Reviewed by Michael Peck
The Military Book Review

Some victims cope with their traumas by seeing a doctor. Amos Gitai coped with his by making a movie. His catharsis was to relive the nightmare of going down in a burning Huey helicopter over the Golan Heights.

Kippur is one of the most brutally honest war films ever made. Not in the gory Saving Private Ryan sense, but in its depiction of soldiers pushed to their limits.

As the name implies, Kippur is set during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when the Arab armies launched a massive surprise attack on the holiest of Jewish holidays. With Israel caught off guard, for a time it seemed the nation would finally be destroyed. The finely tuned Israeli reserve system became a shambles as reservists scrambled pell-mell to the front.

The movie focuses on an Israeli sergeant named Weinraub (which apparently was Gitai's family name before his father changed it). When the air raid sirens announce that war has erupted, Weinraub and his friend Lt. Ruso hurry to their reserve commando unit on the Golan, only to find that it has already left. They are nearly scooped up by an arrogant infantry colonel, who vows to be in Damascus in a couple of days (illustrating Israeli overconfidence after the country's 1967 victory). The pair eventually picks up a hitchhiking doctor, who recruits them for a helicopter rescue unit.

What follows are a series of vignettes. The helicopter lands on a devastated trench line, and the crew finds the only survivor is the cocky infantry colonel, who begs the crew to evacuate his men (against the rules — the helicopter only evacuates wounded, not corpses).

The rescue squad flies to the hospital and are soon back in the air for another mission...and then another. In the most harrowing sequence of all, Weinraub, Ruso and their team are carrying a stretcher with a wounded man through thick mud. Their radio squawks; the helicopter is leaving in five minutes. They can't carry the wounded man to the rendezvous point in time. What do they do?

What's most remarkable about Kippur is that it's a war film without combat. The enemy is never seen except for a few explosions (tank lovers rejoice — the film has hordes of Centurions). The enemies faced by Weinraub and his comrades are exhaustion, cold and the incessant race to evacuate the wounded before it's too late. Except there's never enough time.

Kippur drags at times, and director Amos Gitai occasionally can't make up his mind whether he's filming a memoir, a war film or an artsy movie (the opening scene with Weinraub and his girlfriend is downright weird). Yet ultimately Gitai succeeds in revealing an experience that seared his life — and will sear the audience's too.