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Under army regulations, training recruits got a five-day leave every few
months during fironut. My first one came a bit later than usual, due to Rotem.
But in April 1960, shortly before the Passover holiday, I headed back to
Mishmar Hasharon. Despite my minor triumph of desert navigation, I still had
every reason to believe I’d be spending the next couple of years in an APC unit
in the Negev, and can’t pretend I was looking forward to it. Still, the idea of
returning home in my army uniform, at least a bit stronger and bulkier than
before, did give me a sense of pride.
It was on my third day back, when I was in the dining hall with a half-dozen
schoolmates-turned-soldiers, that Avraham Ramon sat down and joined us. He
was a yeled chutz, one of the “boys from outside” who had joined our class
when we were taken out of the regional high school. He, too, was now in the
army. As we were finishing lunch, he asked me: “How’s fironut?”
“Tough,” I said. “Boring.”
Smiling, he said: “How would you feel about joining a sayeret?”
The question took me by surprise. In Hebrew, sayeret meant “reconnaissance
unit”. It was the name given to special units that carried out missions behind
enemy lines, or under particularly exacting conditions. In the early 1960s, there
were only two of note. One was Sayeret Golani, attached to the Golani Brigade
near the northern border. The truly elite one was Sayeret Tzanhanim, the
paratroopers’ sayeret. It had been built from Company A of Battalion 890,
where Yigal had served in the 1950s.
“Which sayeret?” I asked.
“It’s called Sayeret Matkal,” he replied.
I’d never heard of it. When I asked what it did, he said: “I’m not allowed to
say. But are you interested?” The air of mystery made it seem only more
enticing. And no matter what it did, it had to be a step up from what lay ahead
of me in the Negev. “Yeah. Sure,” I replied.
I heard nothing further in the days after I got back to Beersheva. But at the
end of the month, I was ordered to report to a small hut in an army base near Tel
Aviv. It belonged to Maka Esser, the personnel department of military
intelligence. I was greeted by two men in their late 20s. One of them, shorter
even than me, introduced himself as Sami Nachmias. The other was tall and
slim and said in a surprisingly quiet voice: “I’m Shmil Ben-Zvi.” They were
two names which I, like most Israeli teenagers at the time, knew well. Ben-Zvi
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