The War of the Lights

TWENTY-FIVE years ago, on a cold clear day, I broke my patrol in a quiet orchard on the Israeli-Lebanese border. Looking up into a perfectly blue sky, I saw far above me the tiniest specks, so small that they would disappear and then sparkle vaguely in reappearance. In this barely perceptible, inaudible glitter that seemed not much more than a trick of the eye, men were at that moment fighting for their lives. And years before, at the edge of the Sinai Desert on a moonless January night, I had watched the small lights marking Israeli A-4s rise and fall in silent parabolas like the abstract play of lights in an exhibition at a planetarium.

No one is truly accustomed to the kind of angelic combat, as if from the pages of Milton, that I witnessed on these two occasions, for after thousands of years war is still in the main either Homeric or industrial. But for more than a century it has been moving away from the human scale and into realms of speed, force, and discreet communication associated previously only with the supernatural. The nature of this progression is not always clear, and recognition is not automatic. What I saw as an infantryman suddenly illuminated something I had seen as a boy.

About the Author

Mark Helprin

Mark Helprin is the author of The Oceans and the Stars, Paris in the Present Tense, Winter’s Tale, In Sunlight and in Shadow, Freddy and Fredericka, A Soldier of the Great War, and numerous other novels.

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TWENTY-FIVE years ago, on a cold clear day, I broke my patrol in a quiet orchard on the Israeli-Lebanese border. Looking up into a perfectly blue sky, I saw far above me the tiniest specks, so small that they would disappear and then sparkle vaguely in reappearance. In this barely perceptible, inaudible glitter that seemed not much more than a trick of the eye, men were at that moment fighting for their lives. And years before, at the edge of the Sinai Desert on a moonless January night, I had watched the small lights marking Israeli A-4s rise and fall in silent parabolas like the abstract play of lights in an exhibition at a planetarium.

No one is truly accustomed to the kind of angelic combat, as if from the pages of Milton, that I witnessed on these two occasions, for after thousands of years war is still in the main either Homeric or industrial. But for more than a century it has been moving away from the human scale and into realms of speed, force, and discreet communication associated previously only with the supernatural. The nature of this progression is not always clear, and recognition is not automatic. What I saw as an infantryman suddenly illuminated something I had seen as a boy.

About the Author

Mark Helprin

Mark Helprin is the author of The Oceans and the Stars, Paris in the Present Tense, Winter’s Tale, In Sunlight and in Shadow, Freddy and Fredericka, A Soldier of the Great War, and numerous other novels.