Up the ladder: AS DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF, with Dan Shomron, minutes before a special police unit frees hostages from a Palestinian bus hijacking in southern Israel in 1988. In direct command, walkie-talkie in hand, is the head of the southern command, Yitzhak Mordechai, whose paratroopers my battalion was sent into rescue at the Chinese farm in the 1973 Yom Kippur War war.