morning there was an inspection to make sure that the sacred tidi-ness was observed. Feeling at home was excluded.
* * *
At the forward base before our first battle, sixteen of us were lying in a tent together with the squad leader and longing to be back in the training camp. But even this was heaven compared with our "homes" during the first days of the Nachshon or the Maccabi operations, those damned little tents which let the rain in and were suffocating on hot days. How we cursed those little tents!
A lot changed after the Maccabi operation. We were allocated a permanent base, which we left for battle and returned to afterwards. We left our private things "at home" and took only the absolute necessities with us - sometimes less.
We were lucky. We managed to take over living quarters that had once been intended for officers. We lived six to a room, and immedi-ately set about putting our stamp on the place. We hung the photo of a pretty dancer from an American magazine on the wall. We stole two large maps from an Arab village, for the development of our inspired strategic plans. One night we raided the storeroom and returned with a large table, two chairs, and two armchairs. A gray blanket served as our tablecloth. We made vases out of old brandy bottles, and every morning one of us was selected to wash the floor and get some flowers.
When we were out in the fields in those days, we used to say: "We’ll soon be home." That was no empty phrase. We knew that a real home awaited us, in which we could feel like human beings.
When the commando unit was formed, our unit, which had lived in this beautiful room, fell apart. Each of us took with him a part of our common property. And since we had been told that the new arrangements would not last for long, we didn’t make any efforts to make our new "residence" comfortable.
Then we were reassigned to new barracks. We didn’t like that. But we were experienced front mice, no longer green recruits. So the two of us - my friend Shalom Cohen and I - laid claim to a small room. We organized three armchairs and a table, brought two mats from a captured Arab village, hung three maps on the walls, and built our-selves a little bookshelf for the books we had collected over time. And