He can’t yet walk, but he has already been called up by the army for reserve duty – as a driver.
For Elihu Ben-Shoshan, crawling is more his speed these days, preferably with a pacifier firmly planted in his mouth.
Nevertheless, as Israel Defense Force order recently arrived in the mail at his Carmiel home, ordering him to show up for duty as a driver in a month.
“I burst out laughing, I couldn’t believe it,” his mother Michael Ben-Shoshan told the Israeli daily Yediot Achronot. “What, they’ve started drafting babies into the army?”
The IDF said in response that thousands of similar orders are issued weekly, and such a mistake in the paperwork is possible.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
