HOUSTON – Steven Plumb saw the caller ID when the phone rang early Tuesday. It was an Israeli number, but not one the Houston father knew. One of his sons is a member of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF).
“So the first thing that I thought was what’s happened to my son that somebody else is calling me. I knew that they had taken away their phones,” Plumb said. He knew his son was somewhere along the border with Lebanon, but that’s all.
“I answer the call and it’s my son speaking to me, which was immediately a sense of relief, but brought in another sense of dread that if you’re calling me, you’re telling me you’re going into battle, which he did. He said, ‘I wanted to let you know that in five minutes we’re moving out and we’re going into Lebanon.’ And I’m like, what do I say? This could be the last words I speak to my son. I don’t know if he’s going to come back alive. I don’t know if he’s going to come back wounded. So I wished him peace. I wished him strength. I told him a happy New Year because tomorrow night starts the Jewish New Year,” Plumb said. “He’s going to be spending it defending the Jewish people in the state of Israel, which is, in my opinion, a very brave and high calling to answer and to do. I’m very proud of him. And I told him, ‘I love you. And we, your mom and I are hoping and praying for you.’”
Plumb said his son has been in the IDF since October 7, 2023, when the Israeli-Gaza war started.
“And so we initially fell into this sinkhole of watching every scrap of news, looking for any tidbit, trying to understand what’s going on. And we were paralyzed. We couldn’t function. We couldn’t take care of the daughter who was the child who was still living here. And that wasn’t fair to her. It wasn’t fair to all of us. We, both my wife and I both work. We needed to get our focus back on work and taking care of things. And so we learn how to push those things out. And that’s what every Israeli family does when they have a child in the IDF, they don’t think about it. You have to push it out of your mind. You have to be strong because you have to be strong for your child.”
Plumb’s two other children went to bomb shelters when the missile launch started Tuesday.
He recounts what their day was like in the video above.
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