Avi's time on the Pumpkin is punctuated with bursts of violence, guerrilla attacks, and ambushes. Avi likes to read and is drawn to the works of writers who have served in past conflicts such as the World Wars. He dreams of the adult life he will begin when his service is over and writes beautifully about his life in the military, including the feeling that he is losing his innocence.

He is cynical about the military but still feels bound by responsibility. Part One tells the story of a young Israeli soldier named Avi who served on the Pumpkin in the mid-1990s.

What unites the varying parts and perspectives is one particular military outpost where various characters were stationed at different times. The story is told from several perspectives and is therefore divided into four parts. Pumpkinflowers is about the war in the Israeli security zone in Southern Lebanon during the 1990s and its immediate aftermath.

Pumpkinflowers: An Israeli Soldier’s Story. “A major arm of the government of the world’s most powerful nation,” Patrikarakos writes, “simply could not compete with networked individuals operating out of dilapidated buildings in war-ridden Syria or teenagers sitting in their bedrooms creating and sharing content.The following version of the book was used to create this study guide: Friedman, Matti. Tallying the results that night, they found that of the 100,000 tweets using the hashtag, the material being pushed by the superpower accounted for all of 1 percent. effort to fight back online doesn’t stand a chance: We learn that on the day in 2014 when the Islamic State took Mosul, Iraq, staffers in a State Department office tried to “hijack” the militants’ hashtag #CalamityWillBefallUS, furiously putting out their own counter-messages. Those new tools allowed them to inflate accomplishments, terrorize from afar and galvanize global attention far beyond the dreams of their predecessors, like that Hezbollah team with its video camera in 1994. Elsewhere in the Middle East, the author recounts how the tech-savvy militants of the Islamic State rose from the ashes of Iraq in tandem with the rise of YouTube and Twitter.

Pumpkinflowers by Matti Friedman