Under army regulations, training recruits got a five-day leave every few

Under army regulations, training recruits got a five-day leave every few months during fironut. My first one came a bit later than usual, due to Rotem. But in April 1960, shortly before the Passover holiday, I headed back to Mishmar Hasharon. Despite my minor triumph of desert navigation, I still had every reason to believe I’d be spending the next couple of years in an APC unit in the Negev, and can’t pretend I was looking forward to it. Still, the idea of returning home in my army uniform, at least a bit stronger and bulkier than before, did give me a sense of pride. It was on my third day back, when I was in the dining hall with a half-dozen schoolmates-turned-soldiers, that Avraham Ramon sat down and joined us. He was a yeled chutz, one of the “boys from outside” who had joined our class when we were taken out of the regional high school. He, too, was now in the army. As we were finishing lunch, he asked me: “How’s fironut?” “Tough,” I said. “Boring.” Smiling, he said: “How would you feel about joining a sayeret?” The question took me by surprise. In Hebrew, sayeret meant “reconnaissance unit”. It was the name given to special units that carried out missions behind enemy lines, or under particularly exacting conditions. In the early 1960s, there were only two of note. One was Sayeret Golani, attached to the Golani Brigade near the northern border. The truly elite one was Sayeret Tzanhanim, the paratroopers’ sayeret. It had been built from Company A of Battalion 890, where Yigal had served in the 1950s. “Which sayeret?” I asked. “It’s called Sayeret Matkal,” he replied. I’d never heard of it. When I asked what it did, he said: “I’m not allowed to say. But are you interested?” The air of mystery made it seem only more enticing. And no matter what it did, it had to be a step up from what lay ahead of me in the Negev. “Yeah. Sure,” I replied. I heard nothing further in the days after I got back to Beersheva. But at the end of the month, I was ordered to report to a small hut in an army base near Tel Aviv. It belonged to Maka Esser, the personnel department of military intelligence. I was greeted by two men in their late 20s. One of them, shorter even than me, introduced himself as Sami Nachmias. The other was tall and slim and said in a surprisingly quiet voice: “I’m Shmil Ben-Zvi.” They were two names which I, like most Israeli teenagers at the time, knew well. Ben-Zvi 04 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011525