He decided to make aliya after graduating and to join the IDF, so he showed up at the draft board within days of moving here. He decided he should visit an Arab country before moving here, so he backpacked around Jordan, alone. But what struck me most was not so much these big decisions, but how this pattern permeated his life at the micro level.

Alex wouldn't think about writing letters, he would just write them from an airplane he was about to jump out of in paratroop training; on a few minutes' break in a grueling hike, while all his colleagues were collapsing with exhaustion; while guarding (when he wasn't supposed to). No window of time was too small to fill with a letter or a drawing.

Reading Alex's letters makes one realize how self-absorbed we all are. Here he was, a "lone soldier" in basic training with "kids" (as he rightly called them) four years his junior, struggling with physical challenges, tormented at times by whether he had made the right choice. Yet he would write to each of us about our lives and problems as if he had not a care in the world.

As a writer and editor, I am particularly impressed by how cleanly he expressed himself in a pre-computer era, with simply a pen and paper. Alex wrote like he drew fast, naturally, and with a sparing use of lines.

This is a powerful combination not just because anyone reading the book feels like they have lost someone they just got to know, but because it is hard not to take lessons for your own life. Its effect is similar to what might happen if one took the High Holy Day liturgy to heart that is, a push not to just make those new year's resolutions, but to actually carry them out.

The other striking thing about Alex's thoughts from 15 years ago is how much has happened since then, and yet how we have essentially returned to the starker version of the Arab-Israeli conflict that existed in his day. Alex lived in a world without the Internet, before the first intifada, during the final throes of the Cold War; and, of course, before the Oslo Accords, Camp David, the current war and September 11.

And yet a letter to a friend from Cornell shows the same fundamental dilemma we have today: how to fight a war for survival under the scrutiny of the world and our own values.

As Alex explained, "You see, the officer must think, and do his thinking with a sense of justice far less abstract than that of the law professor or the civil judge... The young men I'm with are learning to think and make decisions harder than any in the civilian world, and they are not abstract or far away."

Alex continued, "We will win the next war, as we've won every war until now, and Israel will not be pushed into the sea.

"But I don't want to lecture anymore about Zionism and decision making. I'd rather tell you about walking through a wadi in the middle of the night with a million stars over my head, and singing as I walk because I'm so content and so enjoying myself, and climbing mountains and looking over the desert, and seeing eagles and a huge waddling porcupine, and the goodness of the rest which always comes after a night of trekking with so much weight on my shoulders... I'm feeling wonderful and very much at peace with my decision to stay on."

I still miss you, Alex.

For more about Alex and his book, see http://www.alexsinger.org.

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