Kapusta was our guide on our punishing five-day treks through the Negev. Though Avraham would see us off at the start, he stayed back at the base. In a couple of the exercises, we relied on carrier pigeons to keep in touch with the base, until Kapusta began killing them for dinner. Once, on a searingly hot desert afternoon, hours from the nearest hospital, he spotted a poisonous snake. He used pieces of wood to pry its head up from the sand, grabbed its neck and strangled it.
We also studied some Arabic, though most of the Sephardi recruits already spoke the language. My tutor was a Cairo-born Jew named Amin. In part because he enjoyed mathematics and played the violin, we hit it off immediately. He was also deaf in one ear. Languages have never been my forte. Even in Hebrew, I have a slight lisp. That made mastering Arabic even harder. Still, Amin would frequently compliment me on my accent, at which point the others in the class would point out that I was lucky he was hard of hearing.
A year in, we were given a classroom briefing on what to do if we fell into enemy hands. The gist was to tell them only our name, rank and serial number. But we had a special session with Gibli, who told us about what captivity was really like. He had been shot and wounded during a retaliation operation in 1954 and was captured by the Jordanians. Until his release, he was kept in solitary confinement and tortured. The details of his imprisonment, the beatings and the cigarette burns, were lurid. Partly because we were developing a bit of commando self-confidence — but mostly to hide the discomfort of wondering how each of us would react to being in enemy hands — we heckled him over an account that seemed to get more heroic with each retelling. He wisely ignored us. He told us that survival would be down not just to physical strength. It required strength of mind, the kind of subtlety required to give your captors something to keep them at bay and to establish some form of human bond, to but withhold anything of genuine value.
A few weeks later, the whole sayeret held a four-day exercise in the Galilee. On the second night, at about four in the morning, we shook off our backpacks and settled in for a few hours’ sleep. The first thing I heard was shouting in Arabic. I saw a guy hovering over me, his face covered. He handcuffed me, pulled a burlap sack over my head, yanked me to me feet and led me off. We were piled into the back of a truck. From the whispered comments around me, I assumed all twenty of us had been taken. We drove for nearly four hours. Twice, I got an slap across the face, more painful because of the burlap. I kept
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