the skies; strike out alone at night, with sayeret-issue night goggles, to bring back the surviving soldiers after we realized we’d lost one of our APCs ina battle with Egyptians; and even, because I’d been there before on sayeret missions, leading a joint armored force across the Egyptian desert to complete the encirclement of Sadat’s Third Army and effectively end the war. Still, the memory which has stayed with me longest — summoning back all the miscues and misjudgements of some of Israel’s top commanders, and the terrible price paid by the men on the ground to turn things around — was the fight for an experimental agricultural facility located just a few miles back from our side of the Suez Canal. * * * On Israeli military maps, it was called the Chinese Farm. In fact, it was Japanese experts who helped set it up in the then-Egyptian Sinai before the Six- Day War. When we captured it in 1967, deciphering the characters on the equipment had evidently proven beyond our linguistic capabilities. Thus, Chinese Farm. Now, it was back in Egyptian hands. The sprawling complex, with its web of large irrigation ditches, controlled the main transport corridor from the Sinai to the bank of the canal. Before dawn on October 16, one of the battalions in Arik Sharon’s brigade, under a veteran paratroop commander named Danny Matt, had managed to cross the canal on rubber rafts with an advance force of some 750 men and a few dozen tanks. But it was a precarious beachhead, vulnerable to Egyptian air strikes, artillery and Sagger fire. Hopes for any large-scale Israeli counterattack rested on moving forward an enormous roller bridge, and hundreds more tanks, to complete the crossing — impossible without retaking the Chinese Farm. The first I knew of the scale of Egyptian resistance there was about four in the morning on the seventeenth. I got a radio call ordering me to get my battalion ready to move, ASAP. We were attached the other main armored force, along with Arik’s, as