Steven Pressfield - The Lions Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War

Lenart with his F4U Corsair at the battle for Okinawa, 1945.

B efore I address what this book is, let me state what it is not.

It is not a comprehensive history of the Six Day War. Entire battles have been left out. Critical contextual material such as the international diplomatic and political state of affairs prior to the war, the point of view of the Arabs, even the history of the Jewish people, has been included only as it touches upon the testimony of the central personalities of this piece, the war veterans themselves. Even within the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), units whose contributions to victory were essentialthe Golani Brigade, Ugda Yoffe, the Harel and Jerusalem Brigades, the Sayeret Matkal, the navy, and many othersreceive only passing mention.

The Lions Gate tracks the experiences of a limited number of IDF unitsMirage Squadron 119 of the air force, the 7th Armored Brigade (in particular its Reconnaissance Company), Helicopter Squadron 124, Paratroop Battalion 71, and several others. Even within these formations, only a limited number of individuals are profiled. The books primary material comes from sixty-three interviews I conducted in Israel, France, and the United States, totaling about 370 hours. The focus is deliberately personal, subjective, and idiosyncratic.

Nor does this book pretend to document the facts of the war. The meat of this narrative is the testimony of soldiers and airmen. It is their memories. Memory can be a tricky animal. Is it truth? Is it history? Is it fact?

I am less concerned with these questions, which are ultimately unanswerable, than with the human reality in the moment. What fascinates me is the subjective immediacy of the event. I want to be in the cockpit, inside the tank, under the helmet. What is important to me is the event as the man or woman experienced it.

Memory, we know, is notoriously unreliable. Memory can be self-serving, self-glorifying, self-exonerating. Memory fades. People forget. Memory contains gaps and blank spots.

Then there is the Rashomon effect. The attentive reader will discover instances in this book where three individuals present three different versions of the identical event in which all three participated. This phenomenon happened during the interviews themselves. When I spoke with more than one person at a time, one friend would often contradict another. No, that happened before dark. Dont you remember?

The reader must keep these considerations in mind when evaluating the accounts presented in these pages.

A word, too, about the treatment of material within the interviews. In some instances the interviewees speech is transcribed verbatim. In others, I have edited, inverted order, altered tense, used time compression, and employed other narrative devices. The interviews were conducted in English. For most participants, English is a second or third language. Several interviews involved translation on the spot by my colleague Danny Grossman. In configuring the material for use in this book, I have sometimes retro-imagined the interviewees prose as if it had been spoken in his or her primary language.

Books. A number of the individuals interviewedYael Dayan, Ruth Dayan, Eliezer Cheetah Cohen, Uzi Eilam, Ran Ronen, Giora Romm, Morele Bar-On, Avigdor Kahalani, and othershave themselves written works in full or in part about the Six Day War. I have, with these writers permission, interpolated material from their published works into these spoken narratives.

One unit featured in this book is the Reconnaissance Company of the 7th Armored Brigade. Members of this group produced a documentary, We Looked Death in the Eye... , about their experiences in the 1967 War. I have employed the same practice with this film as I have with books, taking certain quotes spoken on camera and integrating them into the individual speakers narrations.

I must alert the reader to another intentional violation of the conventions of history writing. Moshe Dayan died in 1981. I conducted my interviews during 2011 and 2012. Clearly I could not have spoken with Dayan. Yet I have written his chapters in the first person, as if in his own words.

Why am I calling this book hybrid history? Because I have elected in its composition to employ techniques from a number of disciplinesfrom journalism and academic history, from conventional nonfiction and narrative nonfiction, and from New Journalism.

The Dayan chapters must be considered the latter. Dayan did not dictate these sentences into my tape recorder. They are not his testimony or his recounting of events. However, I have made every effort to be as true to the historical Moshe Dayan as my limitations of knowledge and imagination permit.

Fortunately Dayan left an autobiography, a diary of the Sinai Campaign of 1956, an extraordinary personal testament titled Living with the Bible, and a number of other published works. In addition, many excellent biographies exist, penned by his colleagues and contemporaries. I was privileged as well to interview a number of individuals who were extremely close to Dayan: his first wife, Ruth; his daughter, Yael; his nephew Uzi; as well as associates and fellow officers Neora Matalon-Barnoach, Shlomo Gazit, Morele Bar-On, Michael Bar-Zohar, Aharon Yadlin, and Zalman Shoval. That being said, the reader should bear in mind while reading the Dayan chapters that I have at some points crossed the line into pure speculation.