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had been an officer in Arik Sharon’s original Unit 101, and Nachmias was one
of the earliest recruits to Company A. They shook my hand and motioned me
into a Jeep. As we drove out of the base, they peppered me with questions about
almost anything except the army: the kibbutz, school, sports. Then, Ben-Zvi
pulled the Jeep to the side of the road, turned around to face me and asked: “Is it
true you can pick locks?”
Yes, I said. “Do you want me to show you?” He said that wouldn’t be
necessary.
“Ts it true you can navigate? Read maps?” Nachmias asked. I said yes.
They drove me back to the base in silence. “OK,” Nachmias said. “You'll
probably hear from us.”
I didn’t. But as basic training was winding down, I got a further order: to
report to an address in Tzahala, a neighborhood in north Tel Aviv where a lot of
military officers lived. It was a small house with a metal gate outside. I was met
at the door by a man about 30 in shorts and a T-shirt who introduced himself as
Avraham Arnan. He led me inside. He unfurled a map of Jerusalem and the
surrounding hills. He pointed to a spot on the southwest of the city. He drew a
wide, curving line through the hills to a second point. “You know how to read a
map?” he asked. When I nodded, he said: “I want you to describe to me — just as
if you were walking on this line — exactly what you see, as you make your way
to the place I marked.” I used the elevation lines on the map as a guide, and the
positioning of the hills and woodland and villages on the map, and began
describing how each stage would look. When I was finished, his only response
was the hint of a smile. When he spoke, it wasn’t about the map. It was, again,
about picking locks. “How did you learn?” he asked. I explained how I'd cut
into the locks, figured out how they worked and made a set of tools to open
them. “Thank you,” he said. “You can return to your unit.”
Though he hadn’t said so, I got a feeling this was the Sayeret Matkal
equivalent of a final job interview. When I got back to Beersheva, I dug around
as discreetly as possible for details about Avraham Arnan. I learned he had
served in 1948 in the hills around Jerusalem, so he would have known first-hand
the terrain he asked me to describe. That, I guessed, explained the half-smile.
But I was entering my last week of tironut. 1 still had no idea whether I’d be
spending the next couple of years inside an APC — or in a sayeret whose
function was a mystery, beyond the fact it seemed less interested in whether my
boots were shined than whether I could pick a lock.
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