2024-03 Israel

Israel 20,

April 1, 2024,

Hi Everyone,

The 5 other guys in my room were in bed sleeping by 9:30-10:00 pm. I stayed up to 12:15 watching an Argentinian movie. I must have fallen asleep at 12:45. The war came home to us at 1:22 am. The sirens went off waking all of us up. We have 30 seconds to get to the bomb shelter. Dressed only in my underwear I made it in 28. Some of the veterans knew to grab some clothes. The shelter is 10 m from my door. It looks like a sewer pipe 20 feet long, 5’10” in diameter and about 8-10 inches of thick concrete.

There were about 30 of us crammed together. The volunteers were mixed in with the non combatant soldiers, male and female. The soldiers with weapons ran to their designated posts. 2 min later there was a loud boom. Our planes flew over head for the next half hour. Everyone was calm. The people with cell phones went right to X (twitter) where we learned that the naval base had been hit with a drone. There was a hole in the building, but not do too much damage. We had visited that warehouse earlier in the day. The drone hit 100 m from where we were hiding in the bomb shelter. One of the American fellows travels around with a harp (about 4 feet high). He thought to bring it with him to the shelter. We heard the background noise of the fighting, air planes and I think the iron dome defence. He played the harp, singing Hebrew songs like Aveno Malkainew. It was surreal.

It is hard to get comfortable in the shelter which is concrete with round walls. Next time I will grab some clothes and a pillow. We were in the shelter for 1 hour. Time passed quickly. People had already posted the battle on Twitter. You can see the boom as we were hit and you can see the iron dome taking out some drones and rockets. It is amazing to see some of the mean comments made by people in the States and Europe, like we really deserved what we were getting.

I was back in bed by 3:00 am and slept until 6:30. We had a meeting in the morning with a commander who told us not to take any pictures. I am only repeating what is already posted on Twitter. Hit Twitter, Eilat, drone attack to see the videos.

I am safe.

Love,

Brian