Personal recollections of an Israeli brigade commander’s deployment and family health crises

There was silence, a grave look from Peled and Bren, the hint of a smile on Motta’s face, and the meeting was over. Several days later, I was notified of his verdict. I would indeed be named the commander of the 401st Armored Brigade in the Sinai, and promoted to full colonel. Our base was a 15 miles from the canal. It was a huge expanse of sand ringed by metal fencing. We spent three months at a time in this forward deployment and three months in our rear base, 50 miles from the canal. During one of our forward deployments, Motta came on an inspection visit. He wanted to discuss how we planned defend the area near the canal in the event of a repeat of the 1973 war. I told him everything we were doing in the brigade was aimed at ensuring flexibility. I had also been thinking about some of the broader issues relating to our defenses in the south. ““No matter how good our tactics or plans,” I said, “what worries me is that we’re szil/ not looking at our overall approach to defense against Egypt. It’s as if we’ve forgotten that in 1967, when we captured Sinai, it was in order to have a buffer zone. We had /50 miles of sand between southern Israel and the canal. But when the Egyptians attacked in 1973, we defended the desert as if it was the walls of Jerusalem!” Since the 401st was one of two regular brigades on the Egyptian front, it was not easy to make the four-hour drive home to Ramat Hasharon. When I got word Nava was going into labor with our second child, I was leading a training exercise five or six miles from our base. As she was on her way to the hospital, I grabbed my car and headed north. Unlike Michal’s birth, this one was not easy. When the baby emerged, she was struggling to breathe. The immediate danger passed, but she was placed in an incubator. When I got to the hospital, Nava was asleep. I was taken to see our tiny daughter, Yael. When the nurse left, I noticed the baby’s pinkie trapped in the plastic cover of the incubator. I started banging on the window of the room. The nurse rushed back. With a look of sympathy mixed with world-weary experience of other fathers in similar panic, she raised the cover, folded Yael’s tiny hands onto her stomach, and all was well. It was another health crisis which hastened the end of my period as brigade commander. But this time, I was the one in the hospital. I nearly collapsed from high fever and exhaustion. The initial suspicion was some kind of contamination linked to the rudimentary sanitation in the Sinai. When the symptoms persisted, the doctors suggested I probably had hepatitis B. Years later, better diagnostic tools ruled all that out. I’ve never discovered what the 161 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028009