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When the guns finally fell silent, I had time to give full rein to my thoughts.
There were obviously fundamental questions about how the war had happened,
starting with why we hadn’t known ahead of time that two neighboring states
were about to attack us — despite sayeret intercepts that could have given us
time to call up all our reserves. Disentangling the details would take months.
But we already knew the human cost of those failures. Hundreds of Israeli
soldiers had been killed. The final number would be around 2,800, nearly four
times our losses in 1967. Thousands were wounded, some crippled for life.
Many of the dead were men whom I’d grown up with or served with, including
more than 20 in my own battalion. Some of the dead in other units were close
friends.
I felt exhausted. I also realized that Nava, thousands of miles away in Palo
Alto, and my parents on the kibbutz could still not be sure I had escaped the fate
of so many others. I learned later that my parents had been making daily calls to
Digli, who was working in intelligence in the kirya. Though he had no way of
knowing where I was, he kept assuring them that he had checked with my
commanders and that I was alive and well. Nava had been relying on American
news reports and the relayed assurances from my parents, which she was
seasoned enough as an army wife to treat with skepticism.
I missed her badly, and little Michal. I felt the need to hear their voices. I
drove to one of the brigade communications units. There was a long line in front
of the radio telephone. But within a half-hour, I managed to get a crackly
connection to California. Nava burst into tears when she heard my voice. I told
her I was fine, and that I couldn’t wait to see her and our little girl. Then, my
own eyes dampening, I reeled off the names of friends who had died. In
addition to the brave men I’d lost in my own battalion, there were more than a
dozen others I already knew of. A pair of brothers from Mishmar Hasharon, a
couple of years younger than me, in separate units, but killed within hours of
each other. Another childhood friend, from a nearby moshav, named Rafi
Mitzafon. And Shaul Shalev, a gifted philosophy postgraduate and a brave tank
commander whom I’d become friends with at officers’ school. He’d rescued
three dozen troops from one of the Bar-Lev fortifications in the first hours of the
war, only to be killed trying to get to a tank crew who had taken refuge a few
miles back from the canal.
I’d lost two wonderful sayeret comrades, too: Amit Ben-Horn, the soldier
who’d relayed the order from Motta to abort our second attempt to abduct the
Syrian officers in Lebanon, and Amitai Nachmani, the officer who had
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