Asa Boxer is a Canadian who grew up in Montreal. Boxer wrote a 2009 Maisonneuve article about his decision to immigrate to Israel and join its military titled, “The Good Soldier,” with a subheading of, “The Israeli Defence Forces is one of the toughest armies in the world. As a young man, Canadian writer Asa Boxer moved to Israel and was drafted, only to confront the true meaning of patriotism and sacrifice.”
Boxer writes, “When I learned in 1997 that the state would underwrite my tuition in exchange for official immigration, I became a citizen and enrolled as an undergraduate at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Within six months, as expected, I was conscripted by the Israel Defence Forces, known as the IDF.”
He adds, “My Israeli friends, however, were baffled by my decision to sign on. Pride in being an IDF soldier flows from its necessity: there is no other choice, no alternative citizenship, nowhere to run. As a Canadian, on the other hand, I did have a choice. It was bad enough, as they never failed to remind me, that I’d left my comfortable life and moved to Israel. But the idea of a North American willingly entering military service seemed to them absurd. I felt differently at the time.”
Boxer later left the Israeli military. Explaining why, he writes, “After weeks of being a jobnik, or pencil-pusher, I began to get an itchy trigger finger. Maybe it was listening to the constant machine-gun rounds, or watching a Viper helicopter or two thump into the fray, or peering at the night sky raging with tank shells and tracer bullets drawing red lines through the air. Something like a hormonal change washes over you in such an environment.
And I wasn’t the only one. Many of the military clerks and jobniks felt the same way, as if we’d all made the wrong choice opting out of combat. Private Hersh—a twenty-six-year-old American guy who had been assigned to Mount Gilo to help staff our new computer lab—had it bad. He started writing to the base commander, making a nuisance of himself to his superior officer: filing what he needed to file, calling whom he needed to call, adamantly demanding to be transferred to Gaza. Anywhere, he said, so long as he got to shoot Arabs. There was some giggling amongst the officers, but eventually they acquiesced and sent him to some front or another where (we heard) he immediately started a skirmish for which he was locked up in a military prison. I didn’t want to become a second Hersh. The IDF, I now understood, was the wrong place for me. I wanted out.”
Boxer eventually returned to Canada, completed degrees in English literature at McGill University and worked as a writer and poet, according to his LinkedIn. A 2018 biography for him on the McGill website states, “Asa Boxer is poet, critic, and founder of the Montreal International Poetry Prize. Recent books include Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013) and Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2015). His debut book, The Mechanical Bird (2007), won the Canadian Authors Association Prize for Poetry, and his cycle of poems entitled ‘The Workshop’ won the 2004 CBC/enroute Literary Award. His work has been anthologized in various collections, including The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry, the Oxford-Poetry Broadside Series, and The Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2009 and 2012. His latest chapbook is entitled Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018).”
His LinkedIn profile states that he now works in “Landscape Design / Permaculture Design” in Elora, Ont.
