by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

January 8, 2009

Two days after his son, Zach, entered Gaza, Bob Goldberg sat at home in Springfield, coping with mixed emotions.

“Like anyone who has a child in the military, particularly now, one part of me is very proud.

“On the other hand, I am very anxious.”

At 21, Zach was dispatched to the ground war in Gaza from a training base near Israel’s Lebanese border.
“He has been telling me all along they had been doing an extensive amount of urban combat training in a very realistic mock city. They were doing some sort of warm-up before they went into Gaza,” said Goldberg.
“He said the training they’ve gotten has been rigorous. They have been doing full war games day after day for the last few months. They are very prepared. They drilled like crazy —sometimes a 12-hour drill followed by two hours of sleep.”

Last Sunday, father and son spoke by cell phone for the last time before Zach went into combat.

“He said he could see the helicopters and the gunships in the sky from 10 miles away, and it became very, very real to him. It was not just training anymore.”

After Zach graduated from Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School in Livingston, he spent a year living on a kibbutz, then taking part in basic training. He passed up a scholarship at George Washington University in 2007, telling his father “he wanted to defend Israel.”

Because “Israel is a cell phone country,” Goldberg said, he has been able to stay in touch with his son “when he was up North and the army thought Hizbullah wouldn’t be monitoring their communications. But now that they are deployed there is a general order — no cell phones.”

That leaves the Goldberg family — Zach’s parents, grandparents, and 24-year-old sister Sara — “hoping for the best and hoping this resolves quickly,” said his father.

Ironically, Zach was to have been discharged on Jan. 9. “But he said, ‘I am not running away from this. I am not leaving my comrades,’” said Goldberg.

When his military service finally ends, Zach is expected to return home for a visit. “We’ll go to Yankee Stadium and see the Yanks play,” said his father.

But Zach intends to return to Israel to study counterterrorism and foreign affairs at Herzylia Interdisciplinary College.

“Obviously we miss him very much, but we raised him to be a proud Jew,” said the elder Goldberg. “We are hopeful he comes back safe, and we are proud as well. It takes a lot of guts for him to do this.”

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