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I didn't even know how to use a rifle. But soon I found that the discipline there was not too harsh, and my friends helped me a lot. They instructed me, they prepared my gear, and-the main thing-they taught me a lesson in evasion, how to "get around" the difficulties. They were good at that, Jet me tell you. So in a short time we finished basic training together, all the combat soldiers of the Garin, and we went to join the others in our new military agricultural outpost. 3 It was then that I stopped feeling sorry about flunking the pilot training.

The first day I went to see the wounded soldiers in the hospital. I wanted some sort of special attention from them, thanks perhaps, appreciation for what I had done. Maybe I was expecting too much at that stage. They greeted me as they did all the others. It made me feel very distant all of a sudden. Most of the time I spent with Zvika's parents. His father reacted like a real hero, even helping the rest of us to cope. His mother-bless her, she died of cancer a year later-she wept with us. You know, there is a song of death, a kind of oriental lamentation.

Our commander suddenly awoke from his stupor, and together we explained to the Lebanese policeman that we had several severely injured people that we had to take immediately to the military hospital. This would be his task. If, in ten minutes we did not hear from the hospital-which was just down the street-that they had arrived safely, we were going to take one of the families that lived in our building and shoot them all on the spot. Hostages. We were theatrical enough in our threat, apparently, and the policeman was stupid enough to believe that Israeli soldiers might do such a thing-so it worked.