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Challenging though our training was, I found every bit of it enthralling and, with each new test passed, somehow empowering and exhilarating. This was all the more remarkable because we had still yet to carry out a single operation. If anyone other than Avraham had been in charge, I think the unit might have unraveled. The fact that it didn’t was mostly due to of the ethos he created, the feeling that we were a special breed with a critically important common purpose, and that sooner or later we would be called on to do special things. When we were in uniform, it was camouflage dress. When we were on the base, we mostly wore sandals and shorts. We called each other by our first names, even the officers.

In its first few years, the sayeret sometimes felt less like an army unit than a college fraternity. Every spring, we organized a feast in a cavernous hangar on the edge of our compound. It was called Chag ha Pri, the Feast of the Fruit. For days ahead of the event, we would mount night raids on kibbutzim, “liberating” crates of every kind of fruit imaginable, and chicken and lamb if we got lucky. The only rule was that none of us would steal from our own kibbutzim. Among the guests at the Feast of the Fruit was an unsuspecting selection of senior officers whom Avraham knew. A few of them got into the spirit, like Dado Elazar, his Palmach commander from 1948. The Palmach had held similar foodfests, with delicacies grabbed from nearby kibbutzim. Dado was by this time commander of Israel’s armored corps. Since our sayeret was always short of gasoline for our exercises, he would divert surplus supplies to us. But other guests were less impressed with the pyramids of oranges and avocados and mangoes and watermelons. I could almost hear a voice screaming inside them: these are Israeli soldiers. They’re stealing this stuff.

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It was not until the autumn of 1961, nearly eighteen months after I arrived, that it seemed we might actually be given a real mission. This was largely due to a change at the top of the military. For much of the 1950s, when Dayan was chief-of-staff, his right-hand-man was a Haganah veteran named Meir Amit. In 1961, the term of Dayan’s successor as chief of staff, Haim Laskov, was coming to an end and Amit was in the mix to get the top job. He was already Head of Operations. In practical terms, that made him the number-two man in the armed forces. But the job went to Tzvi Tzur, Laskov’s deputy. Amit decided to accept

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