Amos was also physically brave, or at least intent on seeming so. Not long after his parents moved him from Jerusalem, in 1950, to the coastal city of Haifa, he found himself at a swimming pool with other kids. The pool had a ten-meter diving platform. The kids challenged him to jump off it. Amos was twelve years old but didn’t yet know how to swim. In Jerusalem, during the war of independence, they hadn’t had water to drink, much less to fill swimming pools with. Amos found a big kid and said, I’m going to do this, but I need you to be in the pool when I land, to pull me up from the bottom. Amos jumped, and the big kid rescued him from drowning and pulled him out of the pool.
Entering high school, Amos, like all Israeli kids, needed to decide if he would specialize in math and science or in the humanities. The new society exerted great pressure on boys to study math and science. That’s where the status was, and the future careers. Amos had a gift for math and science, perhaps more than any other boy. And yet alone among the bright boys in his class—and to the bemusement of all—he pursued the humanities. Another risky leap into the unknown: He could teach himself math, Amos said, and he couldn’t ignore the thrill of studying with the humanities teacher, a man named Baruch Kurzweil. “In contrast to most of the teachers, who spread boredom and superficiality, I’m full of enjoyment and amazement in his classes in Hebrew literature and philosophy,” Amos wrote to his older sister Ruth, who had moved to Los Angeles. Amos wrote poetry for Kurzweil and told people he planned to become a poet or a literary critic.*
He formed an intense, private, possibly romantic relationship with a new student named Dahlia Ravikovitch. She’d turned up one day, morosely, in their high school class. After her father’s death she’d lived on a kibbutz, which she loathed, then bounced unhappily through a series of foster homes. She was the picture of social alienation, or at any rate the 1950s Israeli version of it, and yet Amos, the most popular kid in the school, took up with her. The other kids didn’t know what to make of it. Amos still looked like a boy; Dahlia seemed, in every way, already a grown woman. He loved the outdoors and games; she . . . well, when all the other girls went out to gym class, she sat at the window and smoked. Amos loved being with big groups of people; Dahlia was a loner. It was only later, when Dahlia’s poetry claimed Israel’s highest literary prizes and she became a global sensation, that people said, “Oh, that made sense. Two geniuses.” Just as it made sense, after Baruch Kurzweil became Israel’s most prominent literary critic, that Amos had wanted to study with him. But it did, and it didn’t. Amos was the most insistently upbeat person anyone knew. Dahlia, like Kurzweil, attempted suicide. (Kurzweil succeeded.)
Like a lot of the Jewish kids in Haifa in the early 1950s, Amos joined a leftist youth movement called the Nahal. He was soon elected a leader. The Nahal—the word was an acronym for the Hebrew phrase meaning “Fighting Pioneer Youth”—was a vehicle to move young Zionists from school onto kibbutzim. The idea was that they would serve as soldiers and guard the farm for a couple of years and then become farmers.
During Amos’s final year in high school, the swashbuckling Israeli general Moshe Dayan came to Haifa to speak to the students. A boy who happened to be in the audience recalls, “He says all those who go to the Nahal, raise your hands? A huge number did. Dayan says, ‘You are traitors. We don’t want you growing tomatoes and cucumbers. We want you fighting.’” The next year every youth group in Israel was asked to pick twelve kids out of every hundred to serve their country not as farmers but paratroopers. Amos looked more like a boy scout than an elite soldier, but he volunteered immediately. Too light to qualify, he drank water until he made weight.
At paratrooper school Amos and the other young men were turned into symbols of the new country: warriors and killing machines. Cowardice wasn’t an option. Once they’d proven that they could jump to the ground from a height of eighteen feet without breaking anything, they were taken up in old World War II planes built of wood. The propeller was at the same level as the door but just in front of it, so there was this strong gust of wind to throw you backward the moment you stepped out. The light on the door was red. They checked each other’s equipment until the light turned green, and, one by one, they moved forward: Anyone who hesitated was pushed out.
The first few jumps, a lot of the young men hesitated; they needed a little push. One kid in Amos’s group refused to jump and was ostracized for the rest of his life. (“It took real bravery not to jump,” a former paratrooper later said.) Amos never hesitated. “He was always on the extreme end of enthusiastic when it came to jumping out of airplanes,” recalls fellow paratrooper Uri Shamir. He jumped fifty times, maybe more. He jumped behind enemy lines. He jumped into battle in 1956, in the Sinai campaign. Once, he jumped by accident into a hornet’s nest and was stung so badly he passed out. After university, in 1961, he flew for the first time in his life without a parachute, to graduate school in the United States. As his plane descended, he looked at the earth below with genuine curiosity, turned to the person sitting beside him, and said, “I’ve never landed.”
* * *
Soon after he joined the paratroopers, Amos became a platoon commander. “It is amazing how quickly one is able to adapt to a new way of life,” he wrote to his sister in Los Angeles. “The boys my age were no different than I was other than the two stripes on my arm. Now they salute me and follow my every command: to run and to crawl. And now this relationship is accepted, even by me, and seems natural to me.” The letters Amos wrote home were censored and offer only a glimpse of his combat experience. He was sent on reprisal missions, which invited atrocities on both sides. He lost men, and saved them. “During one of our ‘payback missions,’ I saved one of my soldiers and received honorable mention,” he wrote to his sister. “I did not think I had done anything heroic, I just wanted my soldiers to return home safely.”
There were other ordeals, of which he did not write, and seldom spoke. A sadistic senior Israeli officer wanted to test how far men could travel without their usual provisions and deprived them of water for great stretches. The experiment ended when one of Amos’s men died of dehydration; Amos testified against his commanding officer at the latter’s court-martial. One night Amos’s men threw a blanket over another sadistic officer’s head and beat him savagely. Amos didn’t join in the beating, but in the subsequent investigation, he helped the men who had done it avoid prosecution. “When they ask you questions, just bore them with lots of irrelevant details and they will be thrown off the scent,” he told them, and it had worked.