Yesterday the order came down. Thirty percent of the reserves are going home. Not for a mission. For money, and for the slow work of winding a war down.
The math is not complicated. A reservist costs the army his full civilian salary. He has a job, a career, a paycheck the state has been covering for two and a half years without a break. A soldier in mandatory service costs a fraction of that. As the war eases, the army wants to swap us out and put the young conscripts back in our place. Cheaper, and closer to how things are meant to run. On paper it holds up.
I spent today at the base collecting gear and helping men return their weapons. They came in expecting a hundred and fifty five days. They got forty five. One by one they handed back the rifle, sat down to clean it for the last time this round, and asked me the same thing.
Why me.
The first names on the list were easy to explain. They were men who had transferred in from other units. When a cut has to happen, you hold on to the people you raised. Homegrown talent stays. That part, everyone understood.
After that it got hard.
Some men could not give the full five months. Work would pull them away for a week. A family matter would take them home for a few days. Every absence lands on someone else, and across months it becomes a unit carrying a gap it did not plan for. Those men went next. Not for being poor soldiers. For not being able to stay.
Then the list ran out of clean reasons.
What was left came down to two things. Level of training first. After that, luck. Nobody wanted to be cut. The conversation to decide who stayed and who went was one of the hardest we have had since this round began. You sit in a room and sort men into two piles. Who holds the line and who drives home. Who needs this posting because he has no job waiting for him. Who is the most qualified to stay. Every name is a man you know.
I thank God I was not one of the officers who had to make the final call. I watched what it cost them. They did not enjoy a second of it. Working down that list pained them in a way I will not forget.
Here is what the day looked like from the other side of the table.
A soldier walks in alone. He is quiet. He hands over the rifle that has not left his side for six weeks. He sits and cleans it slowly, the way you handle a thing you are about to stop doing. He is not thinking about the salaries the army saves or the conscripts who will fill the base next month. He is running back through forty five days looking for the mistake that got him sent home. There is no mistake to find. He asks me anyway. What could I have done. What did I miss.
I did not have an answer for him. Most of the time there is not one.
That is the part I want people to sit with. Being released was not a verdict. These men did nothing to earn the drive home. The army needed to shed a third of its cost, and a decision that began as a budget line ended as a soldier cleaning his rifle and wondering if he had failed. He did not fail. He was one of thirty in a hundred, and the hundred could not all stay.
There is a good side, and I hold it tight. These men are going home to their children. They are stepping off a war footing they have carried for two and a half years and back toward a normal life. A full night of sleep. A wife who has been running the house alone. That is the thing all of us are fighting to get back to. They reach it first.
I only wish they could walk out the gate knowing why they were chosen. The army needed fewer men and it needed to spend less. That is the whole reason. It says nothing about the soldier. A man can train hard, show up for every day he was asked to give, and still be the name that comes off the list. Being cut was never a measure of him. I hope, somewhere on the road back to Modiin or Beit Shemesh or wherever home is, each of them lets that sink in.