Modern Love Rescued by an Israeli Soldier NYTimes.com

I’M not sure what I expected to discover in Israel. Though three generations of women in my family were avid Zionists, the country never held much significance in my life. I didn’t expect to find answers to my personal quandaries about religion, politics or human rights. Nope, I mostly hoped to find a beach.

So you can imagine my delight when I found myself rolling around on a ratty mattress in a sandy Bedouin tent in the middle of the Negev desert with a fantastically handsome 6-foot-2, 21-year-old Israeli army commander.

There was only one problem. As he drew me close and pulled off my shirt, the commander unintentionally exposed a pair of wounds about eight inches above my hips. And in doing so, he uncovered the physical manifestation of why I so desperately needed a vacation.

Matan, my dark and quiet warrior, was the first man to reveal the pink, tender scars hidden under my shirt. To him, it probably appeared as if someone had taken an extremely sharp knife and sliced into my 22-year-old chest.

And someone had.

In April last year — eight months after the doctor who had diligently treated my mother’s breast cancer for 12 years told her, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Ritchie, but I just don’t have any more ideas,” and 11 months after I graduated from college — surgeons made two incisions under my breasts. They excavated my chest and reconstructed my cleavage with silicone implants and human tissue, hoping to remove the potentially precancerous tissue lurking there.

Both of my mother’s sisters died of breast cancer when I was a child. My grandmother died of it before I was born. Close to a dozen other relatives on my mother’s side have also fought a strange, vicious and often undetectable form of the disease.

And although no doctor has been able to detect a genetic mutation in our DNA, the disease clearly runs in my family like the dark color of our eyes, the curls in our hair and our malfunctioning thyroids.

So as my mother fought the most challenging battle of her life, I, too, engaged in combat: a pre-emptive war against my genes.

I had always known that the operation, a prophylactic double mastectomy, was inevitable, but it didn’t occur to me until late last year that I would be on the operating table before meeting my husband, raising children and developing a career.

When my mother’s illness took a turn for the worse, I believed I had to act. As difficult as it was to imagine undergoing it at such a young age, it was impossible to imagine undergoing it without her. So I left Teach for America, moved home to be with my mother and prepare for my surgery, and transformed myself into a macrobiotically inclined housekeeper.

When I wasn’t buying organic root vegetables to supplement my mother’s new cancer-fighting diet, I was explaining my decision to doctors, family members and friends.

I sat with people for hours, waiting for them to get over the shock of my decision and accept it. One cousin thought I was making a mistake and begged me to wait. A handful of people stopped returning my calls without explanation, though one admitted later that she “just couldn’t handle it.”

During that time, I endured being poked and prodded by various surgeons (including one who said I would be “forever mutilated” by my decision), seven hours on an operating table and two months of physical therapy.

But I had plans. Not long after my operation, I would be off to the Middle East and a country involved in an entirely different kind of war. Thanks to the Birthright Israel Foundation, I could look forward to a 10-day all-expense-paid trip to the Holy Land, with 40 of my soon-to-be closest friends. We would be following in the footsteps of 160,000 other young Jewish adults who were beneficiaries of the same program.

Exactly three months after I left the hospital, an active-duty soldier introduced himself to our group on a street in Jerusalem. He would be accompanying us for several days as we traveled through the desert.

“I’m Matan,” he said, his hand outstretched. “My name means gift.”

That day he detailed his experience in the second Lebanon war to a group of falafel-eating American tourists at a cafe in the Old City. He told us about a botched mission during the summer of 2006. “My soldier, he died in the helicopter ride home,” he said.

Over the course of the next four days I came to know an intensely antiwar commander who cared deeply about the safety of his soldiers and the future of his country. He yearned for his government to change tactics, improve social welfare programs for the Palestinians and reconsider the impact of the West Bank wall.

Glynis Ann Ritchie lives in New York City.