With the appearance of this new terrorism, the Unit shifted its mission. Instead of merely gathering intelligence, it would now act on it. The Israelis decided to answer such attacks not with wide-scale war but with a series of operations, strikes, and counterstrikes that would keep terrorists off-balance and too busy protecting themselves to launch missions inside of Israel. The commandos turned even non-action into a kind of action, a pause in which the enemy wonders what comes next, a silence filled with phantoms. Those first operations tended to be hit-and-run: identify a target, take it out, get back to base. In the late 60s, Israeli soldiers, who in the Six-Day War had conquered the east bank of the Suez Canal, were under constant fire from Green Island, a big rock in the waterway which the Egyptians had fortified with barbed wire, cement walls, and cannons. It was said to be impregnable. On a night in July ‘69, the Unit outfitted 20 commandos in wet suits and air tanks and sent them, linked by rope, with guns and grenades, into the water of the canal. About an hour later, the soldiers, who had practiced the operation on a Crusader fortress, emerged at the base of the island, dropped their tanks, scaled the walls, and laid siege. After a rambling firefight, the Unit mined the island with bombs and evacuated.

In 1972 the Unit took its first crack at a skyjacking. Members of the Popular Front of the P.L.O. had taken over a Sabena airliner and brought it to Tel Aviv, where, filled with passengers, it sat for hours. The leaders of the Unit, who can draw up a plan on the fly and never use the same plan twice, sent a handful of commandos onto the runway disguised as mechanics. As the airplane taxied in for fuel, the commandos stormed it, attacking the terrorists, capturing two of them and killing two others, and freeing all but one of the passengers. There is a picture of Ehud Barak taken a few minutes after the raid. He looks comical dressed in his white coveralls, his shoulders slumped and his face showing an expression I have seen on the faces of boxers at the end of a hard fight. This rescue, the first such operation in history, became a model around the world. Along with several other rescues, many of them staged by the Unit, it so raised the risks for terrorists that it helped lead to the nearly 20-year decline in skyjacking that ended this past September.

The soldiers in Sayeret Matkal, about 200 full-time commandos, are scattered among several divisions, operating in groups of no more than 15 or 20. In the mathematics of modern warfare, where the enemy vanishes into the circuits of our own technology, such teams are the future of battle—a throwback to the age of knights, when a select few carried with them the hopes of civilization. At any time, two of these divisions may be in the field while a third is back at base in case of emergency. On leave, soldiers have to give a contact number and also call into base every few hours to make sure nothing has developed. These men serve for about five years and then continue on in the reserves, on duty for 100 days a year and reporting in times of crisis. Such veterans also act as recruiters and gatekeepers, as protectors of the legacy. Twice a year, many of them head to a testing camp, where thousands of 18-year-olds run drills, including a grueling sprint up a vast dune called “the natural disaster,” as old-timers search out intangibles. “We don’t look for the big guy but the little guy you hardly even notice first time around,” a member of the Unit told me. “The guy who helps his team, or thinks up some clever way around some old problem.” Recruits who make it through a week of drills—there are sprints and tests and stretcher carries and basketball games and nights without sleep, veterans shouting and hazing and seeing who holds up, and blown tempers and brawls—meet with the leader of the Unit. One commander used to ask each kid where he was from and then, if he was from, say, Safed, a beautiful old town in the hills above Galilee, the commander would say, “You are at the intersection of Zvi Levanon and Beit Yosef looking northeast—what do you see?” He was testing astuteness and visual memory, but he was also saying something about himself and the soldiers in his outfit. Out of the thousands, a dozen or so are selected and sent to the paratroopers, where they go through six months of basic training, sleeping three hours a night, learning how to handle weapons, learning, through endless hikes, every hill and dale of the Negev. From there, they are sent to a training base hidden in the desert, where, in squads of 10 or 12, they drill with pistols and machine guns; there is a course in counterterrorism, in which recruits learn to storm planes, rescue hostages, diffuse bombs, sidestep booby traps, and go in disguise. In drills, each recruit takes a different role—marksman, reserve, monkie, the man who, rappelling from a roof, busts through a window. There are also lessons in hand-to-hand combat, urban warfare, and night fighting, an Israeli specialty. In these months, the soldier takes on the look of a commando, outfitting himself with the gear that suits his skills. A typical commando carries a machine gun, extra magazines, a pistol, a compass, and a knife holstered to his ankle. At the insistence of soldiers in the Unit, Israeli engineers actually invented a new kind of machine gun, an Uzi with a collapsible handle that, even on the run, discharges tremendously accurate bursts of fire.