Chapter Fifteen On the morning of April 1, 1991. I got up even earlier than usual, to visit the graves of the men who had lost their lives in my battalion in the Yom Kippur War. I also went to pay my respects to Uzi Yairi, killed when he’d rushed from his desk in the kiryva to join the Sayeret Matkal attack at the Savoy Hotel. Then Nava and I drove to Jerusalem. At Israel’s national military cemetery on Mount Herzl, we stood before the resting place of Nechemia Cohen, Yoni Netanyahu, Dado, and Avraham Arnan. From there, we went to the Prime Minister’s office. With Dan Shomron and his wife looking on, Shamir presented me with my third star and formally made me chief of staff. For years, I'd developed the habit of carrying around a notebook in which I’d jot down thoughts on things I thought that the Israeli military, and I as an officer, could have done better: errors, oversights, and how we might fix them. In the weeks before becoming ramatkal, I'd filled dozens of pages on issues large and small I hoped to address as the commander of the armed forces. A lot of them dealt with what I sensed was an erosion of cohesiveness in the army, and, since ours was a citizen military, a fraying of the relationship between the army and Israeli society. To some degree, this was inevitable in a country now nearly 45 years old: developed economically and free of the kind of existential threat we’d faced in the early years of the state. But the political divisions over the war in Lebanon, and morale-sapping need to quell the violence on the West Bank and in Gaza had further strained our unity of purpose. Militarily, we were now indisputably strong enough to defeat any of the Arab armies, even if they launched a joint attack as in 1973. Our most important overseas ally, the United States, was committed to helping us retain that position — what both we and they called Israel’s “qualitative edge” — in the interest of our security and their own. But we were facing a series of new, unc