asked what he knew about the car outside. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s not mine.”

asked what he knew about the car outside. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s not mine.” They took it away. As insistently as I, and others in Sayeret Matkal, had wanted to play our part on the battlefields of the Six-Day War — in the Sinai, on the Golan, in the bitter battle to capture Jerusalem, or amid the olive-green hills and valleys of the West Bank — we had to accept that, at most, we’d been freelance support troops. Or mere spectators. But while it would be many years before this was openly acknowedlged, we did play an important part in the outcome. Because Dayan had been called back as Defense Minister only days before the war, he had wisely decided not to alter the plan for the preemptive air strikes. But he did adjust our ground advance. Just as with Eshkol’s knowledge of the initial Egyptian advance in the Sinai before the war, Dayan’s judgements were informed by detailed, real-time intelligence on where enemy tanks and troops were located, what they were doing, and what how and when they were planning to advance. As speculation mounted after the war about how Israel seemed to know so much the Arab forces, Meir Amit’s successor as Head of Military Intelligence, Ahrahle Yariv, even engaged in some misdirection. He was anxious to avoid jeopardizing future sayeret bugging operations. In a speech on how the war had been won, he included a reference to a “high-ranking spy” in the Egyptian army who, he implied, had leaked critical information. The “spy” was the series of intercepts we’d attached to the Egyptians’ main military communications network in the Sinai, and to the telephone poles on the Golan Heights. On a deeply personal level, too, the war left its mark on Sayeret Matkal. Though the fighting had been brief, people did die. Thousands of Egyptians, Syrians and Jordanians. And about 650 Israelis. Some of were not just people we knew. They included close friends. Nechemia Cohen, the officer I’d joined in our failed attempt to defuse the booby-trap in the Sinai before the war, entered Gaza on the first day in his new role as deputy commander of Amsalem’s paratroop unit. Amsalem was killed early on, so Nechemia took command. He was shot and killed fifteen minutes later. To this day, he and I share the distinction of being the most decorated soldiers in Israel’s history. Had he lived, I have no doubt that it is an honor he would have held alone. This was the first close friend from the unit we’d lost. We did not mourn him openly. For young soldiers of my generation, especially but not only those raised with the additional kibbutz ethos of stolid self-control, there was an embedded sense that such individual displays of emotion were an indulgence, and luxury 94 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011565