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had been an officer in Arik Sharon’s original Unit 101, and Nachmias was one of the earliest recruits to Company A. They shook my hand and motioned me into a Jeep. As we drove out of the base, they peppered me with questions about almost anything except the army: the kibbutz, school, sports. Then, Ben-Zvi pulled the Jeep to the side of the road, turned around to face me and asked: “Is it true you can pick locks?”

Yes, I said. “Do you want me to show you?” He said that wouldn’t be necessary.

“Is it true you can navigate? Read maps?” Nachmias asked. I said yes.

They drove me back to the base in silence. “OK,” Nachmias said. “You’ll probably hear from us.”

I didn’t. But as basic training was winding down, I got a further order: to report to an address in Tzahala, a neighborhood in north Tel Aviv where a lot of military officers lived. It was a small house with a metal gate outside. I was met at the door by a man about 30 in shorts and a T-shirt who introduced himself as Avraham Arnan. He led me inside. He unfurled a map of Jerusalem and the surrounding hills. He pointed to a spot on the southwest of the city. He drew a wide, curving line through the hills to a second point. “You know how to read a map?” he asked. When I nodded, he said: “I want you to describe to me – just as if you were walking on this line – exactly what you see, as you make your way to the place I marked.” I used the elevation lines on the map as a guide, and the positioning of the hills and woodland and villages on the map, and began describing how each stage would look. When I was finished, his only response was the hint of a smile. When he spoke, it wasn’t about the map. It was, again, about picking locks. “How did you learn?” he asked. I explained how I’d cut into the locks, figured out how they worked and made a set of tools to open them. “Thank you,” he said. “You can return to your unit.”

Though he hadn’t said so, I got a feeling this was the Sayeret Matkal equivalent of a final job interview. When I got back to Beersheva, I dug around as discreetly as possible for details about Avraham Arnan. I learned he had served in 1948 in the hills around Jerusalem, so he would have known first-hand the terrain he asked me to describe. That, I guessed, explained the half-smile. But I was entering my last week of tironut. I still had no idea whether I’d be spending the next couple of years inside an APC – or in a sayeret whose function was a mystery, beyond the fact it seemed less interested in whether my boots were shined than whether I could pick a lock.

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