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ambitious. We intended to bug the communications line running east from Banias, the Syrians’ base in the north of the Golan, toward Quneitra, their main headquarters. That meant taking a longer route, beginning with a climb onto a plateau about 200 feet high and crossing the Banias River toward the Syrian base.

We had nearly three weeks for our final preparations. After two years of sayeret training, I was confident that, physically, we would be up to the task. But even without the obvious jitters emanating from the kirya, I could not help but be aware of the possibility, and the cost, of failure. Every evening, I would stake out time to go through everything that might conceivably go wrong. Years later, when I went to do my graduate studies at Stanford, I was exposed to words of wisdom from a non-kibbutznik – Benjamin Franklin – which probably best summed up what drove my planning for the sayeret’s first operation, and the others that would follow. “Failing to prepare,” he wrote, “is to preparing for failure.”

Running into Syrian soldiers was, of course, top of the list of potential pitfalls. But land mines were also a danger. I got a map of the area from military intelligence which, in theory at least, showed the location of mines all along the edge of the Golan. But it had been compiled over a period of nearly two decades on the basis of information from shepherds, smugglers and the occasional Arab agent. Whenever they reported seeing the telltale combination of fencing and yellow danger triangles, the place was marked. Once it was marked, no one in intelligence headquarters dared erase it. The result was that the map now showed an almost unbroken stretch of mines. And within the amount of time that we had to get ready, there was no way of knowing which of the minefields was still there.

The timing was chosen by the cycle of the moon. We wanted to cross into Syria in as near to total darkness as possible. That meant the final days of September. Unlike Tubul, who had been commanding the team from the moment they had joined the sayeret, I’d been working with them for only a couple of months. My deputy for the operation, Avi Telem, was also a newcomer. But he was smart, steady and he had served in the Golani Brigade, so he knew the terrain along the border.

Avraham could not hide his own nervousness as the operation drew nearer. A week before we were due to set off, he asked whether we were planning a further, full-scale exercise. When I said the final run-through was set for the following night, in the Negev, he told me he wanted Meir Har-Zion to attend.

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