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At the end of August, a 23-year-old Berkeley native and first sergeant in the Israel Defense Forces said goodbye to her fellow soldiers and flew home to the Bay Area after three years of military service.

“L.” was a soldier in the Artillery Corps’ drone unit serving with the all-female elite Sky Riders team, posted most recently at Nahal Oz on the Gaza border.

She had been home five weeks when the Oct. 7 attacks happened, as her teammates found themselves fighting for their lives against the first wave of Hamas terrorists to infiltrate Israel.

L.’s three closest comrades and their commander, 22-year-old Lt. Eden Nimri, were some of the few women on the base who carry weapons, and they struggled to hold off the terrorists while protecting other, unarmed female soldiers in a shelter underneath the women’s dormitory.

“They were in their PJs and flip-flops, protecting those girls,” L. said in an interview for this article. (Her name is being withheld per IDF protocol.) Grenades were thrown into the shelter, wounding three of the women fighters; Eden was killed.

“It’s mind-boggling and sickening,” L. said. “They thought she was missing for a few days, before they found her. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m glad she was found dead in Israel. What they are doing to Jewish women [hostages] in Gaza [must be] horrific.”

L. said she didn’t enlist “in a vacuum.” She grew up in a Jewish and Zionist home in Berkeley,  attended Jewish summer camp and graduated from Midrasha, an afterschool Jewish program for high school students in Berkeley. “I’m a product of Bay Area Jewry,” she said.

She deferred admission to UC Berkeley to spend a gap year in Israel, returned to Cal for a year, and in March 2020 enlisted in the IDF. Her father is Israeli, but she was not called to serve — she did it on her own, signing up for a combat unit and committing to three years rather than the usual 18 months expected of “lone soldiers” like herself, who have no immediate family in Israel.

L. served in a highly specialized unit that flies intelligence-gathering drones. “My teammates are on the front lines” of the current war, she said. “Our drones will be critical in any ground invasion, to point out anything that would put our soldiers in harm’s way. Protection of ground forces in real time is one of our goals.

“Another is to pinpoint aerial strikes to make sure the right target is being hit. You need confirmation from several sources before you can bomb — we are one of them.”

L. is now getting ready to start classes at Cal. She is staying connected to Jewish life and trying to  integrate into student life, but she is older than her peers and has experienced a very different reality. She said she is “very careful” in choosing whom she talks to about Israel.

“I’m really proud of what I’ve accomplished. But I’m very wary. I’m in a place and on a campus that can be hostile to Jews and Israelis.”

She wishes she were with her unit in the south right now, she said. But she wouldn’t be called for reserve duty anyway for at least six months, and her position has already been filled by a new recruit. What  L. does is too specialized for her to fit in anywhere else.

“If they called me in the middle of the night, I’d be on the next flight,” she said. “My heart is in Israel.”

In the hours and days following the Hamas attacks in Israel, Jews and Israelis abroad began flooding airports, looking for flights to Tel Aviv. Some had been called up for reserve duty, others were volunteering, and others just wanted to get home.

Marco Sermoneta, Israel’s San Francisco–based consul general, says he knows that people from the Bay Area have flown back to Israel either to rejoin their units or to help out, but the consulate does not have a military attache and has no way to track their numbers.

One who jumped on a plane as soon as possible was Dr. Nikolaj Wolfson, 67, an orthopedic trauma surgeon from San Francisco and a former physician in the IDF.

A graduate of the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University who served as a physician in IDF paratrooper and submarine units, Wolfson was demobilized in 1986 but returned in 2014 to treat injured soldiers on the Gaza border as part of his reserve duty in the Southern Command’s medical corps.

Wolfson has volunteered his medical expertise in other locations, notably Haiti in 2010 after a devastating earthquake. But Israel holds a special place in his heart, so mere hours after the Hamas attacks, he booked an Oct. 8 El Al flight from Los Angeles, the first seat he could grab.

“The flight was very quiet,” he told J., speaking from southern Israel.

As the Israeli coastline came into view, one of the flight attendants asked passengers to stand in memory of the fallen Israelis. Then they sang “Hatikvah.” The plane had to circle Ben Gurion Airport twice to avoid a nearby rocket explosion.

Wolfson was being interviewed for this article from an army base near Ashkelon where he treats injured soldiers every afternoon. He spends mornings at the Barzilai Medical Center, also in Ashkelon, where he treats civilians as well as soldiers; he sleeps there at night, in a patient room.

Initially he was treating people hurt during the first hours of the attacks. At that time, terrorists were still roaming the streets of Ashkelon, he recalled. It was total chaos outside.

“We kept receiving the wounded, mainly soldiers,” he said. “We got more than 300 war injuries in the first 24 hours, mostly gunshot wounds. They often died. The nurses and doctors were crying. It was a massacre, the way these people were killed.”

People are still in shock, and it’s hard to fully grasp the situation.

“I want to be positive, but I have to tell you it’s very hard to apprehend what is going on,” Wolfson told J.

The death and injuries he’s seen since arriving have taken their toll on him, he admitted. One particularly heart-wrenching moment came when he and other medical staff went to say Kaddish on behalf of a 5-year-old boy whose entire family had been murdered.

The staff itself is not immune, either. One of the ER doctors at Barzilai, an Israeli Arab, was outside when he was fired upon by Hamas terrorists. He was captured, Wolfson recounts, but was released when his captors learned he was Muslim — although they shot him in the knee before letting him go.

“There are so many stories,” Wolfson murmured, trying to stifle an involuntary sob. “I cannot sleep. I sleep maybe 2 or 3 hours a night, that’s all. You feel the tragedy, everywhere you go.

“I’ve been in three wars in Israel. This is so different from every other war.”

The Israeli Consulate in San Francisco advises locals who want to help or volunteer to contact organizations directly. Licensed medical professionals looking to volunteer should register with the Israeli Ministry of Health at go.gov.il/volunteersforisrael.