Results for “Sayeret Golani”

…e time we installed the communications intercept and covered our tracks, it would be daybreak. Digli and several other sayeret officers were following the mission from their command post in the Sinai, part of the intelligence base our military engineers had built after the war i...

…ate the trepidation with which Israel’s military brass, and Ben-Gurion himself, approached the decision finally to send Sayeret Matkal into action. It was not just the fact that we were a unit uttterly untested in the field. The stakes in the mission we were contemplating were en...

…. He made every one of us feel a part of making this possible. I was one of ten new recruits, bringing the size of the sayeret to twenty. We were almost all teenagers. In fact, the oldest of our officers was 21. Most of the men were Sephardi Jews. For a unit like ours, with the...

/ BARAK / 43 sayeret deputy, my chief of staff. The negotiating team also included Uri Saguy, former head of military intelligence; Gilad Sher, a gifted lawyer I'd known for a quarter of a century and who had been a company commander in my armored brigade in the 1970s; and Amnon...

…enemy communications, we would have to push deeper inside Egypt and Syria. Soon after my return, we began planning the sayeret’s most ambitious mission so far: targeting the main communications system between Suez City, at the southern end of the canal, and Egyptian military hea...

…through the late hours of Wednesday night, we finally settled on our plan: Peled’s major airborne operation, but with a Sayeret Matkal strike force, with its “Ugandan” motorcade, spearheading it. Minutes later, three other C-130s would fly in additional troops to secure the rest...

…t the attack, especially after my assurances that the Lebanese roadblock was not a problem. Yet when we got back to the sayeret base, I realized there was more to his veto than I’d thought. He and Dado had received intelligence saying the Syrians were likely to make a series of f...

…it was clear that it would be by far the most consequential conflict in our country’s history. There was no mission for Sayeret Matkal, nor, it seemed, any prospect of our playing any significant part. The fact that my own role was slightly less peripheral was due to Avraham Arn...

…man I would go on to marry, the previous year. It was through another Cohen, though they were not related: Nechemia, my sayeret friend who was killed in the 1967 war. He invited me to Tel Aviv for a party in the spring, on the Jewish holiday of Purim, and introduced us. Nava was...

…ilitary service was drawing to an end, it hadn’t happened. I did not seriously think of leaving. Though my two years in Sayeret Matkal had been the most physically demanding of my life, they were also the most fulfilling. I did not want to forfeit the chance of being part of its...

…ostly wore sandals and shorts. We called each other by our first names, even the officers. In its first few years, the sayeret sometimes felt less like an army unit than a college fraternity. Every spring, we organized a feast in a cavernous hangar on the edge of our compound. I...

…e could get it installed and working. But the men in my team were soldiers I’d trained from the day they arrived in the sayeret. Achihud Madar was unfailingly surefooted, whether finding his way alone at night on unfamiliar ground or in a firefight inside a building. He also had...

…happened, starting with why we hadn’t known ahead of time that two neighboring states were about to attack us — despite sayeret intercepts that could have given us time to call up all our reserves. Disentangling the details would take months. But we already knew the human cost of...

…rve army general who, when I was chief of staff, had been in charge of the logistics branch of the military. I gave him Sayeret Matkal backup as well, in the person of Danny Yatom, my longtime friend and former sayeret deputy. But all that was process. Winning or losing would co...

Nothing happened for several months. By the early spring of 1973, with my two-year term as sayeret commander winding down, I assumed the operation had been vetoed. I could understand why. As we worked on our plan, it had become clear that getting into the heart of the Lebanese ca...