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Chapter Nine The phone rang in our apartment in Palo Alto at 4:30 in the morning. We had been in the US for barely six weeks. It was the Sixth of October 1973: Yom Kippur, the holiest date on the Jewish calendar. I was still a bit groggy from the night before. We had been out at a get-to-know-you event for some of the several dozen Israelis, and several hundred American Jewish students, at Stanford. While I only vaguely recognized the voice on the other end of the line, her words instantly jolted me awake: “The boss is busy,” she said. “But he wants you to know. A war has started back home.” Her boss was Motta Gur, who was by now Israel’s military attaché in Washington and was my nominal commander for my period in the United States. “I need to talk to Motta,” I said. She passed him the phone. “I want you to know I’m going back,” I told him. Motta’s reply took my mind back 15 months, to our on-again-off-again mission to abduct the Syrian officers, with Motta and Dado in the command post, intent on reining in the “young bulls” of the sayeret. “Ehud,” he said, “from what I’m hearing, I don’t think we are missing a major war.” “What’s this we?” I said. Motta was a general, at the upper reaches of the armed forces, officially posted to Washington. I was a young officer, just starting to work my way up the chain of field command. “I can’t afford to miss even a non-major war,” I said. “Pll check in with you when I get to New York.” “Major” would turn out to be, if anything, an understatement. Yet all I knew, as I kissed Nava and Michal goodbye and got a cab to San Francisco airport, was that Israel was again at war. By the time I joined the swarm of Israelis around the El Al desk at Kennedy eight hours later, the picture was clearer, and more worrying with each new report from back home. Surprise attacks by Syria and Egypt — armies we’d not just defeated, but humiliated, six years earlier — had pinned down and pushed back our forces on the Golan Heights and in the Sinai. Without any advance call-up, many reservists were only now reaching the front lines. As hundreds of people pressed for seats on the El Al flight, I was fortunate to receive a boost up the pecking order from another man in line. Since the Sabena operation, the existence of Sayeret Matkal had become a bit less secret. Still, the identity of the sayeret commander was known to just a few people outside the unit. So skittish were the army security people that before I’d left for Stanford, 146 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_027994