I started this a while ago, but decided to finish and post today. Nedless to say, I'm at work, with some time on my hands.

It's strange that I would never have come across him, if I hadn't forgotten his father's name.
Lt Elad Grenadier, 21, was supposed to leave the army in a month. He then could have, and would have travelled overseas. But he did neither. Killed in an attack in Emmanuel in Israel, in 2002, he didn't even live to see his 22nd birthday...

Today, i met his father, a respected cardiologist Dr Ehud G., in town to promote a particular brand of stent. For the uniniated, a stent is a wire mesh type thing, with a balloon type thing inside, that doctors put in to keep your arteries wide open. So I sat through Grenadier senior's talk, all the while grinning as I thought of the absurdity of sponsorhip in medicine... and the cute but very married dude sitting next to me, another doctor, presumably from the US of A. (Before you ask, I'd noticed the ring)

I came away still thinking about various advertising strategies used today, and the various new avenues that ad guys had entered over the years (the cute married doc being completely forgotten by now), which would have been fine, if i hadnt needed to write an article on the meeting.

I sit at my computer and stare... not into space... not into the distance... but straight my computer screen, thinking, "350 words... where the 'eck was i supposed to bring those from?" After weighing my various options about an opening line, I figure, a simple straight opening along the lines of DrBlah came here to talk abt a buncha things, one being the saftey of this particular brand of stent... yada yada yada..." u get the drift, right?

Then it struck me. I hadn't made notes abt who this fantastic doc was. I mean, sure i had a piece of paper wid his name on it somewhere.... but where??? After seconds of frantic searching went by like long minutes, it struck me - GOOGLE! of course! why not? "because u don't know the man's name, dodo" a voice echoed in my miniscule cranial cavity. So i shuffled back in time, inside my head of course, and remebered Ehud... "good. that's a start. Now think harder," said the voice... and my brains came up with the connection, "somethin wid grenade in it.."

SO began the search. Ehud Grenade... "Do u mean ehud grenadier?" asked the ever helpful elf hidden in the Google server.. (you didnt actually think a machine could be THAT helpful, did you?) So, my head makes like a yoyo and i head off, looking for the father, only to be waylaid by the son.

Suddenly, my article (and the question of of sponsorship in medicine) disappeared into the crevices of my mind. Staring at me from out of the screen is a smiling young man, and he can smile no more. And he didnt deserve to die. It wasn't his fault...

Did he know, when he went to the frontlines, that he wouldn't come home? Wouldn't ever taste his mum's cooking... or hear his dad's voice, a rather nice one at that... never bug or be bugged by his twin younger brothers... Wouldn't love or be loved again... I wonder, did he leave a sweetheart behind? and how long did she wait?

War has never made sense to me, but never have I come into contact to anyone who has actually borne witness to its sensless brutality before. ( I do know a cpla ppl in the forces, but they don't count)

He died fighting for someone else, willing also to kill people he had never met, and held no grudges against... except for the circumstances they met in, and an ideology.... strangers, like that old poem said, he may have bought a drink, had they met in a bar....