BEAUFORT
Ron Leshem
Delacorte Press
Fiction
ISBN: 9780553806823

• About the Book
• Read an Excerpt
• Author Interview –– February 1, 2008

Beaufort is a military outpost in southern Lebanon occupied by the Israeli army. Taken by accident in an Israeli raid in 1980, this desolate piece of high ground could be described as the first target among military outposts for its long and violent history.

Beaufort is held by a small unit that fervently believes that the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon saves lives --- that without their work, Hezbollah would easily infiltrate Israel and begin the mass murder of the Israelis along the border, whom they view as an occupying force. Their job is made more difficult by the arbitrary nature of Hezbollah’s attacks. Sometimes they fire missiles, sometimes they have a sharpshooter, sometimes the local populace collaborates, and sometimes nothing happens for weeks, even months on end.

These men live under constant, excruciating pressure, and their story is told by their team commander, 21-year-old Liraz “Erez” Liberti, a career soldier if only because assimilating into a non-Beaufort world becomes too difficult after he has spent so much time there.

Erez’s job is to ensure that his men do exactly what they’re told, no matter how absurd or contradictory their orders are. He enforces discipline through arduous physical training, fear and sleep deprivation, but his men love him, maybe because he knows them so well and is as big a troublemaker as any of them. Erez does love his men, even when he can’t stop swearing at them. He loves them more than anyone he knows on the outside, including his brother, an Israeli army veteran, and his girlfriend Lilah, to whom he writes letters he will never send.

The whole purpose of military life is to instill sameness, to destroy individual identity for the group to work together, which makes the ease with which Ron Leshem renders his characters very impressive. You know who has the dirtiest mouth, who comes from money, who no longer celebrates Jewish rituals and whose unrequited love for a schoolgirl drags on for a year. You see them withstand pressure, and you see them crack. For if daily life at Beaufort is nearly impossible, Israel’s seemingly arbitrary decision to close it down takes the pressure to a whole new level.

What do you do when you can’t find your friend’s head? The author is not shy about providing details of horrific injuries, how missiles come out of nowhere at random and there is no possible escape. As Israel prepares to abandon Beaufort, the forces of Hezbollah do everything they can to ensure that Beaufort’s closure will be remembered as a bloody retreat. Meanwhile, Erez asks himself what the point of Beaufort was in the first place and thinks of everyone who would still be alive if Israel had come to this decision a year earlier.

Surprisingly, Ron Leshem himself did not serve in the Israeli army. A journalist and television producer, he is appropriately modest about his inexperience compared to the men who inspired his novel, but it feels very, very real. This is a classic war story, with all the traditional elements of heroism, danger and black humor, but the reader never loses sight of the futility of the war itself. BEAUFORT is wildly popular in Israel. This English translation of the Hebrew original is available to Americans interested in reading the book that inspired the Academy Award-nominated movie or who are coming to this incredible story for the first time.

    --- Reviewed by Colleen Quinn

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