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A few weeks later, my term as commander ended. The handover to my
successor, Giora Zorea, turned out to be more elaborate than my arrival, though
not at my instigation. With both Talik and Avraham in attendance, Dado
presented me with my fifth tza/ash. It was not for Beirut. Not for the operation
against the Syrian officers, or the unprecedented access our intelligence
missions were providing into Egypt’s military communications. Dado said it
was for all of the above. And not just for leading the unit of which I’d been a
part almost from the start. It was for my part in bringing it to maturity. When I
replied, I am sure everyone knew I was speaking from the heart in saying that
my every moment with Sayeret Matkal had been a privilege. And that this latest
commendation was an award for the achievements the whole sayeret.
Dado did me another good turn. As my stint as commander drew to an end, I
knew what I hoped to do next in the army: to use my tank training to work my
way up the command chain in the armored corps. But like past sayeret
commanders, it was assumed I would first spend time at the US Marine Corps
staff college in Quantico, Virginia. I had other ideas. I wanted to exercise other
parts of my mind, by doing postgraduate work at a normal American university.
Dado agreed.
I still had to get accepted. The first step was to take the post-graduate entry
exam, the GRE. There were two parts to it. The first involved mathematics and
abstract thinking, the second English language. If my fate had rested on my
English grade, I’d have ended up at Quantico. I finished in the 28" percentile.
But in the other part, I was in the 99.6" percentile. I applied to four universities:
Harvard, Yale, MIT and Stanford. Amazingly, I got accepted by all of them. I
chose Stanford, mainly because it allowed a far greater latitude in choosing my
program of study. Also, the weather.
In early August 1973, Nava and I joined my parents and hers on a sunny
afternoon in Mishmar Hasharon to celebrate Michal’s third birthday and say
goodbye. We were heading to Palo Alto, California, with every expectation of
two years of intellectual stimulation, new friends, new experiences and
something approximating a more normal family life. My “other” family, the
Israeli army, also had reason to believe a period of new possibilities lay ahead.
The threat of terror remained, of course. There had also been a brief bout of
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