On Dec. 7, Pearl Harbor Day, a rocket exploded 32 meters from First Lieutenant Kevin Fefferman.

An intelligence officer in the Second Brigade Combat Team of the Army’s Tenth Mountain Division, Fefferman is now serving on a military base in Baghdad.

“I’m fine, all parts still there, no cuts, just a loud boom, and a wow-that-really-happened stare on my face,” he wrote family and friends in an e-mail shortly afterward.

It’s a feeling the young soldier has gotten to know all too well, as he explained in a subsequent e-mail exchange with NJ Jewish News. Fefferman, 25, who grew up in West Orange and celebrated becoming a bar mitzva at Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel in South Orange, agreed to the interview from his base in Baghdad.

He discussed how he has been attacked by rockets and mortar “several times,” acknowledging, “It is kind of scary, because you never know where it will land. I’ve been shot at, had rounds come off the humvee we were in, shot back, and [was] shot at again.”

The violence is directed not only at American soldiers. “I’ve seen people blow themselves up and others killed in the street because one is Sunni and the other Shi’a. It is hard to get used to seeing violence every day. After a while, it just becomes something you can expect to happen. We are in a place where two different sects of people hate each other, while at the same time, they both hate Americans. Now, this isn’t true of everybody in Iraq, just the bad ones.”

He told NJ Jewish News that he has always known he would join the military. “My family has a long tradition of serving the country.” His father, cousin, and two uncles served in the Navy during wartime, and his maternal grandparents both served in the Army during World War II.

He and his younger sister, Corey, both accepted ROTC scholarships to attend the University of Alabama and the University of Tennessee, respectively. (Corey is currently in quartermaster school in Fort Lee, Va.)

Fefferman was writing on a cold day. “It drops into the low 20s in the evenings, and we are in the middle of the rainy season, when everything becomes a mud pit. Driving around the muddy roads tends to remind me of college, when we’d take pickup trucks and jeeps out to the open fields of Alabama and ride through the mud.”

The weather is a marked change from when he arrived in the Middle East last August. “We landed in Kuwait City at about 4 in the morning and the temperature was 113 degrees. By the time we made it to the American camp, it was daylight and the temperature was rising to about 130 degrees. Kuwait may be the hottest place on earth.”

They stayed two weeks in Kuwait before continuing on to Iraq, and the two countries offered a study in contrasts. “Driving around Kuwait, you can still see burning oil fields and packs of camels roaming the land,” he said. “Iraq’s landscape is much different from Kuwait, as we saw palm trees and buildings all around us. The architecture in this country is fantastic and many of the homes we see would sell for millions back in the States. The palaces Saddam built for himself rival castles built during medieval times in Europe.”

Nevertheless, what Fefferman has seen driving around Iraq’s villages has also had an impact on him. “There are many people who have very little,” he said. “The people in many of the villages have little or no power or running water.”

He described landing in Iraq as “a roller-coaster, as the pilots spiral into the airfield to avoid gunfire and missiles that may be fired during the landing.”

Being Jewish adds another layer of meaning to Fefferman’s deployment to Iraq. Being in the Middle East, he wrote, “I feel closer to God than I ever have before. I work with another Jewish officer over here, and have spoken to the Jewish chaplain on occasion throughout my tour.”

He described the Iraqis he has interacted with on the base as people who “seem open to other people’s beliefs and are just curious to know.”

He added, “Sometimes they would ask me about Hanukka and such, what the story is behind [the holiday] and who Jewish people believe in, as they know only Allah as God.”

While Fefferman said he stays away from discussing religion and politics generally (“Dad” — Harry Fefferman, 59, a science teacher at the Cleveland Elementary School in Orange — “taught me that a long time ago”), he did have one run-in that forced him to fire an interpreter. The interpreter “wasn’t really happy with the Saddam verdict and began to badmouth some of the members of the unit to the other people he lives with. I was later told he called me a Jew and told the other interpreters that.” But Fefferman insisted this was not the norm. “The Iraqi who told me said, ‘Sir, I do not care what you are. People shouldn’t be concerned with that.’”

Harry Fefferman, however, said he has plenty else to be concerned about. (Kevin’s mother died when he was 10.)

“Every day is scary,” said Harry. “Kevin is a military intelligence officer. His work is classified. I don’t even know what he really does. I watch the news, but every time I hear there’s a casualty, my heart skips a beat. You never know, and you’re always afraid something bad is going to happen.”

He writes to his son every day, in part out of pure superstition.

“I figure as long as there’s a letter on the way, he’ll be fine,” said the soldier’s father. “I’ve never missed a day.”