Josh commands a troop of thirty-seven raw recruits. His soldiers guard four border crossings between Palestinian villages and Jerusalem. Everyday they check hundreds of people in search of potential terrorists. Last Thursday night, one of these walked up to a guard, shot him in the back of the head, wounded another, and disappeared.

"I was the second one on the scene," Josh recalls. "I got the report and me and my driver got there in five minutes. There was the dead soldier, lying face down on the street, and another wounded girl soldier, propped up against a jeep.  It was dark, 10:30 pm, I felt like I'm in a movie, like I'm going to wake up in a dream back in my room at the base. Then, you understand this really happened. Then you feel anger. I can't say that I was in shock, because I was moving, not frightened, more angry."

Just behind the jeep where a medic attended to the girl, Josh saw a band of men moving rapidly towards the border gate. "It got tense," he explained.  "You could feel it in the air.  If another Palestinian makes one move, he gets shot. I'm standing there on our side of the border looking at the Palestinians standing on their side, and I'm getting angry."

"This is what you've trained for," this 22 year old officer said. "Everyone expects you to be the first to act, to do something. You have 30 seconds and everyone is waiting for you to tell them what to do. You trained for three years, but in those 30 seconds all I'm thinking is keep everyone out of the way, and restore some calm between the soldiers and the Arabs, so that we can take care of the wounded and protect the borders. Everyone was so tense."

Josh said that there were moments when he nearly lost control. "Some of my soldiers started crying when they saw their friends lying there," he said. "I told them to go behind the wall so that no one would see them. I didn't want the Palestinians to see that we are weak, or that they could break us. Others started shouting at them because we felt it was their fault. I yelled too, told them to keep back away from the border. I even pushed some of them down to keep them away. Some of my soldiers hit them, and I didn't say anything. I knew how they felt. I wanted to do it too."

The lieutenant's freshly-oiled, semi-automatic was ready. Images flashed before him from months of combat drill:  you are a soldier, fight, shoot, protect, fire.  

Observing the crowd of men moving closer to the gate, he could not help but recognize some of their defiant faces.  "That's the hardest thing," Josh says. "These people are going through that border and you talk to them everyday, then suddenly you see in their eyes, they are not your friends, they hate you."

There they were.  Men that had crossed his station earlier that morning. There was the boy who had saluted the young officer, he is not sure if in mockery, or with envy. Some old men came so close he could smell the burnt wood on their clothing.  He had watched them all night long, squatting around a fire, waiting for the gates to open.  Not with intention, nor with regret, Josh's anger gave way to helplessness, and his grip loosened on the steel trigger.

He turned to his troops. The platoon had already begun a retreat to care for its wounded. Soldiers came out from behind the wall, now weeping openly, while the Arab villagers huddled together in the cold, and looked on with suspicion and curiosity.

"Today I learned more about myself, and what it means to lead soldiers," Josh says, "than I learned in three years of army training. We may have lost a soldier,"  he says, "but we gained a lot of understanding, about who we are, and why we are here."