The thick Israeli accent made his English sound rigid and brittle. I appreciated his effort, though. We'd been working together for more than two months before this first hot September week of 1981, and I wasn't making much progress in his language. I was as much of a puzzle to him as Hebrew was to me, and the question had come up in the past weeks. Why, indeed. I hadn't a coherent answer before.

The order for the troops to go "at ease" barked out after a general officer took his place behind the podium. I could well imagine the weariness of the troops at this last speech after so many others, but it was the last. They already had their promotion, shiny-new lieutenants' shoulder-boards glistening in the harsh lights of the camera crews. Now, they stuffed their berets under their left lapels and stood legs apart, rifles at rest, waiting for the final moment of release. Murmuring families in the surrounding crowds hushed, the only sound that of a teething toddler and its whispering mother, the occasional snapping pop as an insect disintegrated against a hot TV lamp.

Again, why was I here? The question echoed within my head.

We'd driven all morning, taking a slow scenic route while crossing the upper Galilee from the Golan to Haifa, down the coastal plains southward, then east through the Judean hills. Shepherds and farms, large towns and small developments, the sprawl of Tel Aviv and green olive trees among brown ridges, all had eventually passed by. Jerusalem had seemed to appear out of nowhere, its modern suburbs looking more like hill-forts than new subdivisions, the old city spreading its contemporary tentacles out through valleys and along hillsides to the south and west.

We had staked a claim to part of a rooftop across from the Wall, with rickety lawn chairs and a cooler of drinks to make the wait more tolerable. Several soldiers' families (more like hordes!) were there, gabbing and gossiping, noshing and waving pocket cameras. The late afternoon sun stabbed through our clothing like a knife, sweat oozing from under our hats, dark moisture under our arms and staining our shirt-backs.

It wasn't my first time here. I remembered, a few weeks after arriving, how I'd touched the finger-smoothed stone, heard ecstatic prayers, felt the strangeness of a yarmulke on my head, recalled the images of weeping Israeli soldiers as they had stood here in 1967. I vividly remembered my following the Six Day War as a child, sick with flu but glued to the news stories on the radio, mapping out the victories as I learned of them on an old atlas in bed, my dreams filled with fuzzy TV images of tanks in battle. Now I was here, realizing that I wasn't only following in more recent boots, but in the steps of Solomon, David, and Abraham. One cannot see history staring back at you and not be affected by it, particularly when you feel the presence of HaShem behind that vail of history.

But that wasn't why I'd volunteered for exchange duty to Israel. I wasn't even Jewish, having been born to agnostic Gentile parents of Scotch-Irish ancestry.  But the pull had been early on, a constant urge to investigate often frustrated by circumstance or instigation, all ironically because of my name.

‘Golden' is an old family moniker originating in the Northern Borderlands of England and Ireland, its wearers having migrated to America in the late 1600s Branches of the clan run through the Old South from Georgia to Missouri, even coming to California via Oklahoma during the Depression. The Southwest became a home to Goldens with the coming of the Mormons and the War for Southern Independence, a sprinkling of them scattered in small Arizona towns like Saint David and Willcox.

Of course, as a fourth-grader, I knew none of this when I was called a ‘kike' by my teacher or bully-beaten on the playground. You begin to look for explanations very fast when something like this comes out of the blue. Thankfully, I was a reader even at that time, and I began my search at a desk in the library, surrounded by books like a young yeshiva student. The voices of Moses and Joshua boomed off the pages of a giant dog-eared King James Bible, strangely sounding like Charlton Heston and John Derek from the ‘Ten Commandments' (a film I'd first seen at the drive-in). Most of the rest were a jumble of words and numbers an ignorant ten-year-old could not decipher, but the stories were wonderful. At least it was a start.

There was no Jewish ‘outreach' in those far-off days, no courses in basic Judaism for potential converts, though I often sneaked into services with a friend of mine at the one local synagogue. I remember the suspicious look on the rabbi's face when Charlie introduced me as his visiting cousin. Ultimately, I was found out and told to stay away until I was old enough to know what I was about. My biggest regret was that Charlie's family was criticized for letting me in, though they allowed me to study with them at home. I didn't go into a synagogue again until I was in my twenties, but I kept on reading.

Over the years, I finally embraced the concept of the ‘Bnai Noach'. It was then that I had the opportunity to come to Israel as part of my military duties, and I jumped at the chance.

;Now, I heard the general begin to speak, my colleague translating quietly. The officer wasn't giving a speech, however, but reading from the Tanach, the first chapter of Joshua. The words of HaShem to His people rolled over the soldiers and their onlooking families, echoing off the ancient stone of the Kotel. I could feel tears welling in the crowd around us, a sob here and there. Something grabbed a hold of my throat, my chest swelling tightly. I had to blink rapidly to clear the gathering film from my eyes.

The general finished and gently closed his Bible, stared silently at his troops for a few moments, then his voice slammed out a single demand in Hebrew:

"DO YOU SWEAR TO UPHOLD THESE COMMANDMENTS TO DEFEND ERETZ YISRAEL?"

The soldiers answered at the top of their voices.

"WE SWEAR!"

Satisfied, the general nodded to his assistants, a whole squad of rabbinic chaplains, and they began to pass out a small Bible to each new officer, shaking their hands, quietly giving blessings while congratulating them. The boys would soon be dismissed to savor the moment with their relatives and friends, whose flashbulbs were now popping like machineguns. None of us knew how soon they all would be literally fulfilling the oath they had just sworn. Though the storm in Lebanon would eventually catch us all up in the coming year, I could feel the happiness that lack of knowledge of the future gave every one of us there.

I saw a woman later, hugging her warrior-son and gripping the copy of the Tanach he'd received like a talisman against harm to her grown child. I thought about how many had already died in the name of HaShem, for everything that was in that book and the land it signified. My colleague asked what I was looking at. I pointed at the pair and smiled sadly.

"You wanted to know why I'm here. Joshua had it right when he said ‘As for me, I shall serve the Lord'."