662: Where There Is a Will
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
My friend Edgar, his mom does not take no for an answer. Edgar is Israeli. Edgar, carrot. We run his short stories here on the radio show now and then. Anyway, years ago, Edgar's older brother was in the army serving in Lebanon. Israel had just invaded Lebanon. It was war. And it sounds incredible to us, but the policy of the Israeli army is that if it's at all possible, you go home on leave every two weeks. And Lebanon's close, just next door to Israel. Edgar says his brother was coming home every month, and then, you know, that stopped. He wasn't getting any leave. And my brother didn't come home for almost two months and he drove my mother crazy, you know, and she decided that she should get my brother back home, you know, and it's very difficult to deal with anything during the war because everybody is hysterical and crazy. But she decided that she needs to speak to the chief of staff and she started calling and the chief of staff is like the head of the army. Yeah, it's like the head general for the entire army. Yeah. Edgar explained her strategy was simple. She called the guy's office, talked to whoever answered and she would talk for long enough until she would have something that she could say offended her or made her angry and then she asks to speak with that person's superior. She did the same thing with that person and then that person's superior. And so on and on and on and on and in the end she found herself speaking to the head general, you know, Rafael Eitan, who's one of Israel's most famous kind of war heroes. Mm-hmm. And she said to him, listen, General Eitan, I know that you're fighting war and I really don't want to waste any of your time, so I really make it simple. My son didn't get a leave from the army for the past two months. I give you 24 hours to send him back home. If you know what's good for you, he'll be back, you know, before tomorrow evening. Well, if you know, it's good for you, yeah. And the guy says to her, I just want to understand, Mrs. Kirt, are you threatening me? And she says, yes, I am, I'm threatening you and I, you know, I didn't want to put it in the subtext because I know that you're busy. So if you know what's good for you, like you send my son back home. And he says to her, Mrs. Kirt, do you know who I am? And she said, yeah, yeah, you're a fire eitan, the war hero. And he said to her, if you know anything about me, then you know that I'm not easily scared. So my mother said, yeah, but I don't think you had many chance to fight with elderly Holocaust survivors or a five foot tall and weigh 82 pounds. And I want to tell you something and I make it very simple and very quick, you know, after you quit the army, you'll either go to politics or, you know, you go to the free market. In both cases, you're going to be very exposed. In both cases, every time there'll be a TV camera around or journalist, you'll have this elderly lady sitting in the first row, shouting at you, accusing you of any bad things that you might have made and maybe of some bad things that you've never made because I'm a very good liar. And you really don't want that.
Transcription truncated.