The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(70)

The head of Israeli military psychology, Lester reported, was an oddly powerful character named Benny Shalit. Shalit had argued for, and received, a new, elevated status for military psychology. His unit had a renegade quality to it; Shalit had gone so far as to sew an insignia of his own design onto its uniform. It consisted of the Israeli olive branch and sword, Lester explained, “topped by an eye which symbolizes assessment, insight, or something along those lines.” In his attempts to turn his psychology unit into a fighting force, Shalit had dreamed up ideas that struck even the psychologists as wacko. Hypnotizing Arabs and sending them to assassinate Arab leaders, for instance. “He actually did hypnotize one Arab,” recalled Daniela Gordon, who served under Shalit in the psychology unit. “They took him to the Jordanian border, and he just ran off.”

A rumor among Shalit’s subordinates—and it refused to die—was that Shalit kept the personality assessments made of all the Israeli military big shots, back when they were young men entering the army, and let them know that he wouldn’t be shy about making them public. Whatever the reason, Benny Shalit had an unusual ability to get his way in the Israeli military. And one of the unusual things Shalit had asked for, and received, was the right to embed psychologists in army units, where they might directly advise commanders. “Field psychologists are in a position to make recommendations on a variety of unconventional issues,” Lester reported to his U.S. Navy superiors. “For example, one noticed that infantry troops in hot weather, stopping to open soft drinks with their ammunition magazines, often damaged the stock. It was possible to redesign the stock so that a tool for opening bottles was included.” Shalit’s psychologists had eliminated the unused sights on submachine guns, and changed the way machine-gun units worked together, to increase the rate at which they fired. Psychologists in the Israeli army were, in short, off the leash. “Military psychology is alive and well in Israel,” concluded the United States Navy’s reporter on the ground. “It is an interesting question whether or not the psychology of the Israelis is becoming a military one.”

What Benny Shalit’s field psychologists might do during an actual battle, however, was unclear. “The psychology unit did not have the faintest idea what to do,” said Eli Fishoff, who served as Benny Shalit’s second-in-command. “The war was totally unexpected. We were just thinking maybe it’s the end of us.” In a matter of days the Israeli army had lost more men, as a percentage of the population, than the United States military lost in the entire Vietnam War. The war was later described by the Israeli government as a “demographic disaster” because of the prominence and talent of the Israelis who were killed. In the psychology unit someone came up with the idea of designing a questionnaire, to determine what, if anything, might be done to improve the morale of the troops. Amos seized upon it, helped to design the questions, and then used the entire exercise more or less as an excuse to get himself closer to the action. “We just got a jeep and went bouncing around in the Sinai looking for something useful to do,” said Danny.

Their fellow psychologists who watched Danny and Amos toss rifles into the back of a jeep and set out for the battlefield thought they were out of their minds. “Amos was so excited—like a little child,” recalled Yaffa Singer. “But it was crazy for them to go to the Sinai. It was so dangerous. It was absolutely crazy to send them out with those questionnaires.” The risk of running directly into enemy tanks and planes was the least of it. There were land mines everywhere; it was easy to get lost. “They didn’t have guards,” said Daniela Gordon, their commanding officer. “They guarded themselves.” All of them felt less concern for Amos than for Danny. “We were very worried about sending Danny on his own,” said Eli Fishoff, head of the field psychologists. “I wasn’t so worried about Amos—because Amos was a fighter.”

The moment Danny and Amos were in the jeep roaring through the Sinai, however, it was Danny who became useful. “He was jumping off the car and grilling people,” recalled Fishoff. Amos seemed like the practical one, but Danny, more than Amos, had a gift for finding solutions to problems where others failed even to notice that there was a problem to solve. As they sped toward the front lines, Danny noticed the huge piles of garbage on the roadsides: the leftovers from the canned meals supplied by the U.S. Army. He examined what the soldiers had eaten and what they had thrown out. (They liked the canned grapefruit.) His subsequent recommendation that the Israeli army analyze the garbage and supply the soldiers with what they actually wanted made newspaper headlines.

Israeli tank drivers were just then being killed in action at an unprecedented rate. Danny visited the site where new tank drivers were being trained, as quickly as possible, to replace the ones who had died. Groups of four men took turns in two-hour shifts on a tank. Danny pointed out that people learn more efficiently in short bursts, and that new tank drivers might be educated faster if the trainees rotated behind the wheel every thirty minutes. He also somehow found his way to the Israeli Air Force. Fighter pilots were also dying in unprecedented numbers, because of Egypt’s use of new and improved surface-to-air missiles provided by the Soviet Union. One squadron had suffered especially horrific losses. The general in charge wanted to investigate, and possibly punish, the unit. “I remember him saying accusingly that one of the pilots had been hit ‘not only by one missile but by four!’ As if that was conclusive evidence of his ineptitude,” recalled Danny.