It was four in the morning California time when the armies of Egypt and Syria launched their attack upon Israel. They’d taken the Israelis by surprise on Yom Kippur. Along the Suez Canal, the 500-man Israeli garrison was overwhelmed by 100,000 Egyptian troops. From the Golan Heights, 177 Israeli tank crews gazed down upon an attacking force of 2,000 Syrian tanks. Amos and Danny, still in the United States trying to become decision analysts, raced to the airport and got the first flight possible to Paris, where Danny’s sister worked in the Israeli embassy. Getting into Israel during a war wasn’t easy. Every inbound El Al plane was crammed with fighter pilots and combat unit commanders who were coming in to replace the men killed in the first days of the invasion. That’s just what you did, if you were an Israeli capable of fighting in 1973: You ran toward the war. Knowing this, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had promised to shoot down any commercial planes attempting to land in Israel. As they waited in Paris for Danny’s sister to talk someone into letting them onto a flight, Danny and Amos bought combat boots. They were made of canvas—lighter than the leather boots issued by the Israeli military.
When the war broke out, Barbara Tversky was on the way to an emergency room in Jerusalem with her eldest son. He had won a contest with his brother to see who could stick a cucumber farthest up his own nose. As they headed home, people surrounded their car and screamed at Barbara for being on the road. The country was in a state of panic: Fighter jets screamed low over Jerusalem to signal all reserves to return to their units. Hebrew University closed. Army trucks rumbled all night through the Tverskys’ usually tranquil neighborhood. The city was black. Street lamps remained off; anyone who owned a car taped over its brake lights. The stars could not have been more spectacular, or the news more troubling—because, for the first time, Barbara sensed that the Israeli government was withholding the truth. This war was different from the others: Israel was losing. Not knowing where Amos was, or what he planned to do, didn’t help. Phone calls were so expensive that when he was in the United States they communicated only by letter. Her situation wasn’t unusual: There were Israelis who would learn that loved ones living abroad had returned to Israel to fight only by being informed that they had been killed in action.
To make herself useful, Barbara went to the library and found the material to write a newspaper article about stress and how to cope with it. A few nights into the conflict, around ten o’clock, she heard footsteps. She was working alone in the study, with the blinds lowered, to avoid letting the light seep out. The kids were asleep. Whoever was coming up the stairs was running; then suddenly Amos bounded from the darkness. The El Al flight that he had taken with Danny had carried as passengers no one but Israeli men returning to fight. It had descended into Tel Aviv in total darkness: There hadn’t even been a light on the wing. Once again, Amos went into the closet and pulled down his army uniform, now with a captain’s insignia on it, and, once again, it fit. At five o’clock the following morning he left.
He had been assigned, with Danny, to the psychology field unit. The unit had grown since the mid-1950s, when Danny had redesigned the selection system. In early 1973 an American psychologist named James Lester, sent by the Office of Naval Research to study Israeli military psychology, wrote a report in which he described the unit they were about to join. Lester marveled at the entire society—a country that had at once the world’s strictest driving tests and the world’s highest automobile accident rates—but seems to have been struck especially by the faith the Israeli military placed in their psychologists. “Failure rate in the officer course is running at 15–20%,” he wrote. “Such confidence does the military have in the mysteries of psychological research that they are asking the Selection Section to try to identify these 15% during the first week in training.”
The head of Israeli military psychology, Lester reported, was an oddly powerful character named Benny Shalit. Shalit had argued for, and received, a new, elevated status for military psychology. His unit had a renegade quality to it; Shalit had gone so far as to sew an insignia of his own design onto its uniform. It consisted of the Israeli olive branch and sword, Lester explained, “topped by an eye which symbolizes assessment, insight, or something along those lines.” In his attempts to turn his psychology unit into a fighting force, Shalit had dreamed up ideas that struck even the psychologists as wacko. Hypnotizing Arabs and sending them to assassinate Arab leaders, for instance. “He actually did hypnotize one Arab,” recalled Daniela Gordon, who served under Shalit in the psychology unit. “They took him to the Jordanian border, and he just ran off.”
A rumor among Shalit’s subordinates—and it refused to die—was that Shalit kept the personality assessments made of all the Israeli military big shots, back when they were young men entering the army, and let them know that he wouldn’t be shy about making them public. Whatever the reason, Benny Shalit had an unusual ability to get his way in the Israeli military. And one of the unusual things Shalit had asked for, and received, was the right to embed psychologists in army units, where they might directly advise commanders. “Field psychologists are in a position to make recommendations on a variety of unconventional issues,” Lester reported to his U.S. Navy superiors. “For example, one noticed that infantry troops in hot weather, stopping to open soft drinks with their ammunition magazines, often damaged the stock. It was possible to redesign the stock so that a tool for opening bottles was included.” Shalit’s psychologists had eliminated the unused sights on submachine guns, and changed the way machine-gun units worked together, to increase the rate at which they fired. Psychologists in the Israeli army were, in short, off the leash. “Military psychology is alive and well in Israel,” concluded the United States Navy’s reporter on the ground. “It is an interesting question whether or not the psychology of the Israelis is becoming a military one.”
What Benny Shalit’s field psychologists might do during an actual battle, however, was unclear. “The psychology unit did not have the faintest idea what to do,” said Eli Fishoff, who served as Benny Shalit’s second-in-command. “The war was totally unexpected. We were just thinking maybe it’s the end of us.” In a matter of days the Israeli army had lost more men, as a percentage of the population, than the United States military lost in the entire Vietnam War. The war was later described by the Israeli government as a “demographic disaster” because of the prominence and talent of the Israelis who were killed. In the psychology unit someone came up with the idea of designing a questionnaire, to determine what, if anything, might be done to improve the morale of the troops. Amos seized upon it, helped to design the questions, and then used the entire exercise more or less as an excuse to get himself closer to the action. “We just got a jeep and went bouncing around in the Sinai looking for something useful to do,” said Danny.
Their fellow psychologists who watched Danny and Amos toss rifles into the back of a jeep and set out for the battlefield thought they were out of their minds. “Amos was so excited—like a little child,” recalled Yaffa Singer. “But it was crazy for them to go to the Sinai. It was so dangerous. It was absolutely crazy to send them out with those questionnaires.” The risk of running directly into enemy tanks and planes was the least of it. There were land mines everywhere; it was easy to get lost. “They didn’t have guards,” said Daniela Gordon, their commanding officer. “They guarded themselves.” All of them felt less concern for Amos than for Danny. “We were very worried about sending Danny on his own,” said Eli Fishoff, head of the field psychologists. “I wasn’t so worried about Amos—because Amos was a fighter.”