Table Of ContentAlso by Steven Pressfield
FICTION
The Profession
Killing Rommel
The Afghan Campaign
The Virtues of War
Last of the Amazons
Tides of War
Gates of Fire
The Legend of Bagger Vance
NONFICTION
The Authentic Swing
Turning Pro
The Warrior Ethos
Do the Work
The War of Art
SENTINEL
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Map design by Christy Henspetter.
Graphics by Jasmine Quinsier.
Photograph credits appear here.
ISBN 978-0-698-16397-3
Version_1
This book is dedicated with respect and deep appreciation to Lou Lenart,
Captain, U.S. Marine Corps, 1940–1947, Israel Air Force, 1948–1954.
Lenart with his F4U Corsair at the battle for Okinawa, 1945.
CONTENTS
MAP
ALSO BY STEVEN PRESSFIELD
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
A NOTE ON HYBRID HISTORY
EPIGRAPH
BOOK ONE: T W
HE AITING
BOOK TWO: E B
N RERA
BOOK THREE: T W , P T
HE AITING ART WO
BOOK FOUR: M
OKED
BOOK FIVE: S
INAI
BOOK SIX: J
ERUSALEM
BOOK SEVEN: T D B
HE EEP ATTLE
BOOK EIGHT: T L ’ G
HE ION S ATE
POSTSCRIPT
IN GRATITUDE
THE FALLEN AND THE DECORATED OF THE RECONNAISSANCE COMPANY OF THE 7TH ARMORED
BRIGADE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INDEX
A NOTE ON HYBRID HISTORY
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 essential—
the Golani Brigade, Ugda Yoffe, the Harel and Jerusalem Brigades, the Sayeret Matkal, the navy, and
many others—receive only passing mention.
The Lion’s Gate tracks the experiences of a limited number of IDF units—Mirage 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 book’s 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.
Don’t 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
interviewee’s 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 interviewee’s prose as if it had been spoken in his or her
primary language.
Books. A number of the individuals interviewed—Yael Dayan, Ruth Dayan, Eliezer “Cheetah”
Cohen, Uzi Eilam, Ran Ronen, Giora Romm, Morele Bar-On, Avigdor Kahalani, and others—have
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 disciplines—from 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.
On my office shelves sit 107 books about the Six Day War and its antecedents. Why write
another? The answer is I wanted to tell the subjective story, the on-the-ground and in-the-air saga, in
a way I have not seen it told before, even if it meant taking liberties with academic and journalistic
conventions.
The swift passage of the years is a factor as well. Many of the veterans interviewed for this book
are in their late sixties; no few are in their seventies, eighties, or nineties. They may not tell their
stories on the record again.
I am a Jew. I wanted to tell the story of this Jewish war, fought by Jews for the preservation of
the Jewish nation and the Jewish people. I don’t pretend to be impartial. At the same time, I have
tried, despite license taken, to tell the story straight.
I alone am responsible for the structure, theme, and editorial choices in this book. I chose what to
put first and what to put last, what to leave in and what to leave out. The veterans honored me by
telling me their stories, but responsibility for the final shape and content of this work rests with me
alone.
STEVEN PRESSFIELD
2014
