have him back," said his father, Chuck Waxman, 58. Waxman earned a bit of notice here in the states, when a photographer caught up to him as he crossed back into Israel near the town of Tiberias after the first of three tours inside Lebanon. The photograph ran in Newsday and elsewhere.
His expression conveys something ineffable about the reality of war. "I was very tired," he said during an interview last week at a Long Island diner. The Queens accent is gone, replaced by a distinctly Israeli inflection.
"We had been out for six days, and that was the first time I would have a chance for a shower." Waxman's road to the conflict began in 2001 during a year in Israel. He took classes, volunteered on a kibbutz and worked at Masada, the fabled mountaintop fortress.
He returned to Queens somewhat grudgingly, and attended college in upstate Binghamton. After a couple of semesters, he said, he grew disenchanted, so he returned to Israel. His family was pleased, if somewhat more nervous because of the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"It was a little worrying," Chuck Waxman said. "I remember that his grandmother freaked out. But I told her, 'What do you want me to do?
It's his life.'" Eight months later, Waxman entered the army to complete the service required of all 17- to 21-year-old Israelis. After boot camp, he drew guard duty on the border, close enough to see Hezbollah sentries.
On July 12, Hezbollah raiders crossed the border and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers. The Israeli offensive killed more than 1,200 Lebanese -- the majority of them civilians. On the Israeli side, more than 155 were killed, 118 of them soldiers.
"Everything changed," Waxman said. "We went from sitting on the border to walking into Lebanon at night carrying 70-pound packs." He says Hezbollah behaved less like a terrorist group than another army.
"It's an army in every sense," he said. "They had all the tactics and the training." Waxman says rations dwindled, and atone point, a grenade accidentally exploded near the squad, hitting six members of Waxman's unit with shrapnel.
On his third mission, Waxman and his unit reached a badly damaged town near the Litani River about 10 miles into Lebanon. "It looked just like you would expect a war zone to look," he said. "House after house was destroyed.
It drove home that this was a serious thing." While Waxman admits doubts while on his mission, he feels proud to have defended his adopted home. "There was a moment when we had crossed the border and reached the hill above [the Israeli community of] Kiryat Shemona," he said.
"When we had left it was almost abandoned and the forest around it burned. It reminded me that we did what we did so that people could go on with their lives, that it means something. It's unfortunate that we had to go to war to get that.
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