to get air support, but the commander of our artillery force called in all available

to get air support, but the commander of our artillery force called in all available units, and they drew a kind of protective box of shellfire around Ira’s men as they moved back. We sent our other reserve division towards the crossroads to provide support, and Amram went with them to co-ordinate the operation. But Ira still had to fight his way out. It was 15 minutes of hell. By the time he reached safety at around nine in the morning, he’d lost ten tanks and nearly 20 men, four of them during the final, frantic retreat. Five more were missing. The reserve division also found itself in a fierce firefight with the Syrians, and lost eleven men. We were now just three hours from the cease-fire. We did advance nearer to the Beirut-Damascus road. An hour before noon, our dedicated anti-tank unit destroyed 20 of Assad’s top-tier tanks, Soviet-made T-72s. Under different circumstances, those successes might have been a cause for consolation. Yet it was hard to dwell on them given what had happened north of Tovlano. After the war, Sultan Yacoub created fertile ground for conspiracy theories, half-truths and finger-pointing. That there had been many oversights and errors was clear, though there was never a full and formal debriefing process to identify in detail what had gone wrong. I found it deeply frustrating that, unlike in 1973 when I'd been in a battlefield command role, I was now at several steps removed from what was happening on the ground. But everyone involved shared responsibility for the failures — including the overall commanders: Yanoush, and me as well. That weight felt even heavier because the tragedy occurred only hours before our own force’s involvement in the Lebanon War was over. It was not, however, the end of the war. The cease-fire held only intermittently in the rest of Lebanon, barely at all in some areas. Freed from fighting in our sector, Yanoush, Amram and I began spending time with units elsewhere. A couple of days after the cease-fire, I found myself alongside a pair of generals, Uri Simchoni and Yossi Ben-Hannan, south of Beirut. In front of us, troops from the Golani Brigade were completing their takeover of Beirut airport. “You were right,” I told Uri and Yossi. They had been in charge of the simulation exercise in the Airya, predicting how Arik’s ostensibly more limited invasion plan would inevitably develop into Big Pines. Even as we were talking, 201 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011672