It had happened when he was an officer, during the years that Israel had occupied southern Lebanon. His unit was given the assignment to kill the Hezbollah leader in the region. Intelligence knew that every single day at 6:30 a.m. sharp, the Hezbollah chief left the house and got into his car, and their instructions were to rig the engine with a bomb. There were fifteen men in Rafi’s unit, and they were carried over the border by helicopter and dropped at a mountain hideout. At 10:00 p.m., they set out crawling down the mountain and through the fields. For four hours they dragged themselves along on their stomachs until finally they arrived at the village. There was a UN convoy there, and the peacemakers were up laughing and drinking, because the UN people are always happy, Rafi said, for them it’s just one long party. The unit slid past the UN tent on their stomachs and surrounded the house of the Hezbollah leader. As the officer of his unit, Rafi was positioned near to the front door, and it was then, lying on his stomach with his gun trained on it while the explosion specialist disappeared under the car, that he noticed the pairs of children’s shoes. Three or four pairs lined up at the entrance, little rubber sandals just like he and his brothers used to wear on the moshav, when they wore shoes at all. No one had mentioned any children. Though why would they have? Children had no value in the calculus of military operations or wars. And in all of his nearly five years in the army, no one had ever told him anything beyond what he needed to know, and he hadn’t asked. About civilians, the question had only ever been: Should you encounter one in your mission, what will you do? Of which the only three options were: kidnap, kill, or let go, where no answer was right or good. And yet the fact that Rafi had not known about the children and now was lying ten meters from their sandals disturbed him. At that moment he felt a tap on his shoulder and, lifting his eye from the crosshairs of his gun, he saw the face of the explosion specialist, painted dark green like his. The specialist gave him the thumbs-up: the bomb was in place, rigged to go off the moment the Hezbollah chief touched his foot to the gas pedal. Rafi signaled to his men to retreat, and for four hours they crawled back on their stomachs to the mountain hideout, where they collapsed in exhaustion.