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Chapter Six

The French have an expression for love at first sight: coup de foudre. A thunderbolt. That was how it felt when I’d set eyes on nineteen-year-old Nili Sonkin in mid-February 1963.

It was my first visit to the kirya in Tel Aviv. I’d been told to report to the administrative section, to register my formal change of status from a mere draftee to a staff officer, something I’d managed to overlook amid the demands of our first sayeret operations on the Golan. Since I didn’t know which office to go to, I asked a girl sitting at a desk near the entrance. She looked up with a wide smile. When she directed me to the second floor, it wasn’t just her voice that struck me: multi-timbered, almost like a musical composition. It was her eyes. Bright, radiant, green. Full of playful, unapologetic self-confidence.

In the weeks that followed, I invented a series of excuses to return to the kirya. I introduced myself to her, with as much composure as I could muster, and on each further visit chatted to her a bit more. I told her about growing up in Mishmar Hasharon, about math and music, about Israel, and how, as a soldier in the past few years, I’d walked almost every inch of the land – in short, about everything except our still-secret sayeret and our nighttime forays across the border. She, too, opened up about her home and her family and her friends. Though there was another girl I’d been going out with – the younger sister of my old kibbutz co-conspirator, Moshe – she was more a friend than a girlfriend. I’d never before felt anything like the connection I sensed with Nili, nor anything like the race in my heartbeat as I set out to see her.

I also found myself gripped by an unexpected, and unfamiliar, lack of self-assurance. I was now 22, three years older than Nili. I had the inbred confidence of a kibbutznik, the quiet sense of specialness which, at least for another decade or so, would give the children of the kibbutzim a disproportionate place in Israel’s government and army, media and the arts. The same confidence which had convinced me as a raw recruit back in boot camp that I could lead a supply convoy to the edge of the Sinai. Since then, I’d begun to make a mark in Sayeret Matkal as well, leading its first clandestine operation and receiving a citation from the chief-of-staff. Yet with Nili, I couldn’t help feeling unmoored, totally out of my depth. She was part of a different Israel. She was a Tel Avivit, born and raised in the largest and brashest city in our young state, a place which was everything the kibbutz was not. She had graduated from Alliance, a high school

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