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demanded a meeting with Dado before our attack in Rue Verdun. Amit died in
the fighting near Ismailia, at the northern end of the canal, as Arik Sharon’s
units pushed on after the crossing. The day before the end of the war, both
Amitai and Amiram Levin were part of an operation to take over the Fayid Air
Base across the canal. When an Egyptian RPG hit their Jeep, Amiram was
wounded. Amitai was killed.
I thought, too, of Yishai Izhar: the friend struck down beside me, who I’d
cradled in my arms on the top of my tank, trying to stop the bleeding.
“Oh Ehud,” Nava said. “It’s like 1967 all over again.”
“No,” I said. “Worse. Much worse.”
A few weeks later, | was coming out of the kirya when I ran into another
friend, whom I’d first met at Hebrew University. Like me, he had been a junior
officer in 1967. His name was Ron Ben-Ishai. He would go on to become a top
journalist, covering the military for Israel’s best-selling newspaper, Yediot
Achronot. In the early autumn of 1967, we were still transfixed by the idea of
being able to visit areas of biblical Israel, which for years had been under
Jordanian rule. With a few other friends who were young officers, nine of us in
all, Ron and I embarked on a trek from the southern edge of Jerusalem, weaving
our way through the Judaean Desert toward Kumeran, on the Dead Sea.
Now a very different war had come and gone. I’d fought in it. Ron, as what
is now called an embedded journalist, had been with Danny Matt’s paratroopers
when they’d crossed the canal. He was alongside another of Arik’s units
fighting out of the bridgehead on the far bank of the canal. That both of us had
seen terrible suffering over the past few weeks did not need saying. But Ron
said he wanted to show me something. Fishing into his wallet, he took out a
carefully folded photograph. He had taken it in 1967, just six years earlier, to
mark our Judaean trek. There we were. All nine of us. Young. Full of optimism.
And probably a bit full of ourselves as well.
Ron and I were the only two left alive.
We had won the war, and not just because our forces were now within 60
miles of Cairo, and only 25 from Damascus. We had been attacked by two huge
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