The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(69)
? “On the Belief That Arthritis Pain Is Related to the Weather” appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in April 1996.
9
BIRTH OF THE WARRIOR PSYCHOLOGIST
By the fall of 1973 it was fairly clear to Danny that other people would never fully understand his relationship with Amos. The previous academic year, they’d taught a seminar together at Hebrew University. From Danny’s point of view, it had been a disaster. The warmth he felt when he was alone with Amos vanished whenever Amos was in the presence of an audience. “When we were with other people we were one of two ways,” said Danny. “Either we finished each other’s sentences and told each other’s jokes. Or we were competing. No one ever saw us working together. No one knows what we were like.” What they were like, in every way but sexually, was lovers. They connected with each other more deeply than either had connected with anyone else. Their wives noticed it. “Their relationship was more intense than a marriage,” said Barbara. “I think they were both turned on intellectually more than either had ever been before. It was as if they were both waiting for it.” Danny sensed that his wife felt some jealousy; Amos actually praised Barbara, behind her back, for dealing so gracefully with the intrusion on their marriage. “Just to be with him,” said Danny. “I never felt that way with anyone else, really. You are in love and things. But I was rapt. And that’s what it was like. It was truly extraordinary.”
And yet it was Amos who worked hardest to find ways to keep them together. “I was the one who was holding back,” said Danny. “I kept my distance because I was afraid of what would happen to me without him.”
It was four in the morning California time when the armies of Egypt and Syria launched their attack upon Israel. They’d taken the Israelis by surprise on Yom Kippur. Along the Suez Canal, the 500-man Israeli garrison was overwhelmed by 100,000 Egyptian troops. From the Golan Heights, 177 Israeli tank crews gazed down upon an attacking force of 2,000 Syrian tanks. Amos and Danny, still in the United States trying to become decision analysts, raced to the airport and got the first flight possible to Paris, where Danny’s sister worked in the Israeli embassy. Getting into Israel during a war wasn’t easy. Every inbound El Al plane was crammed with fighter pilots and combat unit commanders who were coming in to replace the men killed in the first days of the invasion. That’s just what you did, if you were an Israeli capable of fighting in 1973: You ran toward the war. Knowing this, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had promised to shoot down any commercial planes attempting to land in Israel. As they waited in Paris for Danny’s sister to talk someone into letting them onto a flight, Danny and Amos bought combat boots. They were made of canvas—lighter than the leather boots issued by the Israeli military.
When the war broke out, Barbara Tversky was on the way to an emergency room in Jerusalem with her eldest son. He had won a contest with his brother to see who could stick a cucumber farthest up his own nose. As they headed home, people surrounded their car and screamed at Barbara for being on the road. The country was in a state of panic: Fighter jets screamed low over Jerusalem to signal all reserves to return to their units. Hebrew University closed. Army trucks rumbled all night through the Tverskys’ usually tranquil neighborhood. The city was black. Street lamps remained off; anyone who owned a car taped over its brake lights. The stars could not have been more spectacular, or the news more troubling—because, for the first time, Barbara sensed that the Israeli government was withholding the truth. This war was different from the others: Israel was losing. Not knowing where Amos was, or what he planned to do, didn’t help. Phone calls were so expensive that when he was in the United States they communicated only by letter. Her situation wasn’t unusual: There were Israelis who would learn that loved ones living abroad had returned to Israel to fight only by being informed that they had been killed in action.
To make herself useful, Barbara went to the library and found the material to write a newspaper article about stress and how to cope with it. A few nights into the conflict, around ten o’clock, she heard footsteps. She was working alone in the study, with the blinds lowered, to avoid letting the light seep out. The kids were asleep. Whoever was coming up the stairs was running; then suddenly Amos bounded from the darkness. The El Al flight that he had taken with Danny had carried as passengers no one but Israeli men returning to fight. It had descended into Tel Aviv in total darkness: There hadn’t even been a light on the wing. Once again, Amos went into the closet and pulled down his army uniform, now with a captain’s insignia on it, and, once again, it fit. At five o’clock the following morning he left.
He had been assigned, with Danny, to the psychology field unit. The unit had grown since the mid-1950s, when Danny had redesigned the selection system. In early 1973 an American psychologist named James Lester, sent by the Office of Naval Research to study Israeli military psychology, wrote a report in which he described the unit they were about to join. Lester marveled at the entire society—a country that had at once the world’s strictest driving tests and the world’s highest automobile accident rates—but seems to have been struck especially by the faith the Israeli military placed in their psychologists. “Failure rate in the officer course is running at 15–20%,” he wrote. “Such confidence does the military have in the mysteries of psychological research that they are asking the Selection Section to try to identify these 15% during the first week in training.”