When the guns finally fell silent, I had time to give full rein to my thoughts. There were obviously fundamental questions about how the war had happened, starting with why we hadn’t known ahead of time that two neighboring states were about to attack us — despite sayeret intercepts that could have given us time to call up all our reserves. Disentangling the details would take months. But we already knew the human cost of those failures. Hundreds of Israeli soldiers had been killed. The final number would be around 2,800, nearly four times our losses in 1967. Thousands were wounded, some crippled for life. Many of the dead were men whom I’d grown up with or served with, including more than 20 in my own battalion. Some of the dead in other units were close friends. I felt exhausted. I also realized that Nava, thousands of miles away in Palo Alto, and my parents on the kibbutz could still not be sure I had escaped the fate of so many others. I learned later that my parents had been making daily calls to Digli, who was working in intelligence in the kirya. Though he had no way of knowing where I was, he kept assuring them that he had checked with my commanders and that I was alive and well. Nava had been relying on American news reports and the relayed assurances from my parents, which she was seasoned enough as an army wife to treat with skepticism. I missed her badly, and little Michal. I felt the need to hear their voices. I drove to one of the brigade communications units. There was a long line in front of the radio telephone. But within a half-hour, I managed to get a crackly connection to California. Nava burst into tears when she heard my voice. I told her I was fine, and that I couldn’t wait to see her and our little girl. Then, my own eyes dampening, I reeled off the names of friends who had died. In addition to the brave men I’d lost in my own battalion, there were more than a dozen others I already knew of. A pair of brothers from Mishmar Hasharon, a coupl